{"id":652091,"date":"2025-12-24T08:02:12","date_gmt":"2025-12-24T08:02:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/652091\/"},"modified":"2025-12-24T08:02:12","modified_gmt":"2025-12-24T08:02:12","slug":"panto-dame-celebrates-1000th-sheffield-performance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/652091\/","title":{"rendered":"Panto Dame celebrates 1,000th Sheffield performance"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;I love the fact that panto is sometimes the first time that a person has been to the theatre and even after a thousand times, it never gets boring,&#8221; Williams says. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">And it is a quaintly British phenomenon, he adds.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;Only we do it well. Other countries have tried and it doesn&#8217;t work, it just wouldn&#8217;t work in America would it? <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;They just don&#8217;t get it, it would just be weird.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;The men play the women and the women play men and and you shout at the audience and they shout back at you.&#8221; <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Pantomime dates back to the late 18th Century in England and was an early form of participatory theatre in London. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">In its heyday in Victorian London, shows could last up to five hours, according to the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vam.ac.uk\/articles\/the-story-of-pantomime?srsltid=AfmBOopxhRRjz73cLuRKtmchHhTWBsw7NNcXw_5QddgRSYyTctSO0ETE\" class=\"ssrcss-f6h2dj-InlineLink e1kn3p7n0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Victoria and Albert Museum, external<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">In more recent years, pantomime has become an important element of a theatre&#8217;s offering &#8211; and its finances.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">More than 500,000 people from across Yorkshire went to see a pantomime last year and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/articles\/cg5me7r05q8o\" class=\"ssrcss-f6h2dj-InlineLink e1kn3p7n0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">16 regional theatres said pantos brought in between 9% and 45% of their annual income in 2024<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Darren Henley, chief executive of Arts Council England, says pantomimes are the &#8220;absolute bedrock&#8221; that regional theatre across across the country are built upon<b class=\"ssrcss-1xjjfut-BoldText e5tfeyi3\">.<\/b><\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;It&#8217;s a couple of hours where you can lose yourself. It&#8217;s traditional, it&#8217;s modern, it&#8217;s innovative,&#8221; he adds.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Sheffield Theatres also predicted it would see more than 50,000 visitors this season. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Williams says the trend for pantomime keeps growing, despite it &#8220;taking a bit of a dive in the 90s,&#8221; when he says it went a bit &#8220;naff&#8221;. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">It evolves, he says, because the songs, jokes and scripts are modern and take into account language and references that also need to change with the times.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"&#8220;I love the fact that panto is sometimes the first time that a person has been to the&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":652092,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8817],"tags":[748,393,4884,1620,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-652091","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sheffield","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-england","10":"tag-great-britain","11":"tag-sheffield","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115773502252330272","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=652091"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652091\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/652092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=652091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=652091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=652091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}