In Britain every December, something very strange takes place. In January, a well-known stage actor who performed Chekhov in a free theater in October has to tell a packed house of six-year-olds that the wolf is actually right behind him. People in the crowd scream. He pretends not to know. Everyone has a good time. And somewhere, a theater director lets out a small sigh of relief. For another year, the books are balanced.
This is how the pantomime makes money. It’s not very exciting. It’s not often that the major newspapers really look into it. Even so, it is the most important financial event in the British theater calendar in almost every way.
Every Christmas, around 260 professional pantomimes are put on across the UK. These shows bring in more than three million people and earn over £60 million at the box office. For many regional theaters, the panto season brings in thirty to fifty percent of their entire yearly income. Not their income in December. Their annual income. When you look at that figure for a while, it really strikes you. It means that a theater’s ability to put on risky, new, or difficult work later in the year often depends on how loudly people booed the bad guy in January.
In one version of the story, famous people sing in pantomimes just because they love the style and remember trips they took as kids. And maybe that’s true for some people. But the truth about money is easier to see. A panto contract usually means six to eight weeks of steady, well-paid work on some of the country’s biggest stages. When it comes to live theater, that kind of steady work is really rare for performers who aren’t super famous. Rehearsals, runs, and touring all add up to a stable income period that the business doesn’t usually offer in any other way.
There’s also something else going on with the big names. The blogger who once said that panto was “the strangest deal in the entertainment business” was right on the mark: the trade between old stars and happy audiences makes sense in its own way. People come to see someone in particular because they vaguely remember them. They aren’t there to be shocked by the cast. They’re there to laugh along with you. It is one of the few entertainment situations where cultural nostalgia is a product and not just a side effect.
A big part of this that is missed is how technically difficult the work is. The panto dame, who is always a man, always wears fancy clothes, and always has to keep the attention of a room full of both confused toddlers and slightly drunk adults, does not tolerate weakness. Michael Harrison, who runs one of the biggest panto companies in the UK, has called pantomime the “dirty word” of theater. The funny thing is that it takes a lot of skill: comedic timing, physical endurance, crowd control, and the ability to improvise. Every day, jokes are changed to fit what happened in the news that morning. The cast makes the necessary changes. It’s not often that you have to do that kind of constant, responsive, live thinking in British theater.
The shape has been around for hundreds of years, changing with the times without losing its main shape. It took in music hall. It took on the culture of TV stars. Recently, there are signs that it is accepting a wider range of people to perform on those stages, with casting becoming more like the people who actually walk through the door. It’s still not clear if that evolution will continue in a meaningful way. But the need to change has always been a part of what makes pantomime profitable—it brings in new audiences every generation and every trip.
Watching all of this from the outside, it’s hard not to notice that pantomime has quietly done something that most live shows fail to do: it has become necessary. Not just loved or traditional, but also strong and stable. The glitter and jokes that will make you cringe are real. But so is the 40% of a theater’s annual income that depends on them.
It turns out that the dame costume is not a step down. It is more like a lifeline for a lot of the people involved, like the actors, directors, crew, and the theaters themselves.
