Croydon Panto 2026: Cinderella, 40 Dates, From £18

Croydon’s pantomime this year is Cinderella, in the Fairfield Ashcroft Theatre at Fairfield Halls, Park Lane, CR0 1JD. It opens on Friday 11 December 2026 and closes on Sunday 3 January 2027.

Forty public performances are on sale now, every date and time already published, with tickets from £18 and a £3 transaction fee charged once per order, not per ticket. (Fairfield Halls)

One thing worth knowing before you book anything: a 2-for-1 offer on selected performances closes on Sunday 20 September 2026. Fairfield calls it Double Trouble, the discount is applied at checkout, and it is the only whole-audience discount in the run. Everything else is tied to a group, a school or an age.

Who is in it

Cinderella is produced by UK Productions Ltd and written by Jon Monie.

• Charlie Guest returns as Buttons
• Lee Latchford-Evans, of Steps, plays Prince Charming
• Rachel Grundy plays Cinderella
• Luke Attwood and Brandon Nicholson play the ugly sisters, Melody and Harmony Hard-Up. The pair have worked together in panto for seven years and are also known for their drag personas, Lexi Leven and Miss Lola Lush

Fairfield does not publish a running time or an age guidance for this production.

Every performance

Times are as published on 3 September 2026.

Four dark days sit inside the run, and they are easy to miss:

• Monday 14 December and Thursday 17 December, both in the opening fortnight
• Christmas Day
• New Year’s Day, so the run jumps straight from 31 December to Saturday 2 January

Boxing Day starts later than everything else in the run, at 1pm and 5pm. Monday 21 December is the only evening show that starts at 6pm rather than 7pm.

Live availability, checked 3 September: the two 10am performances, Tuesday 15 and Wednesday 16 December, are already flagged “Limited Availability”. Both are morning midweek shows aimed at schools. Nothing else in the run carries a warning yet.

Prices and discounts

Fairfield publishes a “from £18” headline and price bands A, B and C, but no band table, so the top price is not stated anywhere on the listing. Add £3 per order.

Group bookings of 20 and 50 go through the box office rather than the website. The main number is 0300 500 0595.

The pattern behind all of that: the fortnight from Saturday 19 December to New Year’s Day is full price, with the captioned and relaxed performances carved out as the two exceptions. If you want a discount, book before 19 December or on 21 or 30 December.

Two errors in Fairfield’s own listing

Both are on the Cinderella page itself, and both could cost you money.

The access labels are swapped in one place. The warning box, the group discount terms and the performance schedule all agree that Monday 21 December 2pm is the captioned performance and Wednesday 30 December 2pm is the relaxed performance. The under-16s discount paragraph says the opposite, calling 21 December relaxed and 30 December captioned. The schedule is the one to trust: it is the same list the booking system draws from, and the £25 relaxed price is stated separately against 30 December.

Two schools performances are named in one place and not the other. The schools concession says the £19.50 rate applies to Fri 11 Dec (10.30am and 7pm), Sun 13 Dec (11am), Tue 15 and Wed 16 Dec (10am and 1.30pm), and Sun 3 Jan (3pm). But in the performance schedule, the “Schools and Young Persons rates available” flag appears on only six of those: it is missing from Friday 11 December 7pm and from Sunday 3 January 3pm. Confirm with the box office before you build a school trip around either.

A third, smaller slip: the discount blackout is written as running to “Mon 01 Jan”. 1 January 2027 is a Friday. The date is right, the weekday is left over from an earlier year.

The five “school shows” are open to everyone

BH Live, the charity that runs Fairfield Halls, announced in a release headed “Record-Breaking school bookings for Fairfield Halls’ 2026 Pantomime!” that it had added an extra school performance, “taking the total to five dedicated school shows”, and that all front-row stalls for those performances had already sold out. The five it names are Fri 11 Dec 10.30am, Tue 15 Dec 10am and 1.30pm, and Wed 16 Dec 10am and 1.30pm. (BH Live)

“Dedicated” does not mean closed. All five are on general sale on Fairfield’s own booking page as we write, two of them flagged Limited Availability. If you want a cheap morning panto and do not mind a hall full of school parties, they are bookable.

Two things in that release do not match the venue’s listing:

• It says “Early bird tickets are £19.50 when booked and paid for by the end of September”. Fairfield’s own page prices school groups at £19.50 as the standard rate and puts the early bird on top: “£2.00 off the below prices when booked and paid for by 30 September 2026”, which is £17.50. The venue’s page is the one you book through.
• It says of last Christmas that “Aladdin was a hit last year”. Fairfield’s 2025 pantomime was Beauty and the Beast, which ran 12 December 2025 to 4 January 2026, with a captioned performance on 22 December and a relaxed performance on 2 January. (Fairfield Halls)

BH Live also says it will cover up to ten pupil premium tickets per school booking, a saving of up to £175, when booked and paid for by 30 September 2026, up from a smaller allowance last year. That is the single largest discount on this show and it is schools-only.

Cheaper than last year

Beauty and the Beast opened at from £18.50 in 2025. Cinderella opens at from £18. The headline price has gone down 50p in a year, which is not something you can say about much in Croydon this winter.

Schools and youth groups

• £19.50 a ticket in every price zone for school and young people’s groups of 10 or more, including Brownies and Cubs
• £17.50 if the booking is made and paid for by 30 September 2026, a £2 early bird that expires four weeks from now
• Groups of 50 or more also get free ice creams with all paid tickets
• One free staff place per 10 paid tickets for schools, and one free leader ticket for young people’s groups

Access

• Captioned: Monday 21 December, 2pm
• Relaxed: Wednesday 30 December, 2pm, at a flat £25 plus the £3 order fee

Fairfield lists no audio described performance and no BSL-interpreted performance for this production. If either is added, it usually appears on the producer’s own access page before the venue tags it, so it is worth checking UK Productions as well as Fairfield closer to the date.

Getting there

Fairfield Halls is on Park Lane, a five minute walk from East Croydon station and about ten from West Croydon. The tram stops at Lebanon Road and George Street are both closer than either station.

If you are driving to an evening performance, our parking in Croydon page has the council’s tariffs and the gap between the cheap and expensive car parks, and roadworks and travel covers anything blocking the approach.

For the rest of the town’s festive programme, see Croydon Christmas lights and Croydon fireworks and bonfire night. Before any of it, Croydon Harvest and the Walnut Fair runs on 3 and 4 October.