In London the standard announcement before the show was done with a recording, but at least they made it less boring by having the text read by one of the children from the cast.

For a long time, I thought it was being read by Small Boy, which would have been quite amusing, especially for is delivery of “filming, recording, or the thanking of photographs is NOT ALLOWED!” He was so fierce, that it would be hard to imagine anyone daring to do any of the proscribed activities!

It was, of course, delivered in Geordie, “filming” consisting of three syllables. The first recording was eventually replaced by a similar one, with a slightly less aggressive “not allowed”. Maybe the lawyers needed some other bit of the text tweaked, too. Who knows?

Eventually that the second recording was done by one of the Debbies, Demi Lee, if my memory serves.

I always wished that the announcement could have been done “live” by Small Boy, but maybe that would have taken him out of character, disrupted the start of the show.

At Goodspeed (Sept/Nov 2019) I have been delighted by how the kids are trusted in many, many ways. For instance, the director found a way to make the wretched announcement as part of the first moments of the show, and delivered by Small Boy, hurrah! SB says “turn off pagers, and anything else that might make a noise”. (There not yet being any cell phones in that earlier era.) One night he got the line slightly wrong, pressed on, got himself in a terrible tangle… and then got himself (quite) smoothly out the other end, and he had even, along the way, covered the “essential” notices. (Posted midnight, 26/27 Sept 2019)