Panto fun in Cambridge this year

Nov. 28, 2011 - PRLog -- Oh no I didn’t – Oh yes you did!  It’s panto time again and theatres up and down the country ring with the familiar “He’s behind you” screams from excited 6 year olds.

From Brighton to Belfast and from Cornwall to Canterbury there is bound to be a panto near you.  Combine it with a stay in a nearby hotel and you can fully relax and enjoy the merriment on offer.  

Celebrity pantomimes are really popular, made even more accessible and prolific with the advent of reality tv stars who may have secretly harboured a longing to tread the boards.  Cambridge Arts Theatre this year are producing Cinderella, with ex-Three Degrees singer (and veteran of I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here) Sheila Ferguson playing the fairy godmother.

Pantomime is a great boost to the local economy, with many stars staying in hotels for the whole 6, 8 or 10 week run.  Cambridge hotels are currently not revealing which one of them will play host to Ms. Ferguson, but the days of the artists staying in grotty digs are long and truly over.   Nowadays the accommodation is more likely to be a hotel near the theatre as the panto run can be quite exhausting.  Staying in a Cambridge hotel will also be a nice festive treat for the theatregoer.

A quintessentially British form of theatre, the origins of panto are thought to date back to the middle ages but haven’t changed much in the last 100 years. It’s only when you have to explain the premise of panto to a foreigner that you realise how ridiculous it really is.  

There is a girl dressed as a boy who is the son of a man dressed as a woman. The girl dressed as a boy will win the heart of the other girl (surprisingly dressed as a girl), with the assistance of a person(s) dressed in an animal skin. There is always a villain, usually a chase sequence, quite often a ghost and the chance of a custard pie fight is never far away.

It may be a fairly standard fairy tale in print, but in panto form it is a mixture of fairy story, spectacle, song and dance with a heavy emphasis on audience participation.

As with anything enjoyable though, it’s not without it’s risks.  Health and safety officials have stopped many pantomimes from flinging sweets into the crowd as part of the entertainment, after two pensioners claimed to have been hurt by flying Quality Street chocolates.  The sweet throwing, which is a traditional part of pantomime was banned at The Pavilion Theatre in Gorleston, Norfolk in 2007 and replaced with marshmallows instead.  

And in 2008 a Cornish village drama group had to register a plastic sword and a toy gun which produced a flag saying “bang” with local police to stay inline with guidelines from the health and safety executive.


So our advice would be take an umbrella for the soaking from the water pistols, take your glasses so you can read the bang from the gun and take your sense of humour, it’s what makes Panto fun!

Visit : http://www.bedfordlodgehotel.co.uk/

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