Panto: The Beloved British Holiday Tradition Full of Merriment, Music, and Mayhem

LONDON – Here’s a recipe as essential to many Christmas in Britain as turkey, tinsel and mince pies.

Mix a fairy-tale plot with topical references, slapstick, song, dance and double entendres. Drench in sequins and spangles, mix vigorously, add some noisy audience participation, and you have a panto.

Pantos — short for pantomimes — are stage musicals that play at theaters big and small across the U.K. each winter. Formulaic but anarchic, family-friendly but a little risque, they are a holiday tradition that give many children their first exposure to live theater — and adults a chance to cut loose.

Anyone who thinks Britons are buttoned up hasn’t been to a panto. Audiences happily shed their inhibitions – cheering, singing, hissing the villain, shouting “He’s behind you!” to warn the hero.

“It’s singing, dancing, laughing — taking the family out and being able to be out with their kids and letting the kids run riot,” said Clive Rowe, who directed and stars in “Dick Whittington and his Cat” at the Hackney Empire — his 17th annual panto for the storied east London theater.

Pantomime has deep roots, stretching back to the stock characters and bawdy humor of the 16th-century Italian commedia dell’arte and the French harlequinade, as well as the English music hall. By the late 19th century, the elements had gelled into a form still recognizable today.

The plots are drawn from well-known fairy tales and children’s stories such as “Aladdin,” “Snow White” and “Cinderella.” Characters include a plucky hero, or “principal boy,” often played by a woman, an outrageous villain, and a “dame,” a sharp-tongued matron who is always played by a man in fabulously flamboyant drag.

“The pantomime dame is the beating heart of the show,” said Simon Sladen, curator of theater and performance at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. “She is that engine that drives it. Firstly with pace and anarchy, but also a little bit of sauce on the side.”

An estimated 3 million people in Britain attend a pantomime each year, in venues ranging from small regional theaters to London West End playhouses. Many theaters rely on them for a big chunk of their annual income.

When London’s theaters were closed for months by pandemic lockdowns in 2020, panto dames led a protest march through the city to stress their importance to the creative economy.

They provide seasonal work to faded pop stars, television entertainers, the occasional Hollywood celebrity — Pamela Anderson took Liverpool by storm when she starred in “Aladdin” in 2010, singing “Santa Baby” while suspended on a swing above the stage, dressed in costumes by Vivienne Westwood.

They are also vital experience for many young actors, including the A-listers of tomorrow.

Jude Law told The Associated Press recently that he’d played Humpty Dumpty, recalling his performance as “loud and round.” At 17, Michael Fassbender played one of Cinderella’s Ugly Sisters, and a tree.

“Wicked” star Jonathan Bailey starred alongside a young Nicholas Hoult in a production of “Peter Pan.” Hoult also appeared in “Mother Goose” as a child, and says he would happily do another, as they’re “really fun.”

Asked to sum up the art form, Bailey called it a “quintessentially British bloody good time for all the family.”

Today’s pantos often strive to reflect diversity, both onstage and in the audience. Rowe, whose Hackney Empire pantos draw many of their cast and crew from Britain’s Black communities, said that at its core the genre is “about acceptance.”

“It’s about understanding, it’s about the idea that being different isn’t necessarily a bad thing,” he said. “It should be brought in and kind of celebrated and that no matter where you are in society, from the youngest to the oldest, we all have a place and we should embrace that.”

Drag performer Ginger Johnson, starring in an adult “all-drag panto” version of “Peter Pan” at London’s Phoenix Theatre, said that panto’s ability to change is “why it’s managed to survive for so long as a cultural form.”

“I think for a lot of kids, panto is the first time that they come in contact with drag as well,” Johnson said.

Stage historian Sladen said that some are leaning into the drag element of panto, with “a bigger, wider explosion of roles than just the dame and the principal boy being cross-dressed.”

“We might see the fairy godmother played by a dame or played by a drag artist. We might see a wicked stepmother, also played by a very well-known drag performer. So (it’s) constantly evolving, constantly changing with the times.”

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Jill Lawless contributed to this report.