This December, Mercury Players Theatre in Madison, Wisconsin, will produce its seventh annual holiday panto at the Bartell Theater. A “panto” or “British pantomime” is a traditional form of family-friendly year-end holiday entertainment, and scores of amateur pantos are put on every year throughout England, often by amateur groups like social clubs that are not otherwise theatrical.
Mercury’s 2022 show will be The Panto-lorian, an original full-length work by local playwright Nick Schweitzer and producer/director Steve Noll. Previous shows have been Gadzooks, Cinderella! (2015), The Wizard of Oz (2016), Harry Potter and the Pet Rock (2017), Star Wars: The Panto Strikes Back (2018). Alice in Pantoland (2019), and Snow White and the Seven Superheroes (2021).
Even to many theatre professionals, the holiday panto is a foreign concept, specifically a British one, where it has been a tradition for some 400 years. The origin of the British panto seems to be lost in the mists of time. Most scholarship traces pantomimes back to the 1800s, and then to Harlequinades before that in the 1700s. It is interesting to note, however, that Shakespeare, who mentions Christmas only three times in all of his works*, uses two of those references to demean what he obviously considers lowly holiday entertainments. In The Taming of the Shrew, he refers to “a Christmas gambold” and in Love’s Labors Lost, he talks of “a Christmas comedy, some carry-tale, some please-man, some slight zany…”.**
Most everyone would agree that pantos are a “lower” form of theatre art, but they are popular. In fact, David Garrick, the famous eighteenth-century actor-manager-playwright, apologized in 1750 for descending to pantomime with the following words:
But if an empty house, the actor’s curse,
Shews us our Lears and Hamlets lose their force,
Unwilling we must change the nobler scene,
And, in our turn, present you Harlequin ...
If want comes on, importance must retreat;
Our first great ruling passion -- is to eat.
The panto for which this apology was made, Queen Mab, continued in the company’s repertoire for twenty-five years. Incidentally, the plot of Mercury’s first panto, Gadzooks, Cinderella!, involved a Shakespearean troupe reduced to performing a children’s story, and a recurring exchange in the panto was a familiar line followed by “This ain’t Shakespeare!”
Pantos are intended to be an alternative – almost an antidote – to serious traditional holiday shows like A Christmas Carol or The Nutcracker or The Little Match Girl. The basic plot of a panto is always simple, often a fairy tale like Cinderella or Little Red Riding Hood to entertain the children, while other more subtle parts – though nothing in a panto is subtle -- are designed to entertain the adults.
Among the central time-honored panto elements are gender reversals and cross-dressing, starting with the essential roles of (1) the “Dame” played by a male and (2) the “Principal Boy” played by a female. Kid-friendly elements include (3) interaction with the audience, (4) familiar singalong songs, (5) animals (“skin” roles), (6) supernatural characters such as fairies, and (7) standard comedy routines -- often unsophisticated or even slapstick humor such as objects falling on actors – that are repeated year after year even when irrelevant to the plot. Additional entertainment elements for adults include (8) musical parodies, (9) topical humor, and (10) cultural references both political and local that are over the head of the younger audience members. In Britain, the shows are often written ad hoc based on the resources available to the particular group, hence quality varies greatly.
Another aspect of pantos, at least the ones produced by Mercury, is the creative freedom given to directors and cast. Starting from a written script, the director and actors turn what is often a fairly conventional play into a rollicking entertainment, the goal being to create laughter for all ages. These annual year-end holiday shows have become audience favorites, with some of the largest houses of the entire year for the company and many returning patrons, especially families with school-age kids.
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*Love’s Labor’s Lost, Act I, Scene 1, line 105; Love’s Labor’s Lost, Act V, Scene 2, line 463; and The Taming of the Shrew, Induction, Scene 2, line 138
**The Taming of the Shrew:
Messenger:
Your honor’s players, heating your amendment,
Are come to play a pleasant comedy;
For so your doctors hold it very meet,
Seeing too much sadness hath congeal’d your blood,
And melancholy is the nurse of frenzy:
Therefore they thought it good you hear a play,
And frame your mind to mirth and merriment,
Which bars a thousand harms and lengthens life.
Sly:
Marry, I will, let them play it. Is not a
comonty [comedy] a Christmas gambold or a tumbling-trick?
Page:
No, my good lord; it is more pleasing stuff.
Sly:
What, household stuff?
Page:
It is a kind of history.
Love’s Labors Lost, Act V, Scene II
Biron:
... To dash it like a Christmas comedy;
Some carry-tale, some please-man, some slight zany,
Some mumble-news, some trencher-knight, some Dick,
That smiles his cheek in years, and knows the trick
To make my lady laugh when she’s disposed, ....
