Suzanne Shaw has toured the country as Snow White and never once played the baddie. This Christmas the former Hear’Say singer is the Wicked Queen at the Grand, and she wants the boos.
She said: “I am more than ready for them. We got a few boos when we were in Hear’Say, but at least this is on purpose.”
She is “positively encouraging the boos”, and has a reason: “And you know what? I’ve got a lot of perimenopause rage to just channel right now.”
She added: “So this couldn’t have come at a better time!”
Shaw, Swansea-born director Christian Patterson and comic Steve Walls have been talking about the Grand’s Snow White in interviews released by the theatre, ahead of a run from 5 December to 3 January.
They join a cast that includes Kev Johns, the Grand’s dame for more than 30 years. He returns virtually as the Dame in the Mirror while he recovers from the stroke he suffered in February.
When the casting was announced in July, he said: “The people of Swansea still get to see me in a dress this year! Panto is so special to me, so although I can’t be there giving my usual performance this is the next best thing.”
‘Come on Swansea, give me your very best’: Suzanne Shaw on her first Wicked Queen
Shaw said: “What I think I’m going to love is that you really know if you’re hitting the mark as a baddy. If people aren’t booing, I know I’m not doing a very good job.”
Her challenge to the audience: “So come on Swansea, give me your very best!”
She has played the Grand “quite a few times” but never a Welsh panto, and the costume is doing some of the work: “It is very sexy. It will definitely help me channel really that proper Wicked Queen-ness.”
The Queen, she said, is someone “where she thinks she’s a little bit more than she actually is, a bit Desperate Housewives”. “I’m going for that vibe, a bit too much work and no longer the fairest in the land!”
Her model is Toyah Willcox, who played the Queen in Shaw’s first ever panto, a Snow White 21 years ago when her son Corey was one: “He’s now 21 with a child of his own who will be almost one come panto time. So it is a real full circle moment.”
She added: “Ever since that first Snow White 21 years ago, I’ve been waiting to be Toyah Willcox and here I am. I’m ready for you Swansea!”
From the gods in 1977 to the Grand’s stage: Christian Patterson’s full-circle homecoming
For Christian Patterson, who directs the show and plays the Queen’s henchman, the first visit to the Grand was in 1977, aged five, to see Ryan Davies in Babes in the Wood.
He said: “My grandmother, Sally, took me to the Grand Theatre. She bought a ticket at this thing called a box office, I’d never heard of it before!”
He sat “right in the gods”, and remembers it as “absolutely hilarious, the most amazing thing I’d ever seen”. That, he said, “was the moment where I thought to myself, ‘I don’t know what that is, but I want to do that.'”
Nearly 50 years on, standing in front of “a home audience, an audience that I know very well, because I’m one of them”, is “just a dream come true”, he said. Patterson co-founded the Grand Ambition collective at the theatre in 2022.
He calls panto “the ultimate hug”, and takes a child’s first visit seriously. “Some will come with their parents, their adoptive parents, foster parents, or their grandparents and some of those grandparents may not be there the following Christmas.”
He added: “It’s kind of the ultimate in entrances and exits. And I want that first, and that last, experience to be one that they will remember forever.”
His henchman, he says, is torn between loyalty to the Queen and being “a nice guy”, somewhere between Captain Mainwaring and Oliver Hardy. “He tries hard!”
Thirty pantos in a row: Steve Walls leaves Whitley Bay for Muddles and a Joe Pasquale script
Steve Walls plays Muddles, the comic, after a panto every Christmas for 30 years, bar the Covid year. He has spent the last 15 Christmases at the same theatre in Whitley Bay, and admits leaving “feels a bit of a wrench”.
Welsh audiences, he said, remind him of home. “In my mind, they’re very similar to the people in the North East, very down to earth, fantastic, warm people and they seem to like me too!”
Walls said Joe Pasquale, who led the Grand’s Aladdin last year, is writing the script.
He said: “The comic character drives a show. So you’ve got to be the energy.”
He added: “You’ve got to come on, make everybody feel relaxed and happy, and bring everyone along with you.”
The cast is led by Owain Wyn Evans as the Spirit of the Forest and Port Talbot’s Rebecca Keatley as Snow White.
Evans will arrive from a 400-mile Children in Need bike ride that finishes in Cardiff on 13 November. The show is produced by Imagine Theatre, with tickets through the Grand’s box office.
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