Elf will be New Year treat at the Brighton Centre

As producer and director Jon Conway says, there will be plenty of dads all turning up in their Elf Christmas jumpers as well when Elf the Musical hits town: “You really have just never seen so much yarn and wool in one place! It's like you are attending a Noel Edmonds convention!”

As for what will be happening on the stage, Jon is promising something truly spectacular – Santa’s flying sleigh, an audience snowball fight, an indoor snowstorm, a giant candy cane journey from the North Pole and aerial cirque stars plus giant TV screens so you don’t miss any of the action. Steven Serlin steps into the big floppy shoes of Will Ferrell to play Buddy the Elf.

Back in the 1980s, Jon was the king of panto, writing hundreds of pantos and producing dozens: “But I left that because I wanted to do something different and I came up with the idea of doing arena events because it felt like they were the way to go. That was 2015. The NEC asked me to come up with something and so I set up the world's biggest pantomime with a 120-foot castle on-stage and big names and horses dragging the coach through the auditorium. And it went very well. We did two or three more of those and then I got the rights to do Elf. And I persuaded them to let me supersize the Broadway musical. When you are in an arena the excitement the crowd generates is a different buzz to the excitement you get in the theatre and there is just so much more that you can do. Our scenery is computer-generated backdrops a bit like Assassin's Creed in quality and it feels like the actors are moving in front of film as they react with it. There is a snowball fight in the film but there is no snowball fight in the musical but I decided to bring that snowball fight back and give the audience 200 inflatable snowballs so that they can have this massive snowball fight between themselves and with the cast.”

Plus you can also expect aerial trapeze artists when it comes to the decorating of Macy's at Christmas. It is going to be huge.

“We first did Elf in 2017 and we started at the NEC and now we are touring. We play three shows a day and then we go. The big problem in moving it all is finding food for the cast and crew but it's all very rock 'n' roll. We arrive at the venue at seven in the morning and the crew start working and within eight hours we've put up everything and we have transformed this empty room, all the lights and the staging and the sound and absolutely everything and then the actors turn up at four and do the sound checks and then they do the show. And the great thing about doing it this way is that not all theatres are the same whereas with this way of doing it, the stage is the same size wherever we go.”

At the heart of it all is the fact that it is such a great story: “Will Ferrell just absolutely created this character Buddy the Elf and it’s one of the greatest cinematic characters ever created. Everybody knows what he like looks like and he's just like everybody’s silly uncle or dad who just wants to have fun at Christmas.”