I saw my seventh (and last) panto of the season last night, and though it’s not a necessarily a representative sampling, there are some trends that even this limited exposure reveals. First, of course, as the media has widely picked up on elsewhere, there’s the Ian McKellen effect: the fact that, encouraged by his appearance at the Old Vic, panto is no longer the preserve of the C and D list “celebrities” – and Christopher Biggins, of course, always in a class of his own – but that the star of panto has risen and therefore so have (some of) the stars. But those sightings of actors you rarely see in a theatre outside of panto time has always been part of the enduring appeal of it. It’s not quite the same as seeing Simon Callow, say, who we see all the time in the theatre, but in a different guise.
And secondly, there was the birth this year of a new panto producing house, First Family Entertainment, born of collaboration between what was Clear Channel and Ambassador Theatre Group. Three of my seven pantos were First Family productions, not by design but because they were geographically the suburban pantos most easily within my reach, at Richmond, Wimbledon and Bromley.
Given that pantos are what a producer once referred to me as a “bank raid” – a cash cow that drives the rest of the year’s regional theatre programming – it’s no surprise that ATG/CCE have decided to take them ‘in house’ and retain not just creative control but entire financial reward (against a little risk), too. There may be a higher capital investment upfront required than booking a panto from one of the existing producers, but ATG and the company-formerly-known-as-Clear Channel both don’t merely run theatres but are also active producers of the product that goes into them already, whether in the West End or regionally, so it makes sense that they have expanded their interests here.
And though my sampling may not in any way be definitive, each have been very handsomely produced; I did, however, spy a certain homogeneity between the two separate Cinderellas I saw, which may have had different writers credited to each, but seemed to oddly share some of the identical jokes and topical references.
But while these family entertainments deliver the panto goods – in a way that the rather-too-adult Aladdin at the Old Vic signally does not – my two favourite pantos remain the ones at Hackney Empire and Stratford East, as much for the audiences and the venues as for the shows themselves. That’s because both attract a local audience of all colours and creeds to share the communal joy, not just of Christmas, but of theatre itself, and both theatres are simply enchanting: they provide the best kind of introduction to the theatre possible to anyone who has never been before.
