Kindred Spirits Theatre Company’s Jack & The Beanstalk – 13 December 2025, Sheffield Library Theatre
Review by Claire Taranaski.
Kindred Spirits Theatre Company, made up of performers aged 11 to 18, have moved to their biggest stage yet at the Library Theatre for their 2025 panto Jack & The Beanstalk, a fun family friendly panto, where you can tell the entire cast are loving being part of the show as much as we are loving watching it.
A big part of this comes down to director and writer Heather Reynolds, who you can tell puts the members of the company first, encouraging the audience to support them, though we did not need Heather to persuade us with this as all their performances were a delight. Heather’s script was a lovely take on the story transporting us to the Kingdom of Kindred and full of fun jokes (my personal favourite being Lily Clare as Simon’s “Past Your Eyes Milk”) and fun re-writes of well known songs and climaxing with a giant twist on the classic story. Heather and everyone involved also remained calm under pressure when the beanstalk prop did not behave as expected and this just added to the fun of the show.
Our favourite cast members, and this seemed to be the same for everyone around us, were Anya Illsey-Walsh and Leah Charles as the double act fairy narrators Fairy Fauna and Fairy Flora. I have seen a lot of pantos and these are my two favourite panto narrators to date, making them a double act was a brilliant idea and their friendship, comedic timing and attitude shone through, though unlike Fairy Flora as an audience we did not keep wishing the show to end. They also brought to life the comedic gold of Heather’s script and made it feel completely natural and got the audience dancing in their seats with their act two opening musical number “The Giants Don’t Feel Like Dancing”.
Unlike a traditional panto Heather had not opted for the traditional dame and as often this is the source of most of the adult jokes, this worked in this family focused show. However we still got our traditional panto principal boy in Sophie Ellis as Jack, who was everything you want in the role, possessing wonderful stage presence, comic timing, chemistry with co-stars, including the perfect panto princess from Polly Shipley (with added girl power), her brother Simon and (in a reference that all South Yorkshire ice cream lovers will recognise and perhaps even more the love of jack’s life) Our Cow Molly (played by Elsa Daines) whose connection shone through in their duet “My Oh My, It’s A Wonderful Life”.
It also would not be a panto without someone to boo and Indiana Savage was the perfect Disney style baddie as Poison Ivy. Her performance was faultless, with great attitude and stage presence, to the point of slightly terrifying a small child in the row in front of us though their dad reassured me they were ok, she got her very own anthem in “Man, I Feel Like A Villain”, an outfit anyone who has wanted to recreate the dance scene from series one of “Wednesday” will want to borrow, and took her comeuppance at the finale with the grace of a great panto villain.
Every panto needs supporting characters and an ensemble to offer comedy, fun music and dance numbers and they left me hoping that Kindred Spirits will tackle the musicals “Matilda” and “Bugsy Malone” in the future as based on their performances of “Revolting Children” and “We Could Have Been Anything” they will be able to pull off these shows with delightful success.
We left the theatre with my six year old daughter singing “My Oh My” and counting down the years until she turns 11 and can give the company a try and with me looking forward to hearing what the company do next as they had back to the Library Theatre at the end of March.
And finally my daughter’s review “I loved the songs, the fairies, jack and the cow, It was such a good time.”
