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Cinderella
A Pantomime
14th December 2015 to 2nd January 2016 (no performance Christmas Day or New Years Day)
Pantomime (informally panto) is a type of musical comedy stage production, designed for family entertainment. It was developed in England and is still performed there, generally during the Christmas and New Year season and, to a lesser extent, in other English-speaking countries. Modern pantomime includes songs, slapstick comedy and dancing, employs gender-crossing actors, and combines topical humour with a story loosely based on a well-known fairy tale. It is a participatory form of theatre, in which the audience is expected to sing along with certain parts of the music and shout out phrases to the performers.
Pantomime has a long theatrical history in Western culture dating back to classical theatre, and it developed partly from the 16th century commedia dell'arte tradition of Italy, as well as other European and British stage traditions, such as 17th-century masques. An important part of the pantomime, until the late 19th century, was the harlequinade.
Traditionally performed at Christmas, with family audiences, British pantomime continues as a popular form of theatre, incorporating song, dance, buffoonery, slapstick, cross-dressing, in-jokes, topical references, audience participation, and mild sexual innuendo.
Pantomime story lines and scripts usually make no direct reference to Christmas, and are almost always based on traditional children's stories, particularly the fairy tales of Charles Perrault, Joseph Jacobs, Hans Christian Andersen and the Grimm Brothers. Classic pantomime stories include Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Aladdin, Sleeping Beauty, Mother Goose, Dick Whittington and His Cat, Beauty and the Beast and Robinson Crusoe. 20th-century additions include Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Peter Pan and The Wizard of Oz.
The form has a number of conventions, some of which have changed or weakened a little over the years, and by no means all of which are obligatory. Some of these conventions were once common to other genres of popular theatre such as melodrama. The Shanachie's version includes:
- An older woman (the pantomime dame " in this case, the Ugly Sisters) is usually played by a man in drag.
- Risqu" double entendre, often wringing innuendo out of perfectly innocent phrases. This is, in theory, over the heads of the children in the audience and is for the entertainment of the adults.
- Audience participation, including calls of "He's behind you!", and "Oh, yes it is!" and "Oh, no it isn't!" The audience is always encouraged to hiss the villain and "awwwww" the poor victims, such as the rejected Buttons, who is enamored of Cinderella.
- A slapstick comedy routine may be performed, often a decorating or baking scene, with humour based on throwing messy substances. Until the 20th century, British pantomimes often concluded with a harlequinade, a free-standing entertainment of slapstick. Nowadays the slapstick is more or less incorporated into the main body of the show.
- In the 19th century, until the 1880s, pantomimes typically included a transformation scene in which a Fairy Queen magically transformed the pantomime characters into the characters of the harlequinade, who then performed the harlequinade. This has been incorporated into Cinderella during the scene where the Good Fairy is preparing Cinderella for the ball.
