Just a spoonful of sugar
’Tis the season for a treat. The musical is vying with the pantomime as the traditional Christmas outing, but the main thing is that hearts are warmed and spirits cheered
CHRISTMAS is coming and the theatre, like the goose, is getting fat. Up and down the land, theatres seek to swell their coffers by putting on lavish shows that will provide some kind of insurance against possible hard times ahead, but, although pantomime is still popular, I am struck by the changing nature of Yuletide entertainment.
When I was a child in the postwar Midlands, panto, Peter Pan and Toad of Toad Hall were the seasonal staples. I can vividly recall seeing a young Norman Wisdom in Robinson Crusoe, Phyllis Calvert as J. M. Barrie’s boy-who-wouldn’t-grow-up and
Patrick Wymark as A. A. Milne’s bombastic hero. I’m sure you can still find their equivalents today, but what is immediately apparent, as you scan the brochures, is how many of the big regional theatres rely on classic American musicals to draw the crowds.
At the Sheffield Crucible, Robert Hastie is directing Frank Loesser’s 1950 landmark show Guys and Dolls, with Kadiff Kirwan, lately seen on TV in Fleabag and This Way Up, as Sky Masterson, who wins a bet by luring a Salvation Army lass to Havana. At the Curve, Leicester, Nikolai Foster recreates the gang warfare of the Jets and the Sharks with a revival of West
Side Story. And at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, Jo Davies is directing a revival of Gypsy which, as West Side Story does, has lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by Arthur Laurents.
This is by no means an exhaustive list. You can catch a stage version of The Wizard of Oz at Leeds Playhouse and, although it’s not an American show, expectations are running high at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre for a musical version of David
Walliams’s The Boy in the Dress with songs by Robbie Williams and Guy Chambers. One of the most joyous shows in London right now is the revival of Mary Poppins at the Prince Edward, with Zizi Strallen giving a terrific performance as P. L. Travers’s unearthly nanny.
The conclusion is obvious: that the musical is now regarded as the dominant form of popular entertainment and the one most likely to attract audiences over
Christmas. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, as it offers uplift, sensuous delight and, if we’re lucky, an ecstasy such as you rarely get from watching film or TV. Does this mean that the musical is gradually replacing pantomime as the stock Christmas crowd-pleaser? I sincerely hope not, as panto has multiple attractions: it invites noisy audience participation, is a glorious theatrical ragbag and is infinitely adaptable.
I grew up in a world where the Principal Boy was invariably a beguiling female and the Dame a veteran comedian. Where, I sometimes wonder, are my Pat Kirkwood and my Arthur Askey of long ago? Today, the Principal Boy is as likely to be a male pop singer as a woman, although the tradition of the transvestite Dame happily still persists.
In recent years, I’ve seen the role taken by artists as various as Ian Mckellen and Roy Hudd, who share a love of music hall and variety (as it was known in the 1950s) and who have an ability to chat to an audience as if we were nextdoor neighbours.
Statistics also suggest that pantomime is still alive across the length and breadth of Britain. The company Qdos Entertainment is producing upwards of 30 shows around the UK, ranging from Cinderella in Aberdeen to Dick
Whittington in Wolverhampton. Three years ago, the company also restored pantomime to the London Palladium, where Julian Clary has since pitched camp. He is rejoined again this year by the regular team of Paul O’grady, Nigel Havers, Gary Wilmot and Paul Zerdin in Goldilocks and the Three Bears. I welcome the return to tradition even if, watching their Cinderella in 2016, I felt Mr Clary’s doubles entendres were more suited to an adult than a family audience.
Although pantomime, combining a fairy-tale story with pop songs and topical gags, is a peculiarly British institution that will always bewilder overseas visitors, it’s no longer the only game in town. Musicals, as I’ve noted, are taking over many regional playhouses.
Versions of A Christmas Carol are also enjoying an upsurge in popularity. Jack Thorne’s adapttion is back at the Old Vic with Paterson Joseph as the skinflint hero. History is being made at Wilton’s Music Hall with Sally Dexter as the first-ever female Scrooge. And the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, has seized on the fact that Dickens was inspired by seeing a tombstone of one Ebenezer Scroggie in a local kirkyard to create a purely Scottish version of the story.
A Christmas Carol has always been popular on stage. Indeed, the first version was played at the Adelphi in February 1844, only months after the book appeared. It was also staged with Dickens’s approval and active participation. Seeing Tiny Tim encased in a set of irons for his weak leg, he ordered their immediate removal, arguing that the sight would be too painful for members of the audience with disabled children. If Dickens’s story is everywhere right now, it must be for a good reason: that we long, in an uncertain world, for an espousal of the charity, goodness and warmth of heart that it so humanely advocates.
The point is reinforced by two other Christmas shows that are making return appearances. Sally Cooper’s version of C. S. Lewis’s
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, after triumphant success in Leeds, is this year’s seasonal offering at the Bridge Theatre in London: the whole point of the story, of course, is that the lion Aslan gives his life to save one of the children.
I’m also delighted to see that Mike Bartlett’s Snowflake is coming to London’s Kiln Theatre.
This is a deeply moving story in which the reunion of an estranged father and daughter echoes the need for a reconciliation of opposing forces in fractious times.
All this suggests that theatre at Christmas not only affords escapist pleasure and repairs theatrical fortunes, it also, in its growing diversity, does something far more significant. It offers, for however brief a period, a vision of the hope and harmony that we desperately crave in both our private lives and in the world at large.
Pantomime, a peculiarly British institution, is no longer the only game in town