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All Hail - The New King of
Family Entertainment
By Isabel Bass
I first saw Kevin Wood on stage at the New Wimbledon Theatre in London, during a wildly popular holiday production of Cinderella.
He was suddenly called upon to replace Ronn Lucas, the Los Angeles- based ventriloquist the New York Times calls the “world’s best.” Lucas just totally lost his voice, so neither he nor his famous puppet
sidekicks Scorch the Teenaged Dragon and Buffalo Billy could grace the show that day, and the eager sell-out audience of some 2,000 kids and families was not best pleased.
The curtain stayed down, and the minutes dragged on. In the pit, the band slashed songs and threw scores on the ground, for Cinderella is a musical as well as a vaudeville improvisational comedy of the classic fairy tale. The sound engineers rushed to change cues. You could sense the dancers jiggling up and down in the wings, and the actors breathing deep, trying to hold on.
All of a sudden, Wood appeared on stage and strolled right to the centre.
He was wearing a commedia del arte sort of outfit, with a script in his hand. He’d just arrived from Stoke on Trent, hundreds of miles north, and looked a little flushed. The kettle drums rolled, the piano and horns cranked up, the lights went down, and he began.
“Hiya boys and girls,” he beamed.
“Good to be here. Now I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I haven’t been on stage for 35 years. I’m the producer of this show. But we’d never let you down. The show must go on.”
And indeed it did.
Whoops, cries and shouts! Girls shrieked when the dazzling white-jacketed gold epauletted Prince Charming (pop star Gareth Gates) arrived. Children screeched warnings to Cinderella (TV star Joanna Page) as her ugly sisters lured her to the lock-up cellar. Little ones waved their feet in the air until forcibly restrained. The Ugly Sisters insisted a car wheel hadn’t fallen off: everybody chorused “Oh yes it did.” We all booed “Oh no you don’t,” when the Ugly Sisters boomed “Don’t we look lovely?” And we laughed and laughed when a cookie, said to taste of plastic, was found to be made of ground up credit cards, a “credit cookie crunch.”
This was a lavish show, full of colour, awful jokes, feel-good atmosphere and simple fun that left the audience with broad smiles and little
thought of the fearsome economic climate outside. There was a line of dancing tots, two white Shetland ponies that take Cinderella and her coach to the ball, and dancers who variously transmuted into
aristocrats and workers. The Ugly Sisters, stock characters as familiar as Santa Claus to people who’ve grown up with these shows, wore outrageous outfits, garish makeup, foot-high wigs, and were played
by male actors, a centuries-old theatrical convention that dates back to pre-Christian European festivals and to Elizabethan Twelfth Night times, when it was customary for the natural order of things to
be reversed.
The joyous production is par for the course, when it comes to those Kevin Wood oversees. The amiable producer, now in his mid 50s,
is regarded today as Britain’s most influential force in pantomime theatre – and Cinderella is pure panto.
To an American, pantomime means Marcel Marceau or the shows you see at mime festivals – wordless, whimsical performances with
an undertow of melancholia. UK pantomimes are nothing like this. They have stock stories, recognisable characters, visual and verbal jokes, They covet exaggeratedly boisterous boos and
hisses, laughter and horrified screams. They must be the only tradition in Britain that invites people here to let their hair down and get over being uptight.
Pantomime’s a very old form of theatre, dating back to the ancient Romans and Greeks according to Wood, who may write and lecture about it one
day.
No ancient pantomime texts exist, but they’re a hodgepodge of vaudeville, musical comedy and commedia del arte, the theatre of old which saw actors improvising and telling stories, which told lessons to the crowd, and changing the main character depending on where they were performing, and with the same fixed characters – lovers, father, servants – which we find in today's pantomimes.
Wood says that panto first arrived in England as “entre-actes” between opera pieces, became distinct standalone shows, sort of operas for the
masses, and took off in the 1800s. Now, they’re a traditional staple of the UK winter festive season – like
Christmas lunch turkey with brussel sprouts, bread sauce, Christmas pudding and brandy butter.
You really can’t miss them from late November to mid January, and that’s a good thing enthuses actor Simon Callow,
(Four Weddings and a Funeral), and respected Royal Shakespeare Company denizen, who just played a tremendous Captain Hook in a Wood production of Peter Pan. “Pantos are the first introduction to
theatre for most UK children and one of the few occasions which bring together every generation, class and culture,” he says.
But 10 years ago, pantomime was in the doldrums.
Production “values” were cheap and cheerful end-of- the-pier entertainment ones, and productions were casting well-known sports figures – boxer Frank Bruno and cricketer Ian Botham – or TV soap stars, to bring in the punters. “It had lost touch with its roots, and once you get to that stage, you’ve lost touch with the true tradition of pantomime,” says Callow.
Under Wood’s stewardship, pantomime is now revived and raring to go.
First Family Entertainment, the company he formed in early 2005, a partnership between two large theatre owners and producers, is going from strength to strength. In the last year, it put 12 big shows on across the UK – Cinderellas, Peter Pans, Aladdins, a Wizard of Oz, and a Snow White. Audiences have grown, reviews are admirable, and artists of high calibre now appear, including Simon Callow, Susan Hampshire, and Nigel Havers. US artists now also appear in this great British tradition: Henry Winkler, Patrick Duffy, Mickey Rooney, and Paul Michael Glaser have all made their pantomime debuts for First Family Entertainment.
Wood ‘s criteria are high for his casts and musicians. In his pantos, there’s no fourth wall, you play out to the audience. You sail close
to the wind,
like at a soccer or football match, or at a bullfight. On a good night, actors repartee with the musicians and the audience so smoothly and swiftly that you don’t know where the script stops and the ad lib begins. He likes actors to have some Shakespeare training under their belt so they can cope with all this. They have to be good dancers and impeachable singers, with a quick wit, easy eloquence, and graceful style. Musicians need to have a wide-ranging repertoire, from Bach through Nina Simone to Bruce Springsteen and Elbow.
The funny thing is that Wood’s parents never took him to a panto, and he was from a theatre family. Maybe that’s why. He started as a
lowly stagehand with playwright Alan Ayckbourn (Norman Conquests) in Scarborough, and went on to direct and produce plays and musicals, earning his keep with on odd manual jobs here and there.
He moved from straight theatre into pantomime, as he tells it, because of a Harold Pinter play. “I was putting on Pinter’s Birthday Party in Stevenage, back of London, and a stage hand complimented us on our production while commiserating about our small audience. He marveled that the panto show before us played to packed houses, and he suggested I bring my theatre skills to this popular type of theatre.”
Wood went to the Arts Council and the board of his subsidised company, but his idea was vetoed. Too low rent , too downmarket, too
populist. That nailed his resolve. He formed Kevin Wood Productions, rented a video of Disney’s Snow White, and the rest is history.
“I love panto because it makes me laugh, and makes me cry.
It’s theatre of the people. It’s aimed at the whole family, and it works on so many different levels. For kids, there’s one journey. For adults, there are risque jokes, double entendres and ribald humour. Some take it as a musical with a different focus depending on who’s cast as the Ugly Sisters, the narrator or the Fairy Godmother. Some see it as a morality tale wrapped up in droll scenes, and Charlie Chaplin Laurel and Hardy humor, and others enjoy it as a good night out.”
Wood’s plan is to develop his UK empire to encompass 22 panto shows each Christmas holiday season across the UK. He also has his eye on the
USA, and you may wonder why. Panto’s never taken root in the US, and our
winter festive season is already crammed with Disney-paraphernalia, the dreaded “Amal and the Night Watchman,” “Nutcracker,” and other worthwhile works that children with bow ties and glasses get taken to.
But challenge is like a
red rag to a bull. Wood is determined to bring panto’s good-humoured fun to US audiences, and whether he pelts his US audiences with British candies, invites us to chorus “Oh no, you don’t,” as an evil Captain Hook tries to wipe Peter Pan off the face of the earth, or enthralls us with the first kiss between a sweetheart Cinderella and her Prince, he’s out to provide a feel-good atmosphere that cuts through today’s recession/Depression gloom. Who knows, maybe we’ll see Dolly Parton as Fairy Godmother or even Cinderella – now there’s real panto.
I hope he goes for it. His pantos are a journey back to the excitement of theatre . The US is in for a lot of fun.
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