After a rather sedate Christmas lunch and an entertaining Secret Santa swap with the team we headed off to the New Wimbledon Theatre to check out Peter Pan starring one of my favourite people Henry Winkler (c’mon who doesn’t love The Fonz) and a couple of English performers Bobby Davro and Sarah-Jane Honeywell. Pantos (pantomimes) are a particularly English Christmas tradition so I’m surprised its taken me until my third Christmas in London to get to one! Better late than never I guess. Pantos generally have a number of conventions such as the male lead being played by a girl (in this case Sarah as Peter Pan), lots of double entendre, audience participation (especially hissing and booing the baddie) and normally there will be a man in drag. Peter Pan had this and more. There was huge audience participation in particular when a few of the cast sang a very rowdy version of the 12 Days of Christmas when they threw joined toilet rolls out into the audience as well as blasting us with water guns.

We are all familiar with the story of Wendy, John and Michael who journey to the land of the lost boys with Peter Pan so there is no real need to get into the details. As a performance this panto was much grander than I imagined it be with pretty elaborate sets. The comedy was spot on with Bobby Davro being particular on form. The Fonz was great even when he was covering for a dodgy mike. I’m not sure whether David Hasselhof, originally cast, would have been able to pull off Captain Hook with quite the same coolness, though it would have been interesting to see how the Baywatch theme would be represented in the show. SJH was slightly annoying as Peter Pan but I’m not sure how much that had to do with playing a young bratty bubbly boy than her true self. I’m not sure particularly sure why Bobby turned up at the end in a giant kangaroo outfit but hey it was entertaining nevertheless.

As I said at the beginning today’s performance was great fun despite being clearly some of the older people in the theatre!