Jeff Klawes
The cast of "STAR WARS: The Panto Strikes Back" rehearses at Mercury Players’ warehouse.
Among the mysteries presented in 1969 to viewers of Monty Python’s Flying Circus were the appearances of a gigantic pantomime goose and pantomime Princess Margaret, both resembling 8-foot hand puppets.
For the American audience, the obvious question was Pantomime what?
Mercury Players Theatre revives the longstanding British art form with Nick Schweitzer’s STAR WARS: The Panto Strikes Back, at the Bartell Theatre, Dec. 21–30. It’s the company’s fourth year of presenting a “panto”— a singing and dancing dramatic form that has celebrated silliness since at least the time of Shakespeare.
“The panto genre is genuinely family-friendly entertainment for the holidays, when families are home together,” says Schweitzer. “It’s been entertaining families in Britain for 300 years, and it’s still very popular today.” Also, it’s far from silent.
Regularly included are animal costumes and song parodies. Panto is broad and comic, with audience participation required. Similar to the American tradition of tent show melodrama, you’re expected to boo when the villain comes out and cheer the heroes. By definition, panto is a group experience, and that’s a lot of its appeal to families.
“Elemental to the panto tradition is that it’s based on a children’s story, so that the children in the audience know the story — they know how it goes, and they enjoy that,” says Schweitzer, an adjunct law professor at UW-Madison. Previous Mercury pantos have tackled The Wizard of Oz and the Harry Potter saga.
As noted by The Economist magazine in 2014, “Unusually among Britain’s inventions in popular culture — including most of the world’s sports and half its television formats — pantomime has not traveled well.”
But if not well, it has at least traveled. One of the form’s greatest Victorian stars, Dan Leno (1860-1904), was an influence for Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel, of Laurel and Hardy. Laurel, in turn, influenced Danny Kaye, Jerry Lewis and, famously, Dick Van Dyke. Dumb and Dumber is arguably a distant panto cousin.
Writing in true panto form presents challenges, says Schweitzer.
“One is to follow the panto tradition from England, which has a number of elements that the audience expects to see,” he says. “For example, cross-dressing, slapstick humor and certain routines that are repeated year after year.”
But within those limits, “the element of freedom in writing in this tradition is you make fun of it, so it becomes a parody of a well-known story,” says Schweitzer. “That allows the playwright a lot of freedom to play with things.”
His take on Star Wars combines episodes four through six (the “good ones,” released first). There’s a Death Star explosion but, instead of chittery beeps, Schweitzer’s R2D2 emits sounds such as might be heard in a restroom.
As befits such an historic art form, “It will be a rude noise, a different one every time,” says the playwright. “I hope the kids will come to anticipate it.”
