Author's Note:

Aladdin was a full circle for me - my first ever Panto as a producer was Aladdin with our Director Chris, who took a chance on a couple of newbies to the society and basically got me hooked on Panto. Here we were  about eleven years later, and Chris unfortunately had died of cancer so I had the feeling I had to do a good job for his sake. I wrote a script for Aladdin he would have approved of; all the classic elements but some updated values too - Aladdin is a self-taught all round good guy, who uses his brains,  Princess Jasmine is a thwarted mechanical engineer, So-Shy is quite the opposite of shy, The Genie of the Ring might well have set up all of this so she could be reunited with the Genie of the Lamp. I wrote in the device of the Mobile laundry to make sure the pace kept moving on our small stage and scenes didn't have to be changed too much, and it made for a great ending, when Aladdin and Jasmine converted it into a Transformer to defeat Abanazer rather than break their promise to the Genie.

The performance itself gave us the opportunity to be resplendent - although nightly I regretted putting in the bit about the blindfolded Sedan chair carriers as they got over enthusiastic and nearly wiped us in the chorus out completely! We had Chinese dragons, Lion dancers, acrobatics, ribbon twirlers - our stage is tiny so that was interesting and  if you have the space to do the floating carpet, that would have been the icing on the cake for us!

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