Bit of a let-down: the poster that greeted festive theatre-goers in Croydon this week
What was it that David Bowie said about Croydon?
Festive fun-seekers turning up at the council-owned Fairfield Halls earlier this week having paid as much as £37 for their ticket to see a seasonal pantomime probably felt a bit short-changed when they saw a notice outside declaring that there would be only FIVE dwarfs on stage for the performance.
Anywhere else but in Croydon, this might have been dismissed as a tall story.
What was expected to be a panto was descending into some typically Fairfield farce, with the Croydon dwarf shortage seeming to stretch beyond one panto performance.
Inside Croydon’s wish-list for 2025 includes heartfelt hopes for better artistic programming at the Fairfield Halls, which has never quite recovered from having the council lavish £70million on it in an unfinished and botched refurbishment.
“The current programme all sounds rather desperate,” wrote our culture correspondent, Ken Towl.
Towl had also said “apart from the pantomime”, but that was before the latest round of Croydon cuts had seen the dwarfs reduced to just five in the performance of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
The Croydon panto, staged over four weeks in December and January, is the Fairfield Halls’ big money-spinner. Perhaps, under operators BHLive, the panto is their only money-spinner.
Tall story: the promotional blurb on the Fairfield Halls website definitely promises the full quota of seven dwarfs
The 2024-2025 panto at the Fairfield Halls is being staged in the Ashcroft Theatre, though it appears no seats are being sold in the Circle.
The promotional blurb for its pantomime is typically cheesy: “Mirror, mirror on the wall… What’s the greatest panto of them all? Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at Fairfield Halls of course…”.
Top of the bill is Kellie Shirley, best known for acting in TV soaps including EastEnders and Casualty, plus a roster of panto regulars, and Mia Overfield as the somewhat dwarf-deprived Snow White.
What does it take to put on a panto?: More than five dwarfs, perhaps?
Shirley plays the wicked step-mother.
Elsewhere on the Fairfield website is a promotional piece called “Panto Facts”, including “What it takes to put on a panto”. We checked. The article doesn’t advise producers of Snow White to make sure that they have seven dwarfs.
The poster outside the Fairfield Halls this week offered some dark humour for the absenteeism among their cast: “Please note,” the notice read. “There will be only 5 dwarfs in todays [sic] performance.” It appears the Fairfield Halls is short on apostrophes as well as dwarfs.
“Don’t worry… Queen Grimelda didn’t poison them.” Like that’s in any way reassuring.
But it is impossible to say with any certainty which of the less-than-magnificent seven was unable to take the stage.
Had Sneezy caught a cold?
Was Happy depressed?
No mistake: visitors to pantoland in Croydon had good grounds to expect the full complement of dwarfs
Or maybe Doc was on emergency call at Mayday Hospital?
And don’t dwarfs have under-studies?
We asked BHLive for an explanation for their failure to stage a fully casted Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, what their adverts described as “a festive extravaganza”, but their press office down in dozy Dorset is closed…
So it is that Croydon will go down as the only place on the planet to stage Snow White and the Five Dwarfs.
As Bowie might have said: that’s so fucking Croydon.
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