Charlotte Hunt as Cinderella… she’s been putting “a little bit of sass” into the character. Photo: Steve McGrory

If the art of pantomime is dead, that’s more than jazz singer and music director Leisa Keen knows, and she’s the mover and shaker behind a new Cinderella panto at The Q.

Keen agrees that the popular theatre form, still beloved of the Brits, has seen fewer and fewer musical outings in Australia in recent years, but she, like me, well remembers the naughty pantos staged in Canberra by Kate Peters and the late Peter Williams, full of double entendres, popular songs and jokes aimed at both the littlies and their parents.

In fact, both Keen and David Pearson, who plays Buttons in the show, cut their theatrical teeth in those Canberra pantomimes of yesteryear, and they love them.

Central to the art form, she asserts (and in that respect it’s like cabaret), is interaction with the audience.

In panto that’s seen in the call-and-response routines like “Oh, yes you do” – “Oh, no we don’t”, or “Look behind you!”, and booing. But in revamping the story for modern-day audiences she had to bear in mind changing taste and changing values. In this Cinderella’s world, people will have mobile phones.

Gone are the smutty jokes. “If there’s any bad language we’ll get emails from parents,” she says, and even men in drag are out of favour, it seems – though happily she’s not compromising on that. Just wait for the Ugly Sisters.

Humour for the mums and dads will now come in the form of political and topical references, and a certain mushroom case might get a mention. The aim is entertainment for all ages and, to that end, as well as daytime shows, they’ve added an evening performance on the Thursday.

A working musician around town who knows what goes down, Keen has selected a range of pop songs, some of them with a nice old-fashioned twist, including Ella Fitzgerald and Irving Berlin’s It’s a Lovely Day, It’s My Party (and I’ll Cry If I Want To), The Shoop Shoop Song, along with the more recent We Are Family and The Time Warp, for when the clock strikes.

Keen suspects audiences may need a little training in call-and-response because they could be out of practice, but reminds me that if you’re performing Minnie the Moocher, everybody knows how to sing “Ho-dee-ho-dee-ho”. Buttons will help whip up responses, and there may even be some LED prompts.

She and choreographer Michelle Heine have assembled a star cast headed by Charlotte Hunt as Cinderella, fresh from productions with Canberra Philharmonic and Free-Rain Theatre; local musical stars Joe Dinn and Dave Collins as the over-the-top Ugly Sisters; Pearson as the aforementioned Buttons, servant to Lachlan Elderton playing Prince Charming; Lainie Hart as the Wicked Stepmother; and Keen herself as the Fairy Godmother.

There’ll be 16 children on stage – Keen and Heine are putting them through their paces as we speak – appearing as assorted ballroom guests, mice, other animals and footmen, and also playing a part in getting the Prince together with Cinderella towards the end of the show.

The whole enterprise is the work of the family business MEB Productions, which improbably stands for Midget Elephant Butterfly, after a dream Keen’s partner, Steve Rory, once had. He’s now busy creating a coach intended to look like a “pseudo time machine”.

As for the star role of Cinderella, Hunt tells me she’s not a cardboard cut-out and that she has been putting “a little bit of sass” into the character, although she remains the sweet and innocent Cinderella we all know.

“In a pantomime, you can’t have a limp main character,” she asserts.

Cinderella, The Q, two shows daily, January 21-24.