Sleeping Beauty Pantomime Script Spotlight
A hundred years is a long time to wait for a good panto!
Our Sleeping Beauty pantomime script hands its best participation device to Gerald the Herald, who has lost his trumpet. Every time the King enters, the audience has to make the noise for him, and it grows all evening. Around it sits Queenie, our Dame and the Queen of Slumberland, who approaches royalty with tremendous enthusiasm and limited dignity, and Carabosse, a properly fearsome villain whose arrival at the naming ceremony sets the whole thing in motion, backed by the loyal and permanently baffled Plum. Also, there’s an interval of 100 years and 20 minutes, so make sure the bar is stocked!
Synopsis
At Princess Aurora's naming ceremony, the wicked fairy Carabosse arrives uninvited and, furious at the snub, places a curse on the baby: before her twenty-first birthday she will die when her finger pricks a spindle. Fairy Velvet arrives just in time to soften it. Aurora will not die, but will sleep for a hundred years, wakeable only by true love's kiss.
The King bans all spindles from the kingdom and hopes for the best. One hundred years later, Prince Juan arrives in Slumberland with no idea what he has walked into, and Carabosse is doing everything in her considerable power to see the curse through to its conclusion.
This script will cast a spell on your whole audience!
Straight from the Script
Fairy Velvet softens Carabosse's curse with a subtle alteration. Carabosse is unimpressed:
Carabosse: 'All you ever do is alterations, you're a right little sew and sew!'
Casting Sleeping Beauty: Who this script suits
With 10 principal characters and three supporting roles, Sleeping Beauty sits in our medium cast scripts band and scales up easily. The three good fairies, Silk, Cashmere and Velvet, are principals in their own right and can be played with real variety, and the Ensemble has good work across the naming ceremony, the time jump and the ghost scenes. Gerald the Herald is a gift for the right comic performer, and his fanfare gag gives the audience participation its own thread running the length of the show. The comedy is spread across the cast instead of resting entirely on the Dame, which matters if your company has depth but no obvious star. It is also one of our traditional pantomime script titles, so the show sells tickets on its own.
Gerald opens the show with the Ensemble, sets the fanfare up with the audience before the King has appeared, and fronts the song sheet at the end, so he is the part to cast first and the one to cast for nerve rather than for singing. The three supporting roles are Princes Chris, Tim and Peter, Aurora's unsuccessful suitors, and they are short, funny and localisable, since the script asks only that you keep the alliteration if you rename them after somewhere nearer home. Queenie's handkerchief routine with Gerald and the King needs a little more planning than it looks, because the handkerchiefs get larger each time until the last one is the size of a bed sheet, and somebody offstage has to feed them on in order.
Your Ensemble get more than crowd work. The opening scene introduces them by name with their occupations, Rina the cleaner, Buster the duster, Hector the protector, and the joke only works if the performers saying those lines are enjoying themselves.
There are two love songs and the script asks you to choose contrasting ones, a straight number for Aurora and Juan and something cheekier for Queenie and the King, which is a reminder that the Dame sings a duet as well as the more traditional Dame solo number. Staging is unfussy. Seven scenes play on a full stage and five in front of the tabs, Carabosse's lair does duty in both acts, and the hundred-year jump happens across the interval, so the one scene change with nothing in front of it is the one you have twenty minutes for.
If you like this cast size but want far more named parts to hand out, our Pinocchio is built on the same 10 principals and carries nine supporting roles against these three. It is the better fit for a company with a lot of members who all want a name in the programme.
Sleeping Beauty Reviews
‘A perfect balance between tradition and modernity… with outrageous characters & slapstick comedy!’
Border Telegraph
‘Children squealed with delight at the antics on stage, while adults chuckled at the sly jokes tucked into the script.’
Peeblesshire News
‘The whole cast enjoyed it, especially some newer members, and it was well received by our audience every single night.’
AdLib Community Theatre Project
Request your free Perusal Script
Gerald's fanfare gag is hard to judge on paper and unmistakable once a hall is doing it, so read the scene and imagine the noise. Request a free Perusal Script and we’ll send it over, or visit the Sleeping Beauty script page for the character list and running time. The All Scripts page has every other title, and our home page has everything else.