Little Angel has been making puppet-based theatre since the 1960s. They first staged Finding Santa in 2018, and it is this year’s Christmas show for a young audience at the Midlands Arts Centre (mac) in Birmingham.
It was written by Sean Taylor whose book, Where the Bugaboo Lives, is an interactive, choose your own story adventure. Samantha Lane of Little Angel Theatre collaborated with Taylor to devise a theatrical equivalent in which the audience collectively makes choices and the actors play different scenes as a result.
The premise is that two elves, Tatty Wigtoes (Sam Yetunde) and Pumpkin Fizzletwist (Troy Richards), need to get children’s letters to Santa by Christmas Eve so he will know which presents to bring them. On the way to the North Pole, their sleigh is overturned, Tatty and Pumpkin and all the letters fall out and they are left behind as the sleigh flies on without them.
Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to help Tatty and Pumpkin get the letters to Santa and save Christmas. Are we going to help them? Yes we are!
The story is a high stakes hero’s quest—stakes don’t get much higher than saving Christmas—and Tatty and Pumpkin are a classic double act. Pumpkin is the worrier of the pair; he has an important job to do and he relies on his reason and logic to help him do it. Tatty is the clown with an unshakable confidence that it’s all going to turn out fine (spoiler alert: it does). Between them, they learn that Pumpkin’s rational approach has its place, but so too does Tatty’s spontaneity and sense of fun, so each can learn from the other.
Yetunde and Richards work well together, and it was nice to hear some local accents in a Birmingham children’s show. The third performer is the puppeteer, Lori Hopkins, who plays all the other characters they meet on their journey with a range of accents to match.
Finding Santa has an engaging cast and an enjoyable story, but it is rather talky for a show with a recommended lower audience age of four. There are lots of Christmas cracker jokes and puns, but not much action until the second half and not many puppets—we are half an hour into the show before the first one appears—so it’s not terribly visual for younger audiences. The set consists of various pieces of playground apparatus, with slides and steps and things, so it looks as if it was designed to be used more than it is.
The story options are limited to three decision points, and I got the impression they play more or less the same scene anyway; they just do it with a different puppet. The first decision is whether to go into the deep dark forest or across the endless icy plain. When I saw it, we went for the endless icy plain (I wanted to go into the deep dark forest but I was outvoted) where we met an Arctic squirrel who has forgotten where she buried her nuts. This is a storyline I would have associated more with a walk through a forest than a trek across an icy plain, so I have a feeling we might have met something similar whichever option we chose.
There is also some vagueness about the world we are in. Tatty and Pumpkin have to take the children’s letters from Skarsvag to the North Pole. Skarsvag is a real town in Norway, but they meet a penguin on the way and penguins live in Antarctica, not the Arctic. Its target audience probably isn’t going to be bothered, and the actors acknowledge the improbability of meeting a penguin in the Arctic, but together with the lack of action and the scarcity of puppets, it makes the show feel a bit underdeveloped.
Finding Santa is charming and they are doing two shows a day until the end of December, so there’s plenty of time to add more business.