Writer: Nick Cassenbaum
Director: Abigail Anderson
Seeing a new take on the traditional panto form is always refreshing. With its second annual production, JW3 offers a unique approach, blending the traditional fairy tale and slapstick of pantomime with Yiddish-based puns, songs written or famously sung by musicians of Jewish-based descent and smatterings of London history.
Nick Cassenbaum’s script opens in a clothing factory in what was once the heartland of East London’s Jewish-led rag trade. Now taken over by Simon Yadoo’s dastardly Calvin Brine, the factory workers are demeaned and exploited at every turn. So when employee Goldie (Heloise Lowenthal) is tasked with heading out to the West End to escort Baby Behr (Frankie Thompson) for a fitting, she jumps at the chance – little knowing that Brine is, in fact, planning to use Baby’s hide to make himself a bearskin suit that will grant him eternal youth.
Thompson’s character, who, as well as having the surname Behr, is genuinely a bear (his recently widowed mum running the animal circus, Cirque du Oy Vey), is both the butt of the jokes and the cause of many. Baby’s attempt to study for his bear mitzvah provides ample opportunity for Yiddish and Hebrew wordplay.
But mostly, Baby’s story is a means of introducing Debbie Chazen’s Mama Behr. The type of gregarious panto dame role that would be taken by a man in many other productions, Chazen shows that you don’t need to drag up to be the central comedy performance in a great panto. Mama banters and flirts with the audience, ad-libs to keep the show on track, and delivers even the silliest bear-based puns with gusto.
The warmth of her performance creates the perfect counterbalance to Yadoo’s connivances as the slimy Brine. Yadoo clearly knows how to play the panto baddie, with a finely judged performance that milks the boos at just the right level to keep the story at full pace.
Lowenthal charms her way through the story as Goldie. With a role that is the ostensibly straight character in a cast full of comics, she holds her own, bringing a warmth that brings the audience in. Stepping into the fairy godmother role (here, the spirit of the East End, decked out like a pearly king who’s seen better days) is veteran performer and magician Ian Saville. He may not have quite as firm a grasp on the script as some of the other performers, but Saville is able to spin this into a loveable trait rather than a hindrance. The inclusion of some stage magic staples – the torn-up newspaper that magically reassembles or an escapology act – ends up being woven into the plot rather than mere contrivances, which adds to their charm.
With sterling backup from multi-role players Yael Elisheva and David Ellis and with an onstage three-piece band led by Josh Middleton that fuses musical theatre classics with rock anthems and traditional Jewish melodies, the overall effect is of a panto that not only knows its audience but is joyously celebrating centuries of tradition. Pantomime and Jewish heritage may not have previously been considered as traditional bedfellows, but with Cassenbaum’s deft hand, as with Goldie Frocks’s discoveries in the Behr household, everything is Just Right.
Continues until 5 January 2025
The Reviews Hub Score
Celebratory Jewish panto
