Cather­ine Copeland

Po­lit­i­cal hu­mour and palanc­ing were the or­der of the night at the Na­pari­ma Bowl, San Fer­nan­do, as the Crazy Catholic (Shel­don Nar­ine) and DC Shell The­atre staged Beau­ty and the Beast with a touch of Tri­ni flavour. The Crazy Catholic said: "This is a sto­ry where good al­ways over­comes evil and true love con­quers all. It is based on the orig­i­nal Beau­ty and the Beast. The witch places a curse on the cas­tle be­cause of the ar­ro­gance of the ser­vants and the mas­ter. "She de­clared that un­less he learns to love the curse will be per­ma­nent. It is dif­fi­cult be­cause of his ap­pear­ance and ag­gres­sive man­ner. With Belle and her open-mind­ed­ness, how­ev­er, they did fall in love which lift­ed the curse."

The sto­ry is the fa­mil­iar one, with Beau­ty, daugh­ter of a mer­chant who has ac­ci­den­tal­ly of­fend­ed a hideous Beast, agrees to live with him for­ev­er in or­der to save her fa­ther's life. Ul­ti­mate­ly, Beau­ty's kind­ness and vir­tu­os­i­ty melt the Beast's heart and re­veals the hand­some prince buried un­der­neath his fur­ry ex­te­ri­or. Dur­ing the play we en­counter the lo­cal ver­sion of the char­ac­ters such as Zedan (can­dle); Clock­ers; Dusty; Mrs Potts; and, her daugh­ter Kim Lee (teapot). There is al­so Frankie Fry­fish who is de­ter­mined to mar­ry Belle. She, how­ev­er, de­spis­es him be­cause of his van­i­ty and self-im­por­tance.�

An­oth­er hu­mor­ous char­ac­ter, Creeks Rivers, is in­tro­duced. She is des­per­ate­ly in love with Frankie and dances for him say­ing she will be his pri­vate dancer. Frankie says that she could be his dancer if she pays him two mil­lion. Creeks replies, "But I al­ready bought the flag." In the end Frankie is eat­en by wolves af­ter spurn­ing Creeks again and she goes off with one of his hench­men Mad­do. The pro­duc­tion was tai­lored for chil­dren as it con­tained enough ref­er­ences to the fairy tale for them to un­der­stand and en­joy. The po­lit­i­cal pi­cong made it more re­lat­able to the adult au­di­ence. There was an el­e­ment of in­ter­ac­tion with the au­di­ence, which thrilled chil­dren, as the Beast ran through the au­di­ence look­ing for Belle.