Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has all the ingredients to delight a family audience. The musical begins with the well-cast Willy Wonka (Paul Slade Smith) singing The Candy Man, introducing the world-wide quest to find not just five winners of a competition, but a successor to run his famous chocolate factory.

In the original book Wonka is absent until Chapter 14 (or so), but in the musical he is out of the factory in disguise as a candy shop owner, and soon comes face to face with Charlie, played with confidence on opening night by eleven year old Ryan Yeates

Preparing a good dish, be it a dessert or main course, can take time. The audience needed a little patience in the first act as the five winners from Russia, Germany and America located their Golden Tickets. The stand out song is More of him to Love sung by the mother of the "Bavarian Beefcake" Augustus Gloop.

Charlie Bucket – the final winner - is an Australian with a sweet mother, Lucy Maunder, and a charismatic Grandpa called Joe, played with aplomb by Tony Sheldon. The occasional sprinkle of Australian humour was a nice touch. Grandpa Joe miraculously gets out of bed to don a military uniform (used at the Eureka Stockade) to go on the quest to the factory. The song I’ve Got a Golden Ticket was very beautifully choreographed.

In the second act a chocolate box of tricks and special effects unfolds. The stage is framed with large LED screens which splash with technicolour patterns.

On entering the factory the five winners and their parents get wrapped in a fiendishly complicated contract, a foreboding of the dangers that lie around the corner. Then a beautiful garden of sweets is revealed in a candy-soaked utopia, accompanied by the original movie tune Pure Imagination.

The four other child Golden Ticket winners are played by adults. The brats meet the dark endings dreamt up by Roald Dahl with delicious efficiency.

Sadly, the gluttonous Augustus Gloop (Jake Fehily) ventures too close to the chocolate stream. American brat Violet Beauregard (Monette Mckay) is hilariously inflated into a blueberry. Spoilt Russian brat Veruca Salt (Karina Russell) dances spectacularly before getting her just desserts, whilst TV addict Mike Teavea (Harrison Riley) miraculously shrinks in the best trick of the night.

The story is also modernised in part. A secret new confectionary Wonka is working on – does not have the ability to be sucked for ever as Raold Dahl penned – but rather the special feature is that it can recharge mobile phones.

But the theatrical highlight of the musical is a golden oldie first mastered in the days of vaudeville. The Oompa Loompas appear on stage as part human, part puppets. It has to be believed to be seen.

David Spicer

Photographer: Jeff Busby.