One or two critics go around saying they don’t like pantomime, which is a bit like musically illiterate snobs who say they don’t like musicals.

I probably like pantomime too much ever to give one  a fair review. As November elides into the Christmas build-up (or Advent, to be Quentin Lettsian about it), my heart has already sunk like a stone at the NT’s Christmas offering, Nation, and the Lyric Hammersmith’s edgy, noisy and utterly charmless Jack and the Beanstalk.

I used to relish the Victorian burlesques at the Players Theatre under the Charing Cross arches, the glorious extravaganzas at the Palladium and above all the Scottish pantos starring Stanley Baxter or Jimmy Logan.

The Glasgow Citizens used to do a really beautiful Christmas show, so did the Oxford Playhouse and the Bradford Alhambra.

But you search high and low for a decent panto these days, and you always end up disappointed.

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The seasonal lights in Sloane Square and Covent Garden are really beautiful this year, clusters of illumination nesting in the trees by Peter Jones and, by the Opera House, a huge green deer speckled with a shower of fire flies.

It’s all gone a little too far in the foyer of the Arts Theatre, which has been done up as a Yuletide drinking grotto with garish merchandise for A Christmas Carol and even a long white scarf of fake snow laid across the front window ledge.

Which is why Michael Wynne’s surprise new comedy, The Priory, is such a welcome blast of bad cheer at the Royal Court.

Ostensibly a seasonal version of The Big Chill with nods towards Alan Ayckbourn and Peter’s Friends, The Priory is in fact a radical departure for the Court in its adoption of a conventional form to tell home truths. 

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After weighing my options of what to do in London last night, the thought of an evening with my supervisors, three fabulous entertainers and a WOS t-shirt that compliments my shape quite nicely won out. Thus began my first outing with my WOS colleagues to Christmas with the Rat Pack: Live from Las Vegas!. It was an evening filled with oldies but goodies, and a very drunk and enthusiastic group of people in Box A. Well done, you four! While I loved Louis Hoover as Frank Sinatra and Jason Pennycooke as Sammy Davis Junior, it was South African Craig Els as Dean Martin who won my heart. His versions of “Volare” and “That’s Amore” made this Italian American intern swoon like a 14-year-old. Molto bene.

I honestly had a wonderful evening and enjoyed myself immensely. It was lovely to meet the theatregoers who make WOS the incredible institution that it is, especially since everyone really seemed to be in the Yuletide spirit! The show contained many of my favourite songs such as “Fly Me to the Moon,” “King of the Road,” and “Baby, it’s Cold Outside.” Pennycooke wowed me with his amazing dance moves while Hoover pulled off an impressive New York-American accent. This is not your grandma’s night out, folks.
After the show, I had the pleasure of meeting the cast, all of whom were very gracious and extremely nice. It truly was a lovely way to cap off my evening!
I hope everyone had an absolute blast last night, and if I head back to America before my next outing, a Buon Natale to you!
- Liz Wahlman
Liz Wahlman is doing a CAPA internship with Whatsonstage.com

The reports of Ian Hart leaping off the stage during the curtain-calls of Speaking in Tongues to berate a customer in the stalls are truly bizarre and follow Hart’s confession that he doesn’t really like live inter-action with an audience.

We can take it as read, then, that he won’t be appearing in pantomime this year. Oh no, he won’t.
 
Was Hart’s outburst a cry for help? Perhaps he was looking for a doctor in the house.

He should have tried Hampstead Theatre. When Stephen Rea really was taken ill during a performance of a Mike Leigh play at Hampstead, Jim Broadbent asked if there was a doctor in the house, and twenty-eight men stood up.  
 
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There were several audience participation firsts in the weekend Barbican Theatre visit of Roman Tragedies from the Toneelgroep in Amsterdam.

You could come and go as you liked, wander onto the stage and have a glass of wine, read a newspapaper or check your e-mails.

I even enjoyed a quick word with the gorgeous satuesque blonde actress playing Octavius (Cassius was played by an equally attractive brunette) in the onstage hair salon, while I noticed Lyn Gardner of the Guardian took the weight off her feet on a comfy grey sofa during the tent scene in Julius Caesar.

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I don’t think I’ve seen a more electrifying male double act on the stage since Kevin Spacey and Jeff Goldblum in the Old Vic Speed-the-Plow than in the contest joined between Andrew Scott and Ben Whishaw in Cock in the Theatre Upstairs.

Their speed and rapport as they deal with Ben’s character’s sudden lurch into heterosexuality is truly breathtaking. And funny and touching at the same time.

Andrew’s neat and precise in speech and mopvement, Ben shaggier, though painfully pencil-thin, with his bushy mop of tangled hair.

That hair’s like a proud busby that’s been left out in the rain, and it’s on temporary loan to anyone called John: John in the Mike Bartlett play at the Court, John Keats in Jane Campion’s studiously beautiful film Bright Star.

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There once used to be plays and players. Now there are names and naming, with Alan Bennett swelling  the lists of dramatists writing fiction about real people.

But in Bennett’s case, there’s nothing all that sudden about this: his gallery of past characters includes Kafka, Proust, King George III, Guy Burgess, Coral Browne and the lady in the van in his front garden.

The joke, of course, is that his characters don’t really resemble their own characters at all. When Richard Griffiths pulls on a prosthetic face mask in The Habit of Art he’s said to look more like Marlon Brando.

And when Bennett’s biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, launches into his Douglas Byng drag act, he’s less like the real Humphrey than a wonderful idea of how Bennett would like Humphrey to have been.  

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Busy designer Tim Meacock opened two productions over the weekend: Salad Days at Riverside and The Making of Moo at the Orange Tree.

Both shows, in different ways, are 1950s classics, but there’s nothing remotely retro about Tim, who is like a modern beatnik, shabby and bright and long-haired and devoted to his wheelchair-bound partner Andrew who works for the Arts Council.

He’s turned the Riverside into a big expanse of green parkland where Varsity graduates, tramps, civil servants and policemen all cavort nuttily to the insidiously charming music of a magic piano, and he’s surrounded it (and them) with giant yellow drapes. 

It’s all a delight — I’ve loved the show ever since I choreographed my Oxford college production — but it felt a bit slow, though Tim told me at the Orange Tree (he’d just arrived from the Saturday matinee) that the pace has picked up prodigiously.
 

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Our first Opera Outing and what a first it was! With over 100 theatregoers in the bustling and beautiful London Coliseum foyer I can’t deny that I was a little apprehensive! Would they enjoy it? Would our first Opera Outing be the first of many or the last? Opera guides in hand the seasoned opera goers and the opera virgins alike took their programmes and their seats and settled in for an evening not soon forgotten, the ENO’s Turandot.

Everyone has said the same, this production got us talking. Rupert Goold’s very modern re-inventing of Puccinni’s final opera includes Elvises, Marilyn Mansons, nuns, and I believe, a few members of the Village people! Set in a Chinese resturant a writer (Rupert Goold’s own addition to this opera), having eaten some strange chicken or possibly a magical mushroom, writes or sees, you’re not sure which, the story of an ice queen who can only be won by the man who answers all her riddles correctly. We come to understand that no man has ever managed and thus beaheadings are a frequent event in this Chinese restuarant. The hero of our tale however falls for Turandot and answers all three riddle correctly. Yet she will not love him and so he sets his own task, know my name by sunrise and you will be free, otherwise love me. (more…)

Am I the first to spot Jim Haynes’s television adverts for After Eight dinner mints?

The founding father of the fringe in Britain, and the Traverse in Edinburgh, is seen mingling with his guests at one of his famous bohemian Paris soirees when, with hilarious incongruity, the little square sweets in brown paper bags are passed round.

It’s as though a royal banquet at Buckingham Palace had ended with a lucky dip of fruit lollies and mini Mars bars.

In Jim’s case, you really can say he’s doing these ads for the money.

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