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From Neverpedia

The Christmas Pantomime colour lithograph bookcover, 1890, showing the harlequinade characters

Pantomime is a kind of theatrical musical-comedy production, popular in the United Kingdom and some countries with 19th-century connections to British culture. Panto – as it is popularly called – is usually performed during the Christmas and New Year season. Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up is not strictly a pantomime play, but it has many features in common (especially the tradition of a woman playing the part of the lead boy character), and it's commonly performed in the UK with the full panto treatment, so people sometimes think of it as a panto (much like how many Americans think of Peter Pan as a musical).

(Note: Pantomime should not be confused with mime, which is a very different kind of performance.)

History

The style and content of modern pantomime have very clear and strong links with the Commedia dell'arte, a form of popular theatre that arose in Italy and reached England by the 16th century. A troupe of traveling performers would improvise and tell stories, often changing the main character depending on where they were performing. Each story had common fixed characters: the lovers, the father, servants (one being crafty and the other stupid), etc. These roles/characters can be found in many of today's pantomimes.

Gender-role reversal (women playing male characters and vice versa) is standard in pantomime, and resembles the old Christmas-season festival of Twelfth Night, a combination of Epiphany and midwinter feast, when it was customary for the natural order of things to be reversed.

The pantomime first arrived in England as performances between opera pieces, eventually evolving into separate shows. In 1717, actor and manager John Rich introduced Harlequin to the British stage under the name of "Lun" (for lunatic) and began performing wildly popular pantomimes. These pantomimes gradually became more topical and comic, often involving as many special theatrical effects as possible.

Many theatres in cities and provincial towns throughout the United Kingdom continue to have an annual professional pantomime. Pantomime is also very popular with amateur dramatics societies throughout the UK, and the pantomime season (roughly speaking, December to February) will see pantomime productions in many village halls and similar venues across the country.

Modern characteristics

Traditionally performed at Christmas with family audiences, British pantomime is now a popular form of theatre, incorporating song, dance, buffoonery, slapstick, cross-dressing, in-jokes, audience participation, and mild sexual innuendo. There are a number of traditional storylines, and there is also a fairly well-defined set of performance conventions.

Panto storylines and scripts typically make no reference to Christmas, and are almost always based on traditional children's stories, including several written or popularized by the French pioneer of the fairy tale genre, Charles Perrault (Cinderella is a panto standard), as well as others based on the English tales collected by Joseph Jacobs. Plot lines are often "adapted"' for comic or satirical effect, and certain familiar scenes tend to recur, regardless of plot relevance. Straight re-tellings of the original stories are rare in the extreme.

Another contemporary pantomime tradition is the celebrity guest star, a practice that dates back to the late 19th century, when Augustus Harris, proprietor of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, hired well-known variety artists for his pantomimes. Until the decline of the British music hall tradition by the late 1950s, many popular artists played in pantomimes across the country. Many modern pantomimes use popular performers from soap operas, other television shows, movies, and professional athletes to promote the pantomime, and the play is often adapted to allow the star to showcase their well-known act, even when such a spot has little relation to the plot. Thus a panto production of Peter Pan might give star or co-star billing to an actor playing a relatively minor role in the original story, such as Smee or Mrs. Darling.

Performance conventions

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 them can be found in traditional "straight" productions of Peter Pan.

• A leading male juvenile character (the "principal boy") - is traditionally played by a young woman, and usually in tight-fitting male garments such as breeches that make her female attributes evident. (This is the most obvious point in common. However, while it's usually obvious that Peter is played by a woman, her femininity is downplayed.)
• An older woman (the "dame" - often the hero's mother) is usually played by a man in drag. (Peter Pan has no dame.)
• Risqué double entendre, often wringing innuendo out of perfectly innocent phrases. This is, in theory, over the heads of the children in the audience. (Barrie's script does not include any.)
• Audience participation, including calls of "Look behind you!" and "Oh, yes it is!" or "Oh, no it isn't!" The audience is always encouraged to boo the villain and "awwwww" the poor victims. (The audience is encouraged to clap to restore Tinker Bell's health.)
• A song combining a well-known tune with re-written lyrics. The audience is encouraged to sing the song; often one half of the audience is challenged to sing "their" chorus louder than the other half. (The standard Peter Pan stageplay has only snippets of singing.)
• An animal, played by an actor in animal costume. It is often a horse or cow, played by two actors in a single costume, one as the head and front legs, the other as the body and back legs. (Nana and the Crocodile are both played by individual actors in costume.)
• A good fairy always enters from stage right and an evil villain enters from stage left. In the medieval mystery plays the right side of the stage symbolised Heaven and the left side symbolised Hell. (Not specified by Barrie.)
• Sometimes the villain will squirt members of the audience with water guns or pretend to throw a bucket of "water" at the audience that is actually full of streamers. (Not in Barrie's script.)
• 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 free-standing "harlequinade" slapstick performance. Nowadays the slapstick is more or less incorporated into the main body of the show. (Not in Barrie's script.)
• A Chorus, who can be considered extras on-stage, and often appear in multiple scenes (but as different characters) and who perform a variety of songs and dances throughout the show. Due to their multiple roles they may have as much stage-time as the lead characters themselves. (Peter Pan has no chorus.)

• Wikipedia: Pantomime