When is a Panto a Panto and when is it a New Musical? Director's Blog 37

Good morning All!

Ok. So when is a Panto a Panto and when is it ...........

" A new musical... woven through with the traditional delights of panto" ?

My vision for this year's Broadway Barking Panto Cinderella was driven by where I have come from as a theatre maker for over 25 years. It also reflects the sheer terror and excitement I faced when I realised that I had innocently agreed to produce and direct a pantomime for the first time in my career! It was either an act of total tomfoolery, or one of potential personal and professional transformation. Probably without their knowing it our audiences will tell me this one way or another! 

Someone very close to me yesterday asked me if this serial self-doubt is de rigeur for me in taking on new artistic projects? Joss Bennathan is also a theatre director, and his curiosity stems from the same places as mine more often than not. Mmm.... I think the answer has always been yes. Indeed this time more than ever before probably. And believe me its not an entirely comfortable place to live. You risk being labelled as naively ambitious at best and bonkers at worst! The judgment in the end is largely dependent on whether you pull it off in one way or another.

The high risk strategy of moving out of your own artistic milieu could lead to professional if not personal melt down, failure and at best sheer exhaustion and disappointment! Especially at this stage in a career. Perhaps the more judicious and grown up route would be to hang up the old "fear boots" and accept that this is probably as far as you are going to go. 

After all Arc has carved out its own special niche in theatre making for young people. All of which has been a journey of love, successes, and very occasionally spectacular failures! It remains of course a mission that will continue to ignite the creativity of the Arc team and hopefully do what it says on the tin. And its a tin that I am very proud of! So why not just accept this graciously, put the slippers on and settle down in front of the fire?  There are enough supremely talented and creative youngsters ready to take over. And of course that is as it should be, probably. 

However this, this make a panto thing I got us into, that's a whole new territory!

Ignorance and doubt make you blind sometimes to certain essential truths. Namely that you enter into hallowed ground unwittingly and with a breathtaking innocence. And so it is with this panto thing. 

You see its a form and structure that has some of the strictest rules in theatre making. There is a well tested formula evolved over years and years, and God forbid you might have the fearlessness or stupidity to take this on and think you have any right to adapt it!  

Don't get me wrong - I am a great advocate of the disciplines of form and content. You can't deviate from a Haiku until you understand the form of a Haiku, and even then probably not.

But coming as I do without the panto history or baggage both good and bad, perhaps makes me a primary contender to break open the form whilst honouring the hallowed ground on which I stand. 

This is  even more true possibly for Olly too as the writer. He is used to starting from scratch, determining his own style although driven of course by his own conscious and unconscious references. And this is where I think it gets a little bit more interesting in terms of the traditional versus contemporary bit of the debate!

For me from the get go I wanted the "New musical..... etc" piece and as far as Olly was concerned he was writing a traditional panto. He believes that is exactly what he has done. We have had endless conversations about this with Phil and Owen our Panto aficianados. However no amount of discussion leads to a simple answer!

The thing that tells me and the team I hope that we have entered new territory is the reactions from the panto experts and non-experts in the audience. 

Vivyan Ellacott is the Grand Daddy of and probably the UK's leading expert on Pantomime and author of Swansea Grand Theatre Rep Diaries 1967-1972 amongst other books about this important art form. He was Artistic Director of the Kenneth More Theatre in Ilford until 2010, where he had single-handedly and with little public funding led an organisation that has spawned musical theatre actors and directors over 35 years. 

Indeed Vivyan guided and trained our very own Assistant Director and Choreographer, Owen Smith since he popped out singing and dancing at birth!

So you can imagine the sheer terror I felt in knowing that the Grand Master was in the house on Friday for Press night. I know that it meant a great deal to Owen for Vivyan to see his work, and also probably a need for a nod in the right direction given the vision I had for the show. For me it was just fear.

Now one might expect a traditionalist such as Vivyan to be blinkered in their appreciation of new ways of doing a panto. Indeed I spent some time a couple of years ago at the Moscow Arts Theatre, home of Stanislavsky the great Russian Director, largely responsible for directing the art and practice of the actor over the past century. His work has influenced actors world wide and has spawned many acting technologies in its wake. 

But the thing about process is that it's an ever evolving thing. It never stands still. It never belongs to one person alone. Or it shouldn't. But when we try to hold on to something precious like the Moscow Arts Theatre as it was, we are in serious danger of turning it into a museum, which is what has happened sadly. Pickled as it is in aspic, the theatre is no more now than a sad and dusty exhibition to past times of vitality and invention. It is dead, dead, dead.

So with trepidation I went to find Vivyan after the show. And to my delight he said he loved it! He agreed that is it is not a traditional panto in the truest sense, but absolutely that it is a new musical... woven through etc! He laughed at the rules we have broken all over the place, in the script, in the characters, sometimes in the structure. But he said it is precisely what we should be doing in keeping the form fresh! Music (musical!) to my ears. He loved that Phil Gostelow has composed an entirely new score in collaboration with Olly as lyricist. That's a cardinal number one rule breaker. You are supposed to rehash contemporary songs with local lyrics and references. But here Vivyan was telling me that he was excited about our show! How humbling was this for a director who has so recently lost her panto virginity! Of course the secret is indeed that Olly and I are panto virgins and that Vivyan's protoge and Phil are not! And there's the rub. I think my self preservation instinct was working especially well on the day I commissioned these wonderful and ridiculously talented young men!

So at the end of the spectrum we seem to have satisfied the Maestro to some degree, although I am sure that there were bits that he felt were perhaps a step too far! 

Alongside Vivyan are the traditional panto connoisseurs - mostly in the form of the dedicated team of Broadway volunteers, one of whom, Joe I mentioned in earlier despatches. But also Ann and Pat and Box Office Queens Denise and Celia.  Ann admitted frankly to me yesterday that she really didn't like the panto on first viewing, precisely because it wasn't what she was expecting, and lacked some of the traditional elements that she loves. But with a beaming smile she told me that she now thinks its brilliant! Bless her for her honesty. I really appreciated that! 

And so to the other end of our panto spectrum - my trusted Arc team, used as they all are to the compelling and painfully dark theatre we make for young people about the distressing themes of their contemporary life challenges.

For them it seems maybe that what we have produced is "just" a panto, a light and fluffy show that makes you smile and feel happy for a couple of hours, against a backdrop of our real daily work of trying to make a difference in young people's life choices and aspirations in Barking and Dagenham. Of course both are true. The Arc team are not bothered about preserving the traditions of panto, if anything they are not really that keen on them anyway. But for them this is probably as traditional as anything Arc is ever likely to do!

So you see what we are looking at, is a small and discrete contribution to the development of a theatre tradition and form that for this moment in our history we have had the privilege to take into our hand for a short time. For this I am eternally grateful.

I am going to break with my daily tradition of one blog in a moment to write a second as the flow is with me this morning! The next will be a short review of the reviewer WestendWilma's review of the show - which I loved, well mostly. 

Till then.