Little Red & The Big Bad Wolf

Built for the week before Halloween

The show comes out of a specific gap in the Irish theatre calendar. Pantomime in Ireland is a Christmas trade, and the Civic Theatre in Tallaght had already established a Christmas run when it began programming a second, shorter seasonal show for the week before Halloween, made with Rob Murphy Productions and badged the Civic Halloween Spooktacular.

The 2024 edition was Hansel, Gretel & The Witch, which played the Civic from 25 to 31 October that year, following what the venue described as a sell-out week the previous season. Murphy, who wrote it over the preceding summer, told the Echo he wanted a modern twist on the fairy tale while staying true to the source material, and that Hansel and Gretel was one of the best Halloween fairy tales because it left room for music. Sarah Harvey handled the dance choreography and Elaine Gallagher worked as musician and vocal coach.

Little Red and the Big Bad Wolf followed in 2025, running at the Civic's Main Space from 24 to 31 October under the hashtag the venue uses for the slot. It kept the house furniture of the Halloween shows: a forest setting, a recurring bumbling comic character, and costumes encouraged in the audience with prizes at selected performances.

The company, and what it runs on

Rob Murphy is the single point the work comes from. He is an associate artist at the Civic and acts as producer, director and writer on its annual professional pantomime, and he wrote and directed the Halloween show as well.

The Christmas production gives the clearest measure of the operation's size. Tickles, Beauty and the Beast opened on 3 December 2025 and closed on 4 January 2026, playing 56 performances that included 11 school shows and one sensory-friendly performance. The Civic's Niamh Honer put the audience at more than 16,000 across the run, and described it as the fifth panto produced under Rob Murphy Productions. More than 80 people worked behind the scenes. Elaine Gallagher was musical director, Alan McGrath, from Tallaght, did the choreography, and Kyra Clifford stage-managed, with Bea Adomaityte assisting. Donal Shiels is the Civic's chief executive.

The timetable is not seasonal in practice. Production work on that Christmas show began early in 2025, junior chorus auditions were held in August, and rehearsals for the principal cast and dancers started in late October and ran through weekends in November — which means the Halloween show and the Christmas show are being built by overlapping teams in the same autumn. The next Christmas title has already been named as Tickles and Dottie are Freezin'.

The people on stage

Johnny Ward has played the Wolf in both stagings and is the name carried at the top of the billing. Born on 21 May 1987 and raised in Walkinstown in south Dublin, he played Pauley in the fifth series of RTÉ's Love/Hate in 2014, has taken six separate roles in Fair City including the kidnapper Ciaran Holloway, and appeared opposite Sean Penn in the 2011 film This Must Be the Place. He reached the final of the third series of Dancing with the Stars in 2019 with Emily Barker, finishing runner-up. His earlier stage credits include Buttons in Cinderella in 2012 and Coppers: The Musical in 2018.

Ward told the Echo in October 2025 that the Halloween show started with an idea of Murphy's, and that the two already knew each other from the Stadium panto, where Ward performed each year alongside Alan Hughes and Murphy, who plays Buffy. He rated Murphy as a writer, performer and director, and said the appeal of the form was that it holds a whole family at once, with jokes aimed at the adults that go over the children's heads.

The 2025 Civic cast had Kevin Keeley returning as Wiggles the Woodcutter, Helen Jordan as Glammy D' Granny, Hazel Park as Little Red and Aidan G as Dame Bridey. Keeley is from Tallaght and is the Civic's long-running Tickles; back in November 2019 he told the Echo he was facing 47 shows between 10 December and 5 January after the Christmas run was extended on ticket sales, and that the company rehearsed hard enough to stay in character so the rest of the show could be picked up from audience participation. He had toured the United States with Celtic Woman the year before.

For 2026 the comic lead changes. George McMahon is credited as Billy Silly: born in Dublin on 20 September 1985, he played Jamie Custer in Custer's Last Stand-up and is Mondo O'Connell in Fair City, and he won the reality series Celebrity Farm in 2003, giving the €50,000 prize to three children's and disability charities. His own training started at 14, at the Independent Theatre Workshop and the Helen Jordan Stage School. Laura Kelly takes Glammy D Granny and Robert Downes plays Dame Bridie, having played Dottie in the Christmas panto. Hazel Park stays as Little Red.

The story and the shape of it

The plot is the familiar one, bent. Little Red travels through the enchanted forest of Merrywood towards Glammy D Granny's house, meets a run of characters along the way, and finds there is more to the Wolf than first appears. In the Civic version, Wiggles the Woodcutter helps turn the tables in what the venue called a riotous showdown; in the Ambassador version, that job falls to the comic lead and the dame, with the story twisting towards a finale that reverses the traditional ending.

Both stagings run 60 minutes with no interval, and both are advertised for ages four to 104 — in other words, a single unbroken hour rather than a two-act panto. The Civic programmed its 4pm show on Wednesday 29 October 2025 as a sensory-friendly performance, consistent with the one sensory-friendly date in that winter's 56-show Christmas run.

The 2026 move, and what changed with it

The Ambassador Theatre run is the current engagement: seven performances from Saturday 24 to Friday 30 October 2026, with doors at 1pm and the show at 2pm every day. That is a different pattern from Tallaght, where the 2025 run squeezed 14 performances into eight days by double-billing 2pm and 4pm, opening with a single 7pm show on the Friday and closing with a 12.30pm show on Hallowe'en itself. The city-centre version plays once a day, matinee only.

Prices moved with the venue. The Civic charged €17 for an adult and €14 for a child, with a family of four at €60 including booking fees. The Ambassador tickets went on sale on Wednesday 13 May 2026 at €24.15 for a single ticket and €91.60 for a family of four, booking and facility fees included.

The producer is worth a note. The Civic listing names the show as presented by The Civic and Rob Murphy Productions; the Ambassador listing, carried by promoter MCD, does not name a producing company. What it does carry is three of the Civic principals, the same character names, the same 60-minute no-interval format and the same costume-prize gimmick, so the continuity is on the page even where the credit is not.

What a performance is actually like

This is a participation show before it is anything else, and the cast talk about it in those terms rather than as a text to be delivered. Ward has drawn the contrast with screen work directly: on camera the aim is to stay natural, because the slightest facial exaggeration reads as too much, while on stage the voice has to project and every consonant and vowel has to land, with no rewind. The trade-off, in his account, is licence — if a child shouts that he is a terrible wolf, he can shout back, which is not an option in Shakespeare.

Audiences have been encouraged to arrive in costume at both venues, with prizes for the best dressed at selected performances. No support act is listed for the Ambassador dates; the hour is the whole event.

As of 9 October 2026 the Ambassador run has not opened, so there is no critical response to it yet. The company's recent form is the Christmas side of the ledger: more than 16,000 people through 56 performances between December 2025 and January 2026, drawn from Girl Guides, scout groups, corporate bookings and families travelling in from abroad.