Sleeping Beauty Pantomime Characters: A Complete Guide
We rounded up all the Sleeping Beauty pantomime characters in our production, from Dame Queenie to villain Carabosse, so directors know exactly who they are casting and what each one brings to the stage.
If you are comparing versions of this story, ours makes a clear choice on the two points where productions differ most: a Dame who is the Queen herself, aligning with the older tradition rather than the newer nurse-and-nanny convention many modern scripts use, and a comic herald in Gerald who gets a unique Audience Participation call and response. Here is who you will be casting.
Princess Aurora and Prince Juan
Aurora spends most of Act One a prisoner of her father's anxiety rather than her own curse, locked in the castle until her twenty-first birthday and addressing the audience directly to fill them in on the years they have missed. She falls for Prince Juan within moments of meeting him, in the time-honoured panto tradition of falling in love roughly four lines after an introduction, and his loyalty is tested hard by a suspicious King before their true love's kiss finally breaks the curse. Their best-earned line is saved for the very last scene, when Aurora tells him, 'you're my Juan true love', a pun planted the moment he is introduced. Before Juan arrives, Aurora is paraded past three comic suitor princes, Chris, Tim and the elderly, forgetful Peter, who are one-scene walk-ons rather than characters that need casting in their own right, so we have not given them their own entries here. Our author's notes suggest adjusting their names and home towns to something local, in the same spirit as Cinderella's flexible Emcee announcing local guest names at the ball, an easy way to get a laugh specific to your own town.
The King, Queenie and Gerald the Herald
King Roland, Queen Beatrice, or Queenie, and Gerald the Herald share almost every scene between them, and it makes sense to cast and think of them as a unit. Roland is the overprotective father the whole first act runs on: his response to Carabosse's curse is to ban not just spindles and needles but jazz, rubber and marching, an escalating list that gets funnier with each addition. Queenie is our Dame, and true to the older Queen-as-Dame convention rather than the newer Nurse figure, she gets a proper physical comedy set-piece wrestling a roll of wrapping paper that keeps rolling itself back up, and an escalating handkerchief gag with the King and Gerald where each hankie handed over is larger than the last, ending with one the size of a bedsheet. Gerald himself is our stand-in for the traditionally named Muddles, minus a working trumpet, which sets up the show's best audience-participation device: 'It's the King!', cued whenever Roland is about to enter, with the audience providing the fanfare themselves. He also gets a genuinely surprising near-miss romantic moment with Queenie during the Act Two sleepwalking scene, played entirely for laughs, worth flagging to your cast in rehearsal so nobody is caught off guard by the stage direction.
Carabosse and Plum
Carabosse's name is a genuinely traditional one, Perrault's telling features an uninvited fairy of the same name, so unlike most of our Dames and villains, this is not an NLP invention, worth knowing for competitive positioning since it recurs across other writers' catalogues too. What is distinctively ours is her ending: rather than being banished or defeated, she is magically cursed to be nice by the three good fairies in the final scene, and spends the rest of it handing out unexpectedly generous gifts, a holiday, a new trumpet for Gerald, an early retirement for Plum. It is a redemption arc few other panto villains get. Plum himself is her sidekick, and it is worth noting he is a solo hapless sidekick rather than part of a double act, a genuine departure from the henchman pairing we usually give our villains elsewhere in the catalogue: Bluff and Blunder serve the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood, Slip and Slap serve Octavia in The Little Mermaid, and Drip and Dribble serve Gothel in Rapunzel. Plum carries the comedy alone instead, ageing a full hundred years alongside the sleeping curse so the actor spends all of Act Two on a stick or Zimmer frame, with a runner of fruit-themed malapropisms (his surname is apparently Tomatoes, and he has a sister called Cherry) that need little directing to land.
Fairy Silk, Fairy Cashmere and Fairy Velvet
Traditional tellings of Sleeping Beauty usually feature several good fairies bestowing gifts, not the single fairy-godmother figure more familiar from other fairy tales, so our trio sits comfortably within the wider convention rather than against it. Silk, Cashmere and Velvet are differentiated by fabric-themed personality rather than plot function, Silk is 'soft, smooth and always looks gorgeous', Cashmere is 'smart and warm', and between them they narrate scene transitions in rhyming verse throughout the show. It is worth flagging as a different shape from the single-fairy-helper pattern found elsewhere in our own catalogue, Jack and the Beanstalk's Fairy Haricot works alone, for instance, so directors familiar with our other titles should not assume the same casting shape applies here.
Casting the Sleeping Beauty Pantomime Characters: Who It Suits
At ten principal roles, Sleeping Beauty sits comfortably in our Medium Cast scripts, with plenty of scope to expand the Ensemble of townsfolk, fairies, extra princes and ghosts to suit a larger group. If you are weighing it up against the rest of the catalogue, our full range of pantomime scripts is worth a browse too.
As one group put it, this script is 'A perfect balance between tradition and modernity… with outrageous characters & slapstick comedy!’ (Border Telegraph)
If this cast list sounds like a good fit for your group, request a free Perusal Script or visit the Sleeping Beauty script page for the full synopsis and details.