Review of Badjelly the Witch

Kidz Stuff’s production of Badjelly the Witch will be a memorable school holiday jaunt. All kids should get their parents or grandparents or aunties and uncles to treat them to a family expedition to see Badjelly. Nobody is going to be bored, the grown ups are not going to have to control the children and everybody is going to come away with a happy smile. Although maybe I wouldn’t take a super cool sophisticated teenager everyone else will be enchanted.

I saw two of the theatre pieces presented for children in a recent Capital E festival. They were not up to much, I felt the audiences of children were being sold short. The plays were slow, one was ridiculously focussed on an adult theme with much earnest soul searching from an adult character. The other was dark dismal and unintelligible. The productions came from overseas and it was hard to see why we should put up with being fobbed off in this way. I was longing for some lightness, some wit, and some magic.

It turns out that Kidz Stuff delivers exactly the right kid’s stuff. The little ones sitting on the floor are right there in the show they can touch the actors and stand with outstretched arms as the forest, hunch up to be the stones on the mountain, and wave their arms as the flying eagles. The big kids could do it too if they felt like it and everybody laughs at the jokes, and thrills to the language and the music, and calls out the answers pantomime style.

The actors enjoy the play and each other and their audience and in the party atmosphere the feeling is mutual. The fearsome Badjelly herself played by Bryony Skillington is as larger than life as a real self-respecting child-eating witch should be. My ten year old companion particularly liked her sniggering witty explanatory asides, “this is me flying”, and given the rapt faces of the preschoolers and the mothers and grandfathers near me the family friendly wit and the tension works at all levels. This Badjelly sings like a diva, threatens as a nasty old witch must, and flies on her broomstick with vigorous trendy witchy style.

The lively, skilful, all singing, all dancing, cast wear imaginative fairy-story magic costumes. My favourites are Badjelly’s witchy hat, a perky black royal-wedding fascinator with a traditionally sinister cone at the centre, and the debonair eagle’s airman’s leather jacket and dashing white scarf. Ooooh yes he is a thrill that eagle.

The set is made from ingenious revolving screens and Tim and Rose are imprisoned in chains, police emergency tapes and heavy steel scaffolding which is frighteningly realistic.

The Tararua Tramping Club Hall is a youthfully friendly old venue. In the rain I worried about the exits from the front door and entrances from the back and vice versa but it worked like a dream. There’s not a dud movement or a dud moment here.

Get organised it’s on twice most days of the holidays, it is an hour of fun.

ENDS

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