Blue Workshop with Robinson Crusoe ( Zubin Vincent)
Laughter unlimitedPANTOMIMELittle Theatre’s ‘Robinson Crusoe — spaced out’, left the audience roaring with laughter. NINA SIMON
Well if you missed this year’s pantomime produced by “The Little Theatre” then you have missed three whole hours of laughter (unplugged).
Story unfolds
A half-Mallu-half-Tamil narrator who calls himself “Narrator Maama” is responsible for all characters on stage falling head-over-heels in love with each other (he called it “the cutting and the wottings”) due to “military masala chai”, with his signature James Bond tune marking his entrance and leaving the crowd in splits of laughter and gripping their ribs in pain. Venkatesh Harinathan wooed the crowd from the moment he entered the stage saying “theatre ulla evalo peoples”.
The yarn of the story begins to knit itself into one crazy comedy with Robinson Crusoe (Zubin Vincent) crash landing on Planet X (a green, pollution-free planet with water that heals and green splattered everywhere with weird inhabitants that have horns all over their body and a taste for pineapples!). They are ruled by evil Lord Horn Edwin Double. And believe me, Ashley Shillong was really good at being very evil, with the crowd booing and hissing every time he got on stage! This evil king falls in love with a very scary dame who was the star of the show with fruits and a pineapple head dress and a knack for cooking deep fried foods.
Dame Friday played by Edward Aloysius who kept asking the crowd if she (ahem…’he’) was beautiful, only to get a loud “Oh no, you are not!” in return from the audience.With the dame madly in love with Robinson Crusoe and the evil king planning something evil with his secretary Phoebe Poutsalot (the name describes her) played very well by Abhilasha Vedantam Isaac, the play unfolds into one of the best I have seen produced by “The Little Theatre”. With an talented cast of young, old and some very very young kids dressed in horns and pineapple dresses dancing to music with a refreshing sound track produced by Prithvi Chandrasekhar, it was an amazing play. Like I said, if you didn’t see it you missed it.
Nina is a second year student of Zoology, Madras Christian College.
Lord Horn E (Ashley Shillong), Dame Friday (Eddy) and Phoebe Poutsalot (Abhilasha V)
The little pineapples (Red Workshop)
Panto animal (Mridula) Robinson Crusoe (Zubin Vincent) and the Blue workshop
Dame Friday, Horn E, Dame's son (Aishwarya Govind) Robinson Crusoe's daughter (Rohini Rau)
Dame's son (Aishwarya Govind) & Crusoe's daughter (Rohini Rau)
Amit Singh the director applauds while Aysha Rau (Script writer & Producer) thanks the cast and crew while Narrator Mamma (Venkatesh Harinathan) holds up the brochure!