Cinderella will bring special Christmas sparkle to the Chichester stage

Written by Philip Wilson with music by Jason Carr, it will run from December 17 to 31 and will be directed by Jon Pashley, who also directed last year’s CFYT’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in West Dean Gardens.

The team are promising a spellbinding new retelling of the classic folk tale, full of wonder and delight as we meet a wicked stepfamily, a handsome prince in search of a wife and a missing slipper.

There are also three magical dresses, a wish-giving tree and help for Cinderella from a very unexpected source.

Think Cinderella and think Christmas and inevitably you think panto, but that's not what we're going to be getting here, as Jon, who is originally from Worthing, explains.

“I don't think a panto is a negative thing but it is just not what we're doing in Chichester,” he said.

"We've got this amazing youth theatre. Cinderella is a story that could be told with seven people but we are going to be telling it with more than 70 people through the ingenuity of our writer Philip Wilson who also adapted Grimms Tales for Chichester.

"And for this we were thinking why are we telling the story of Cinderella, who is telling the story and what it means to be this community of people in the youth theatre who are telling the story to a larger community.

“And the point is that it is a magical story of transformation. We need to think what that transformation means for us, and for us we think it is a story about the transformation from childhood to adulthood.

"It starts in a place of darkness and tragedy which is sometimes overlooked. It starts with the loss of a mother which is a huge event, and then we see this young girl who begins in a very dark place grow into adulthood, finding joy and love and hope in her future.

“We have balls and we have princes but there are thousands and thousands of versions of this story.

"The most famous one is the version by Charles Perrault which was turned into the Disney where you have got a fairy godmother and pumpkins and castles.

"We have gone for the other European version which is the Grimm version where you see the world from the village perspective rather than the palace perspective.

"Cinderella meets the prince and falls in love but it's much more to do with the perspective of village community and the natural world.”

Part of the magic for Jon is that it was in Chichester, as he says, that he learned to love the theatre, after which he did an internship in Jonathan Church’s first year as CFT artistic director from 2006-7.

“I had started shadowing Jonathan in the rehearsal room and I assisted a director in a cabaret in the Minerva and that director was Philip Wilson who gave me my first professional assisting job – and who now wrote this.

"But there are even more reunions than that. We have got Abigail Caywood who designed the costumes for Midsummer Night's Dream and is now back designing costumes for this, and we have got Julia Cave who did movement for Midsummer Night's Dream and is now choreographer for Cinderella.”