CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE SPIRIT
Can this really be the first Jewish pantomime? Oy vay, surely this culture with its musical genius, ironic jokes , family warmth, tall tales and matriarchal instinct for decorative hyperbole has long been crying out to be amalgamated into the great Panto tradition. The fit is uncannily perfect, so mazeltov to JW3 for commissioning this, and putting it before hordes of riotously thrilled schoolchildren and us admiring adults and gentiles. It is also nice to be in a show where everyone knows absolutely and reliably how to clap and stamp in time, and catches jokes on the wing, at speed.
The tale is a folktale mashup: three generations of women – ambitious young scentist Red, her mother and her grandmother – have to foil the Big Bad Pig (a powerful Josh Glanc, looking uncannily like Giles Coren in a bad mood). He has betrayed his Jewish family by working in the City and taking control of all the power supply in the Edge of Ware to threaten the lights of Chanukah. He captures Jewish grandmothers, because they are the strongest known form of power. His sidekick is the neurotic , ashmatic and useless Wolf, who he contemptuously calls Fluffy, and who is still traumatized from falling down the chimney of the brick house into the pigs’ hot soup in another tale. The answer to the power problem is, of course, wind: thus enabling a massive running fart joke to thread through the show. This we cheered to the echo. We’re British. It’s panto.
It’s low-budget (the cast whipping the curtains aside between scenes with brio) but not short on glitter and movement. It throws into its soup every proper seasonal ingredient: a villain to boo, journeys through a magical wood, gags and ghosts requiring cries of BEHIND YOU , a water-pistol assault on the audience, a rude song and even a bailiff. There’s a bit of conjuring with eight Martini bottles by Mother Hoodman in her Dreidl-shaped frock (she later appears as a giant pickle) and while she is technically the Dame, she’s played by Debbie Chazen – what Jewish matriarch would hand over such a role to a mere man? And besides, her own mother is a very acrobatic male, Tiago Fonseca: wizened old Bubbah appears at one point climbing over the railings behind the audience and somersaulting down the stairs past us , floral pants akimbo; she also ties up the big bad wolf in bunting made of clothesline knickers. Double-dameing, excellent.
Nick Cassembaum’s script is remarkably good: there are a few standard panto jokes but the best are puns on Jewish words, most of which I got with assistance from my good friend Shirley: the most outrageous being the complaint from the North London cab-driving rat , fed up by competition from the “Cat Uber” – Katubah! – cars. There was also a gale of adult laughter , drowning even the school parties, when the bailiff claims to be the Pig’s official deputy. Mother Hoodman snorts “I”m so bored of deputies!” . And every minute or so there is something slyly funny, as when Red solicitously asks the disguised Wolf “are you comfortable?” to which he shrugs “I make a living..” And when in the final moments an unlikely romance springs with the reformed pig there’s a cry of “marrying out – of species?” To which the response is “Oy, you have to let these things go…”.
The high-spirited self-mockery is warming. . It is also is musically sophisticated, under Josh Middleton (Accordion, keys, trumpet, percussion, fiddle and guitar, always with a klezmerish edge) with terrific songs, never overlong, and tunes which cannily mine into Jewish musical genius by pinching tunes all the way from Rodgers, Gershwin, Berlin, Sondheim, and Lionel Hart to Amy Winehouse (her “ No No No !” becomes the villain’s anthem ). And while I had to look up the fact that the writer of “We don’t talk anymore” Charles Puth had a Jewish mother, it is glorious to have that song given to Mother Hoodman about her longstanding “broigus” with her her own mother, Bubbah.
Such fine Jewish family jokes are woven all through it, all the way to the big soup session, but so is Jewish genius. Every panto has a character who demands that the audience should shout a magic phrase to help them in any crisis. Here , it’s the science-minded heroine Little Red (Gemma Barnett) and she demands that whenever she says “My mind’s gone blank!”the audience should shout THINK! THINK! THINK!. Of course: it’s what Einstein would want. So s a clever show, warm and fine and funny , and I couldn’t have done better after grinching out of doing any other 2023 pantomimes after being spoilt by McKellen’s last year. Chanukah sameach to JW3, Mr Cassenbaum and Mr Middleton and their doughty cast. Take your inner child , and any outer ones you can lay hands on. Well worth the gelt!
Box office jw3.org.uk. to 7 Jan
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