Just A Spoonful Of Sugar

’Tis the season for a treat. The musical is vying with the pantomime as the traditional Christmas outing, but the main thing is that hearts are warmed and spirits cheered

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CHRISTMAS is coming and the theatre, like the goose, is getting fat. Up and down the land, theatres seek to swell their coffers by putting on lavish shows that will provide some kind of insurance against possible hard times ahead, but, although pantomime is still popular, I am struck by the changing nature of Yuletide entertainment.

When I was a child in the postwar Midlands, panto, Peter Pan and Toad of Toad Hall were the seasonal staples. I can vividly recall seeing a young Norman Wisdom in Robinson Crusoe, Phyllis Calvert as J. M. Barrie’s boy-who-wouldn’t-grow-up and Patrick Wymark as A. A. Milne’s bombastic hero. I’m sure you can still find their equivalents today, but what is immediately apparent, as you scan the brochures, is how many of the big regional theatres rely on classic American musicals to draw the crowds.

At the Sheffield Crucible, Robert Hastie is directing Frank Loesser’s 1950 landmark show Guys and Dolls, with Kadiff Kirwan, lately seen on TV in Fleabag and This Way Up, as Sky Masterson, who wins a bet by luring a Salvation Army lass to Havana. At the Curve, Leicester, Nikolai Foster recreates the gang warfare of the Jets and the Sharks with a revival of West Side Story. And at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, Jo Davies is directing a revival of Gypsy which, as West Side Story does, has lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by Arthur Laurents.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. You can catch a stage version of The Wizard of Oz at Leeds Playhouse and, although it’s not an American show, expectations are running high at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre for a musical version of David Walliams’s The Boy in the Dress with songs by Robbie Williams and Guy Chambers. One of the most joyous shows in London right now is the revival of Mary Poppins at the Prince Edward, with Zizi Strallen giving a terrific performance as P. L. Travers’s unearthly nanny.