Comic Tam reigns Supreme

PETER PAN, Opera House, Manchester
PETER Pan — or perhaps more correctly the Tam Ryan Peter Pan show, guest-starring the Supremes.

Yes, the Supremes. In a bit of stage craft that passes most understanding, the magic of Christmas joins with the spirit of pop and in the opening scene of “Peter Pan” arrives three black girls in spangly costumes, singing harmony in suitably-pointed Christmas pop.

Then they turn up to sing in the Darlings’ nursery, then they are mermaids, then they are on board the pirate ship, and so on.

You can’t get rid of ’em, clearly, but it’s a surreal bit of slight-of-stage that gives the producers of this Christmas spectacular an excuse to include many pop tunes. No singing group in Peter Pan? There is now.

That incongruous inclusion apart, this is very much a stripped-down affair.

Always the lamest of the Christmas shows, it’s not a pantomime and attempts to make it so often fail badly, so writer Eric Potts - yes, that Eric Potts, from the Coliseum and Corrie - removes the Darling parents entirely, reduces Nana to a couple of trot-ons, doesn’t have Wendy accidentally shot down, makes Tinkerbell rude but not malicious, and the Lost Boys and Indians don’t get much of a look in. Even Peter (Amy Bird), Wendy (Lorna Want) and her brothers are fairly secondary characters.

The reason is that this is a show geared very much, thankfully, towards laughs. Comedian Tam Ryan, back for the third year as comic pirate Smee, builds strong rapport and great jokes in the first half and slays the audience — children, too — with two fellow pirates in a hilarious version of the “Twelve Days of Christmas”, and then later in “Gangnam Style”.

His role this year seems bigger, presumably to keep the show moving swiftly and the “star” of the show, David Hasselhoff as Hook, fairly low key.

But “The Hoff” isn’t bad: he has been playing Hook for two or three years and enters the spirit of the thing with references to “Knight Rider” and “Baywatch”, and as we know, can sing strongly.

The evening is big scale, strongly costumed, brilliantly colourful with clever projections, funny, and sends you home before 9.30pm (from a 7pm start).

But it also seems a little manufactured; it has the air of a mass-produced show, not a lovingly created one like the Coliseum’s.