I saw Wicked Wizard of Oz in Sussex – and people started walking out after 20 minutes!

I say sad, mostly because as I was there to review this show I felt like I couldn’t join them. And after just 15 minutes of this bizarre panto/circus/musical, I really wanted to.

Billed as a ‘breath-taking, Cirque staging of the Wicked Wizard of Oz’ this two-night production at the Brighton Centre was beset with problems from the get-go. After a very slow start where Kev Orkian, who played the wizard, read out birthdays and played the piano, the action finally started.

But no sooner than the characters had come onstage, they left again. We were inexplicably left watching an empty stage, before music from The Greatest Showman (a bold choice, given what we’d seen so far) was piped in for five/ten minutes.

Eventually, the cast returned to the stage with no mention of the break. But if we thought that was the end of the calamities, we were wrong.

The production felt distinctly amateurish, with the actors talking over each other at times and a real feeling that nobody quite had a handle on what was going on.

There were also ongoing mic issues and props that felt clunky. Trailers for the Wicked Wizard of Oz show make it look slick and exciting, with lots of action, stunts, skills and effects on display, including a witch flying across the stage on a bicycle.

The reality was a bike tied to the top of a golf cart that was driven around the edge of the stage with an incessantly cackling witch atop.

As the golf cart reversed into a parking space on the other side of the stage, I just needed the ‘beep, beep, beep’ reversing noise for the farcical experience to be complete.

At 20 minutes in, I saw the first group of people get up and leave, and many others followed afterwards.

The audience reaction to ‘jokes’ and songs was muted, with barely any clapping and none of the loud and boisterous interaction you’d usually get at a panto.

By the time we’d limped to the interval, we’d seen barely any circus skills and the general mood could probably be summed up as restless and fed up.

Even a lot of the cast looked like they’d rather be anywhere else!

The second half was marginally better, with a couple more circus acts, but it wasn’t enough to bring it back from the brink.

We stayed til almost the bitter end – getting caught in the exit crush and having to queue to leave the car park felt like an unnecessary pain on this night – and made our escape as Dorothy (Kelly Banlaki) and Scarecrow (Jordan Conway) killed the witch. At least that was some welcome good news as I think I might have screamed if we’d had to endure another of her cackles.

Maybe this was just a particularly bad night, but it really did feel as thought they need to go back to the drawing board with this one.

My daughter and I were happy to follow the yellow brick road out of there, because it turned out here really is no place like home!