An old racing car in bad nick but with an intriguing backstory of sabotage is found in a junk yard. Two excitable children and their eccentric inventor dad who is a grieving widower. Camp spies sent from the far away land of Vulgaria by an evil leader and his lecherous wife. The daughter of a candy tycoon. And a scary childcatcher.
This year’s Grand Opera House Trust summer youth production is Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Two years ago, at the end of July 2024, the UK touring production landed on the Grand Opera House Stage. This week, it’s the turn of the 122 young people who have spent the last two weeks under the tutelage of director Tony Finnegan, choreographer Rebecca Leonard and musical supremo Wilson Shields. And they’ve achieved a lot in a fortnight.
The two lead roles are a great advert for Belvoir Players Academy, with Meghan McSorley back playing Truly Scrumptious (Sandy in last summer’s production of
Grease) and Ronan McGoldrick as Caractacus Potts. With a warm tenor voice, McGoldrick’s charismatic presence on stage makes him a believable fixer of problems (with just a hint of twinkly eyed Dick Van Dyke) while McSorley’s solid soprano vocals bring a richness to many of the show’s songs. Young Jemima and Jeremy Potts were played on opening night by Sophia Travers and Finley Bell (alternating with Anna Mitchell and Matthew Loughrey).
Comedic input comes in the form of Granda Potts (
spoon spanner-playing Toby Ferguson who steals the second act with
The Roses of Success performed alongside the brilliantly Tefal egg-headed engineers), the man-child tantrum-throwing sexually-ambiguous Baron (Liam Johnson) and the flirtatious paedophobic Baroness (Emma McLean who totally owns
Chu-Chi Face and gets a great laugh from the adults in the audience when she quips “I never should have allowed toys into the marriage”). Hats off to the choreographer for her work to get the ensemble to burst into life for the toe-tapping
Bombie Samba.
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a story which has stamped its cultural footprint over generations of children and parents through the much-loved 1968 film. The musical legacy of the Sherman Brothers lives on with a big song that every child who’s been in a primary school choir will remember being trained to spit the words out with good diction. But there’s more to the score and lyrics than one ear worm of a song.
The overture hints at a sizeable orchestra down in the pit – fourteen in total – with the oboe (Bryan Barr) regularly featuring in songs (notably in You Two) and a strong percussion section. Toot Sweets brings the full cast – visibly – on stage for the first time with a well animated scene in The Scrumptious Sweet Company.
Two bumbling Vulgarian spies (Colby Scott-Baillie and Jude McClelland with Germanic accents) only get one first act song to introduce their characters –
Act English which sends up English eccentricities – but bring much mirth to later scenes. A victim of mistaken identity, Grandpa memorably shouts “Help! I'm being abducted by foreigners”: a line that could have been written for 2026 sensibilities but is straight out of the 1968 film.
Neal Mullan’s childcatcher (with winklepickers almost as long as his youngster-sniffing nose) is dark and immediately evil, but the part is woefully underwritten in the original script. Similarly, the Toymaker (Charlie Adams) is quickly relegated to guiding Caractacus and Truly through the castle. And let’s not get started on the book’s convenient off-stage rescue of a Grandpa and his grandchildren to hurry along the finale!
While there are few emotional hooks in the story, there are big political themes at play in Jeremy Sams’ stage version of Ken Hughes’ and Roald Dahl’s screenplay based on Ian Fleming’s novel. The Potts family must face up to the capitalism of the junk yard owner Coggins and Lord Scrumptious. A toy-obsessed self-indulgent Baron is running a Nazi-adjacent country with forced juvenile labour. But none of that is important to the audience’s love of the story! What we really care about is an heiress-in-waiting falling for a hard-working and ingenious inventor … and a car that flies.
One of the dangers of any
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang production is that the elaborate props overshadow the characters. Full scale touring productions tend to use hydraulics and controlled lighting to (spoiler alert) make the eponymous car appear to fly as it drives off a cliff at the end of act one. And it turns out that ambitious engineering is also available to less well financed productions. Thankfully, the effort to make the magic happen doesn’t overly slow down the action, though the huge number of bodies on stage does constrain the car’s lateral movement in its final scenes. Another complex prop disappoints with Truly’s motorbike making several underwhelming entrances onto the stage, while Caractacus’ interactions with some of his elaborate machines will hopefully become less hesitant and more charming as the run progresses.
Costuming, chaperoning, line-running, song-teaching, choreographing, blocking, set-building … the list of work to be completed in such a short time is breathtaking. While the principal cast members had a three-day start, the ensemble
only began rehearsals on Saturday 4 July! Those leading the production must have nerves of steel.
Since 2011, the Grand Opera House’s summer youth production has been a great testbed for emerging talent. For a period there were even two summer schemes –
junior and
senior – though in recent years it’s just been a single all-age show. The rehearsals and performances form an important part of the venue’s outreach and investment in the people who make the theatre of tomorrow. Hurray for getting the youth musicians and tech crew on stage to join the cast for the curtain call bows.
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang continues in the Grand Opera House until Saturday 18 July with matinee and evening performances on both days. Note that the evening performances begin at 7pm and not the venue’s usual 7.30pm.
Photo credit: Neil Harrison Photography
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