Beauty and the Beast is first panto in three years - Littlehampton

Tori Monroe, who set up the company very nearly 20 years ago, is promising a cast of 64 – though not all on stage at once – ranging in age from five to 79: “I started it in 2003. January will be 20 years but it was not until the December that we did our first show. When we started in the January we just did classes from my house.” Tori will be celebrating the anniversary in style with a big production of Frozen next May: “There are only a limited amount of people that are allowed to do it and when it first comes out you have to apply for the rights and we were lucky that they said yes to us. It means that no one else can do it in the area within a certain radius or for a certain number of weeks either side. We are very excited about it and then next year will be doing panto again and we will also have a summer show.”

For the moment, though, the focus is on Beauty and the Beast: “We have mostly done a panto but obviously we missed one year for Covid. We were going to be doing The Addams Family but we weren't able to do that so actually we brought that into the December slot for last year and that went very well. We had some really great feedback. We had not done a show like that before. Mostly we tend to do the children's musicals, things like Annie and Peter Pan and the Wizard of Oz, the typical children shows whereas The Adams Family was much more of an adult musical and it was very well received.

“But now we're back to our first panto in three years. I've got 64 in the cast in total which is very exciting. We've got two teams of 20 juniors so not everyone is going to be on the stage at the same time. And I think the biggest thing about it is that it's going to be fun. We do have a show to produce and we want it to be as professional as it possibly can be but we also want people to have fun and we know that if you are having fun on stage then the audience are more likely to be having fun too. Obviously panto is a bit of a niche thing. I think people either hate panto or they love it but we know that this one is going to be lots of fun. It is such a traditional thing and it's for all the children and I think everyone just knows that they're going to have a good time with panto.” Tori is pleased to say that things are pretty much back to normal: “It's nice to have that big age range again. With The Addams Family it was quite a small cast which made it easier to manage of course but with this it's lovely to have all the children. We went into schools before we did the auditions and we did like mini-shows to get the children interested and we were inundated. We had about 250 auditions. We obviously we couldn't take them all and that was the hardest part for me. But we have returned strongly. I would say that the majority of the cast are new for this but we've got a basic core for the group that have been with us for years. We've got one girl that has been with us for maybe 15 years and there are a couple of people that have been with us right from the start. We have that core but we also have new blood. That's really important. New people bring something different. It makes a difference.”