Worth the admission alone is the wickedly-funny send-up of Susan Boyle –perfect punishment for the ghastly blasphemy she's currently committing against Mick and Keef, the gods of rock.
Worth the admission alone is the wonderful singing of Maris
sa Dunlop, transformed by the power of love from drip to diva and delivering a cracking version of All I Want For Christmas Is You, surely the best Christmas song ever.
Worth the admission too for Stephen Mulhern, irrepressible in the Buttons role and great good fun throughout.
And there's so much else besides including a terrific snowball fight, dazzling costumes, great dancing and all the nonsense you'd expect from a conventional pantomime including the words fart and poo several times over.
The bonus is that this is more than just panto, a new kind of Christmas show which combines all the fun of panto with all the glamour of a big musical, together with its high production values.
See this and the other pantos around will look tired and shabby by comparison. This is lavish, beautiful to look at, backed by a great live band and a spectacle in every sense.
Linking it all is the flimsiest of stories (a disgruntled Jack Frost is intent on wrecking Christmas), but wisely this is a show which isn't terribly interested in the story it's supposed to be telling.
Instead it moves from set piece to set piece, mixing great songs with dancing and comedy, giving us the best of both worlds as we move from panto to musical and back again.
If there's a weakness, it's that Robin Cousins is just too nice to be persuasively horrible as the villain; and Gladiator Sam Bond, rather curiously dressed as a gay Viking, is a bit of a spare part. The truth that the Mayflower seems to have missed is that the world has moved way beyond the need to employ muscle-bound non-actors in Christmas shows.
But aside from that, this is a genuinely-classy Christmas show. Full credit to the Mayflower for daring to be different.
Maybe the finale could have been milked a little more. It all ends a little bit suddenly. And Stephen Mulhern is still at the stage where he gabbles
