International: Panto in Canada? Oh yes there is

In the early 1980s, Ross Petty was playing the Demon Barber in a North American tour of Sweeney Todd. On the tour’s final stop in Toronto, the Canadian actor experienced a defining moment of his life – he discovered panto.

The event was Aladdin, a groundbreaking introduction of the genre to Canada staged at the Royal Alexandra Theatre by British producer Paul Elliott. As Petty recalls: “That was the first time I ever saw a panto. That kind of outrageous entertainment where the kids holler and scream, and boo the villain and cheer the hero and ad libs fly fast and furious.”

The following year, 1983, Elliott brought another panto, Dick Whittington, back to Toronto and the Royal Alexandra. He cast Petty and wife Karen Kain in order to cash in on the publicity bonanza surrounding their recent high-profile marriage – the pair had met through the Toronto Aladdin where Kain had been cast as the ‘token Canadian’.

“I loved playing in Dick Whittington and the next year I said to Paul Elliott, ‘Hey, I want to be your co-producer in Canada’. He said, ‘Sure, put up $100,000 and you’ll be my co-producer’.”

By 1986, Petty was the show’s co-producer. It was a decade later when he took over producing altogether in 1996 – and continued to cast himself as the show’s villain each year. And he hasn’t stopped, producing an annual panto tailor-made to his Toronto audience, where he presents around 40 performances a season in the 1,500-seat century-old Elgin Theatre.

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5 Canadian Pantos this season

1. Hansel and Gretel: An East Van Panto Vancouver East Cultural Centre, Vancouver, British Columbia
2. Peter Pan Elgin Theatre, Toronto, Ontario
3. Aladdin: The Panto St Jacobs Country Playhouse, Waterloo, Ontario
4. Mother Goose St Luke’s Players, Victoria, British Columbia
5. Peter Pan Hudson Village Theatre, Hudson, Quebec

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While Toronto has embraced panto quickly, the rest of Canada’s major cities have been slower, although there are growing signs that Canadian theatre producers have discovered the form’s profit potential.

That wasn’t the case in 2006, when Petty – backed by concert promoter Live Nation, the producer of Broadway Across Canada – undertook a seven-city tour of Aladdin that flopped in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, Saskatoon and Ottawa, before returning to another successful run in Toronto.

Petty says the problem with the cross-Canada tour then was unfamiliarity with the form. “A lot of those towns we played had never simply seen panto before. Even though we got great reviews everywhere we played, we were only in town for a week, or a split week.

“Live Nation decided that if they couldn’t make a killing the first time out, they weren’t going to do it again. It was a little shortsighted of them, because the people who did see the show loved it, because it was so unique for them with things like audience participation. If Live Nation had invested another year, we would still be touring Canada.”

A decade later, there are signs that Petty is right. Three years ago, the Vancouver East Cultural Centre and experimental Theatre Replacement launched the (slightly indie-tinged) East Van Panto.

“The community response was just huge,” says Corbin Murdoch, managing producer of Theatre Replacement. “It has grown exponentially over the past couple of years. In 2015, we’re projecting with our production of Hansel and Gretel that 11,000 will come see the East Van Panto – which is funny, because these shows have a different aesthetic from everything else we do, but it’s kind of what we’ve become known for in the city.”

Elsewhere, it turns out that one of the most thriving panto scenes in Canada outside Toronto is not in the cities but small resort towns in Ontario, such as Cambridge and Waterloo.

“We’re having a great experience with them,” says Drayton Entertainment artistic director and producer Alex Mustakas. “We’ve been doing them now for probably 10 years.”

He programmes live theatre in seven different theatres in the area and produces an annual holiday panto at the St Jacobs Country Playhouse, a 400-seat venue in Waterloo.

In recent years, Mustakas tried transferring the production to a couple of his other theatres during the summer. “It’s had great success. This year we’re doing Aladdin during the holidays at the St Jacobs, and then we’re opening in the summer at our theatre venue, the King’s Wharf Theatre in Penetanguishene, and then it gets remounted at our Country Playhouse II venue in Grand Bend.”

The audience demographics for Mustakas’ pantos couldn’t be more different than Petty’s in Toronto or Theatre Replacement’s in Vancouver, but they hit the sweet spot nevertheless. “Grand Bend is a kind of resort town. Penetanguishene is the same, Drayton is farm country, and St Jacobs, Waterloo, is Mennonite country.”

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5 things you didn’t know about Canadian Panto

1. Pioneering panto producer Ross Petty brought in writer Jim Warren, who got rid of the sexism and racism in British pantos. When actor and composer Ted Dykstra then came aboard to write the annual panto, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs transformed into Snow White and the Group of Seven.

2. Petty features product placement in his pantos, featuring comedic ‘adverts’ starring the show’s cast that highlight sponsors such as the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and Tim Hortons cafe chain. For a 2006 national tour of Aladdin, Petty featured WWE wrestler Bret “the Hitman” Hart in the title role.

3. British producer Paul Elliott, who brought panto to Canada in 1982, produced seven pantos in Canada in the 1980s. He is also one of the producers of the stage adaptation of The Shawshank Redemption.

4. Karen Kain, the ballerina who was the ‘token Canadian’ in the first Toronto panto in 1982, is now the artistic director of the National Ballet of Canada, a position she has held since 2005.

5. Veda Hille, musical director of Hansel and Gretel: An East Van Panto, composed a new musical adaptation of the Tchaikovsky opera Onegin. It premieres at the Vancouver Arts Club on March 17, 2016.

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Apart from Petty’s Toronto production at the Elgin Theatre, most Canadian pantos are produced in venues that seat between 300 and 400 people. Ticket prices vary, depending on the region. In Toronto, prices range between $27 (£13) and $99 (£49), while Drayton Entertainment’s range from as little as $16 (£8) for student matinees up to $44 (£22) for adults.

The East Van Panto also features a range of price points, says Murdoch. “You can get tickets for as cheap as $10 (£5), and then they range all the way up to $60 (£30) for our premium seats. The Vancouver East Cultural Centre does a good job of making sure there are tickets set aside for students and seniors and youth, making sure it’s successful, and then balancing that with an astute business sensibility and dynamic pricing, just to make sure we meet the budget.

“It is a huge show to produce. We have 35 performers – so it’s all about finding that balance between making sure it’s inexpensive enough to be accessible, but also making sure we can pay the bills, and I think the Centre does a good job of walking that financial line.”

Meanwhile, in 2016, Calgary-based Alberta Theatre Projects is launching its home-grown panto production of Cinderella, with a distinctly feminist twist, says artistic director Vanessa Porteous. “The premise we have at this point is there’s a time machine and it starts in old timey days and a young boy is brought into contemporary Calgary, thinking he’s going to go on a quest to find his princess.

“But the princess he meets is basically a Calgary teen who’s hot to trot. She wants to start her own business and she’s not the princess he would have expected from the 19th century. There’s gender switching, great singing, audience participation – and it kind of goes from there.”

The show is being written by Calgary improv artist, actor and playwright Rebecca Northan, the creator of Blind Date, the improvised romantic comedy that has been produced Off-Broadway and in London.

“The family holiday show is a really important part of what we do as a theatre company,” Porteous adds, “but I felt like there was another move we could make, where we could take a fairy tale or old story, bring it into the modern era, make it fun and silly for all ages, and make it feature lots of audience participation.”

For Petty, this year’s panto will be bittersweet – at 69, he’s calling it quits as a performer. “Doing both producing and playing the evil character in the show all these years just gets to be pretty tiring. And pretty demanding at the end of a run.

“I had to figure that there was something that had to give, and I certainly didn’t want to give up putting the shows on at the Elgin, because we’ve created a family tradition over the holidays, and there doesn’t seem to be anybody in sight who wants to take over the succession part of this – so I figured I’d better throw in the towel on the performance side.”

rosspetty.com, draytonentertainment.com, mirvish.com