Piccolo Theatre and the Art of the Panto

BY Becky Brett

“Get out there and rock!” sings the chorus to Sinbad, the title character in Piccolo Theatre’s new panto. Not the kind of music one would expect from a 300 year-old theatrical art form. However the English pantomimes, or panto, are a bit more…um…flexible, when it comes to updating.

A combination of commedia dell’arte and British music hall, vaudeville and slapstick, the panto is right up the alley of Evanston’s Piccolo Theatre, which specializes in broad, commedia-style physical performance. But unlike commedia, with its strict rules on how to give and take focus or portray a character, panto is designed to break the rules, giving actors, directors and designers immense freedom—and with it, immense challenges.

“You don’t take a class in how to make giant shoes….or a class in how to make invisible pockets here and there that random things that shouldn’t fit in them can,” said Joshua Allard, costume designer for Sinbad!. Allard has designed several of Piccolo’s pantos, and has only lately come to embrace the creative freedom of the form.

“I hated it to begin with,” Allard said. “But as I worked on the panto I started to get affection for the amount of creativity with no precedent.

“Especially with Sinbad! I’ve been able to get past the idea that it’s got to be reminiscent of the Victorian era. Before I’d tried to imagine what would be a nice update on a Victorian silhouette but would still be funny. It so happens that with this production, one of our company member’s wives is an impulse buyer when she goes to England.”

She came back with loads of saris, which fit the show, but as designers know, it is a big challenge (or pain in the butt) to match “real” items such as these with whatever costumes you may have in storage or the budget to build. “It’s a frugal process,” laughed Allard. “But the nice thing about the challenge is there aren’t rules. You can mix red and purple together and it will look in place. If it were to be more structured it would lose the impulsiveness.”

That impulsiveness is part of the acting process, too, and it affects the audience as well.

Deborah Craft-Proud, who plays Sinbad, described the process as “getting to let loose; not necessarily improv but getting to make things up on the spot. The bits in the script are the main storyline, but we can go off on a lazzi [tangent] and then come back to it.”

Character development on such a grand scale might seem an outsized order for the tiny Piccolo Theatre. Proud described it as taking it “as far as you can take anything. The character is as bold and as wild as you can possibly fathom it to be. If you feel like you’re going really far you’re probably not going far enough.”

And, yes, you did read that correctly: Craft-Proud is playing Sinbad. According to director John Szostek, in traditional panto casting, the principal boy part is played by “a very attractive woman usually in fishnet stockings and knee-high boots. There is no attempt to disguise gender and in fact it is accentuated.” He is quick to point out that there are also strict rules about how the character is to comport him/herself, “so there is nothing licentious about the portrayal.”

The other gender turn is found in the old woman character, which is played by a man. In contrast to the principal boy, this character is given a lot of license. “She speaks directly to the audience and can say a lot of rude things,” explained Szostek.

In this show, the old woman is played by Craft-Proud’s husband, Glen Proud, who points out that freedom doesn’t necessarily mean chaos and murky storytelling.

“It’s a free form but within the form you have to hit your marks specifically,” said Proud. “Just like any broad comedy, you can’t let the joke linger too long or you can’t muddy it up by going through something too fast and going on to the next thing, so it’s got to be very big, but it’s got to be very specific.”

“With a panto you’re drawing such an immense crazy story for so long that you have to keep the storytelling thorough and specific otherwise the audience gets lost by so much visual and so much color that it becomes, ‘Ooo! bright shiny object, bright shiny object!’”

Specifically for the creation of this particular Dame character, Proud studied the Monty Python men playing women. “It’s a cross between a bouncy ball and the Nutty Professor that Eddie Murphy played,” he said.

He had played the Dame several years ago, but she was different. “She was more of a country bumpkin who wanted to be proper, trying to be high-fallutin’. This character is much more crass and in your face and abrasive.”

His inspiration for Sinbad’s Dame? The Spam sketch from Monty Python. “It was really hard for the first week because I’d go back to the previous character and I’d just have to be like [screeches], ‘I don’t like SPAM!’”

The popularity of the English pantomime came about from the time when King Charles II had imposed a ban on spoken drama. Toward the end of the Victorian era, when pantos rose in popularity, only two theatres had Royal Patents for spoken drama. The panto incorporated elaborate costumes and sets, music and intricate chase scenes. Piccolo has taken the elements that they like best from the centuries-old tradition and made the form their own.

The plot of a panto is always a well-known fairy tale or folk tale, with a “good fairy” and a “bad fairy.” The boy is aided by the good fairy and thwarted by the evil fairy, and there is often a wizard or a demonic character behind the bad fairy.

A comic pair (which is not gender-specific) helps the principal boy, and they are generally cast as the wise guy and the dupe. Laurel and Hardy are good examples of a panto comic pair. However, Szostek noted that in modern England panto producers have started taking a “Vegas approach” to casting and bringing in famous comedians to play the comic pairs.

“Some of those comedians will go past the bounds of decorum for a young audience. A skilled panto comedian will know how to phrase a double and triple entendre so as not to leave out the young audience,” noted Szostek.

A good panto has layers of humor for every generation. “There’s a layer that’s appropriate for very young audiences. There’s a layer that’s appropriate for older children and early teens. Then there’s the layer for teens and adults. And then there’s an extra thing that pantos have for grandparents.”

“It’s common to see all the generations coming to pantos today,” said Szostek. This is really family theatre—something for everyone—rather than theatre specific to children.

Audience interaction is key in panto. “We do a little training here because most American audiences have a sense of the American melodrama where you cheer the hero and hiss the villain, but this is more involved,” explained Szostek.

He added that even though actors have fun with the opportunity to be behind a very big character role, “it has to be tempered by the audience’s enjoyment. It can’t be an inside joke for the other actors on stage.” However, if the audience does something that catches an actor’s attention, Szostek noted, “You want to jump on it.”

One important element of traditional panto is a magical transformation. Szostek said, “We took that early element of magical transformation and turned it into a magic scene. In Sinbad! the genies have a confrontation and they are actually on flying carpets.” (You’ll have to see the show to know how it’s done—I won’t spill.)

Another classic element is the “splash” scene—an intricate comic scene that involves anything that is wet or messy. Wallpapering, fixing plumbing, baking a cake, doing laundry—anything that involves soap, paint, paste, food, flour is fair game. You would recognize these scenes as the elaborate comic scenes in silent movies with Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy and Buster Keaton.

Set designer Anders Jacobson is designing his first panto. “It was an opportunity to do something fun and not be caught up in the drama and the acting. You read the script and it’s like, ‘this is silly’ and then you see it acted out with all of the slapstick and the vaudeville. It’s that challenge of making things be understandably absurd.”

For that period, but fun, feel Anders has recreated a false proscenium in the Piccolo space that is a full-scale version of a Victorian-era toy theatre (see www.piccolotheatre.com for an example of a toy theatre). It takes up a lot of room, but easily sets the audience up for what is to come.

And speaking of taking up space, Pantos tend to have huge casts. Sinbad! has a cast of about a dozen people. In England they are done by whole towns. Sinbad! was actually one of the smaller-cast pantos Piccolo looked at, and even with only 11 or 12 people in the cast, once you throw two of them in fat suits, you’ve got quite a crowd. Especially since Piccolo performs out of a small space in the Metra station at Main Street in Evanston.

Craft-Proud noted that when Piccolo first started doing pantos it was at the McGaw YMCA, where the audience has some distance from the stage. However, since audience participation is requested, she said that once they get into it, they don’t seem to be bothered by all the “bright clothes and out-there-ness.”

As Szostek said, “You can go really far with it and the audience will go with you.” And everyone interviewed compared the panto to a live-action cartoon; and if the point is to look like a cartoon, you can’t really go wrong.