Photo Gallery: Pub Night at the Riverside Dickens Festival

By Fancy a pint and a bit 'o bawdy fun? The Riverside Dickens Festival is dishing up both at Pickwick's Pub Night.

The Pub Night supper is the traditional opening to the festival. The menu features pub grub - bangers and mash (that's sausages and mashed taters to us Yanks) and shepherd's pie - washed down with plenty of grog. This year's event also features a new show, created by Patricia Scarborough.

A mainstay of the Riverside performance scene and director of theater at Ramona High School, Scarborough was asked to produce an original entertainment - something that wouldn't be performed on the streets during the rest of the festival.

She pulled together a small troupe of performers and created a show based on a Victorian music hall performance. "Music hall is England's vaudeville. It involves songs and lots of jokes and audience participation," she said. A master of ceremonies - called the Chairman - keeps the show running.

The event includes appearances by Mr. Samuel Pickwick (of Dicken's "The Pickwick Papers") and the author himself, played by local actors Chuck Spitler and Paul Jacques.

As for Scarborough: "My character is Leticia High Flyer and she's the legitimate soprano of the troupe." Aghast at the low morals of her fellow thespians, Leticia "muddles through and tries to hold her head up high," Scarborough said.The performance is mildly bawdy. In days of yore, the Lord Chamberlain reviewed music hall jokes in advance, censoring the naughty bits with a blue pencil. The practice gave rise to the adjective "blue" to describe smutty comic acts, she said.

Many of the audience are expected to turn out in their best Victorian fripperies. They'll find plenty of company through the weekend. "A majority of the attendees for the weekend will be in costume," she said.

And Friday, they are expected to sluice down their victuals with potent potables. "If it's Pub Night, you're quaffing beer or wine," she said. "The evening always goes better if you have some liquid lubrication."