Review: Amazing Animals (Touring)

Saturday, 1st June 2024 at York Theatre Royal

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The Animal Guyz’s Amazing Animals seeks to entertain as much as it educates, giving youngsters a parade of animals (puppets and costumes, not real animals!) to enjoy while offering a great number of fascinating facts along the way.

The team are an enthusiastic bunch and they deliver material with real passion and zest, helped enormously by epic music underscoring almost constantly and even singing a few songs to memorialise lost species and warn us about the future loss of more creatures if we don’t create change. There are serious moments about endangered species and a lovely tribute to the great Steve Irwin but the team do well to balance the happy with the sad.

In this 75 minute show (no interval), Animals appear as a combination of hand-held puppets and the kind of climb-inside animal costumes we’d be most familiar with in Panto land. The hand-helds hold more cuddly appeal and steal the show from the costume-based-animals, although the larger animals do of course hold appeal with their scale.

Screens provide further facts and beautiful scenes of animals in the wild as their tribute stands centre stage – something which does unfortunately draw attention to the flimsy nature of a small number of the costumes.

There are definitely other elements of panto here too, as the team work hard to blend family fun and important facts – there’s gentle mockery within the team, water pistols, a few pop culture references aimed at the grown-ups and some nice silliness with audience interaction.

I’d say this is a lovely show for youngsters to explore the beauty and importance of animals; the variable quality of the costumes might be a little disappointing for the grown-ups, but for the little ones – including the six year old with me – there’s plenty to entertain and thrill.

Amazing Animals is touring into 2025 – more information and tickets can be found here.