I went to our local Panto tonight. For the non-UK reader, panto is short for pantomime and it is theatre show for kids that also has risqué jokes for adults. It generally follows a fairy story, like Cinderella or Snow White, but can have British historical characters, like Robin Hood or Dick Whittington. All roles are stereotypical (the hero, the heroine, the dame, the baddie, etc.) and played for laughs.
Panto matters because for many people it is the only theatre they see every year, for many children it is the first theatre they see and for many theatres it is the cash cow that supports the rest of the season. I have helped run a few amateur drama groups and it was two weeks of panto that subsidised the other three main productions each year.
Panto is the most direct version of theatre as product and it is product managed to be efficient and effective.
There is however, a relationship between that product and the audience that needs care. Tonight’s panto broke that a bit.
Front of Tabs work
I mostly worked in theatre as lighting engineer and it the technical structure of a play that I mostly see.
Front of Tabs means that the curtains are closed and the actors are at the front of the stage nearest the audience.
Front of Tabs work generally comes up more often in panto because it is used to cover up the time spent changing the main stage set. Panto, as a product, is about big sets and garish costumes. Audiences want to feel they have seen the money they paid for tickets on stage. The need for big sets to be assembled and disassembled creates one of the main drags on panto production timing.
Front of Tabs routines include sing-a-longs, comedy songs and inviting audience members on stage. Entertainments that cover up the noise and time of set changes.
All pantos finish with a Walk Down. The actors in particularly showy outfits walking from back of stage to front of stage to take a bow and then, as an ensemble, sing a show-stopping song.
This means that the Front of Tabs work just prior to that final scene is necessarily long. Big set and many costumes means more time.
But not tonight.
Efficient set design
Tonight’s pant was Robin Hood and was mostly all set in the woods outside the castle or the castle grounds. As such there were no interiors and thus no set changes.
This is clearly good product management. The main pain of panto timing management eliminated.
There was no big final set. Just a few steps and the rest of stage as in previous acts.
What is lost in efficiency
That efficiency broke something though.
The final Front of Tabs work can be quite extended audience participation in a sing-a-long that is repeated many times (depending on cues from stage management about how set shifting is going). The repetitions can be competitive: young versus old, men versus women and left hand side of theatre versus right hand side. All for fun, all connecting actors on stage with audience around the theatre.
Tonight’s panto had just one sing-a-long. All they needed was for the actors to change and the steps to be positioned.
Technically, I appreciate the efficiency. I have spent many performances asking stage managers when they are ready.
As an audience member, I feel we lost something important.
Theatre is not cinema. The audience and the performers are directly in the presence of each other, in the time and place. The actors and the audience lend and borrow energy and emotion from each other through the time they share together.
What the efficient product management of panto did was to carve away the importance of the audience and to remove a communal sense of being humans together making an entertainment mutually.
Front of Tabs work was always a way of dealing with a physical production management problem but, over the centuries, it was also the most explicit time when the audience had a voice and a sense of mattering.
The panto today was efficient and I don’t know if the producers know what they lost.