Sleeping Beauty Pantomime Script Spotlight
A hundred years is a long time to wait for a good panto!
Sleeping Beauty is a story where the dramatic engine; a curse, a spinning wheel, a hundred-year sleep, does a lot of the heavy lifting, which frees the script to have fun around it. Our version centres on Queenie, the Dame and Queen of Slumberland, who approaches the whole business of royalty with tremendous enthusiasm and limited dignity, and Gerald the Herald, who has lost his trumpet and is working with the audience to improvise a replacement fanfare every time the King enters. Carabosse is a properly fearsome villain whose arrival at the naming ceremony sets everything in motion, and her sidekick Plum provides the kind of loyal, baffled support that villain scenes need. The hundred-year jump to Act Two gives the show a genuine sense of scale that most panto titles can't pull off.
Synopsis
At the naming ceremony for Princess Aurora, 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 the curse, 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's walked into, and Carabosse is doing everything in her considerable power to make sure the curse reaches its conclusion.
This script will cast a spell on your whole audience!
Sleeping Beauty, Peebles Youth Theatre
What the script looks like in practice
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!'
Who this script suits
Sleeping Beauty works well across a range of group sizes. The three good fairies, Silk, Cashmere and Velvet, give you three strong supporting roles that can be played with real variety, and the ensemble has good work across the naming ceremony, the hundred-year time jump, and the ghost scenes. Gerald the Herald is a genuine gift for the right comic performer and gives the audience participation its own distinct running thread across the show. Groups looking for a script where the comedy is properly distributed across the cast, rather than resting entirely on the Dame, will find a lot to enjoy here.
Sleeping Beauty Reviews
‘A perfect balance between tradition and modernity… with outrageous characters & slapstick comedy!’ - Border Telegraph on Sleeping Beauty
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