Spargo is back as the baddie in the Christmas pantomine Robin Hood

By James Haddrell – Artistic Director of Greenwich Theatre

With the vast majority of theatres, cinemas, galleries and restaurants all having reopened months ago, and audiences and visitors coming back, it would be easy to think that the impact of the pandemic was over, that while companies are certainly having to work hard to recoup losses, operations are back to what they were before Covid hit.

However, with most arts and entertainment venues operating on some kind of annual cycle, that’s not the case. For us, a typical year starts with the final week of our festive pantomime, then moves through a series of touring shows with family programming at Easter and then a big summer show – which is where we are now with Treasure Island.

Then it’s an autumn season of visiting shows with a signature production at the heart of the season (this autumn it’s the world premiere of new British musical Are You As Nervous As I Am?), and then we’re back to pantomime again.
The lead time for us on all of that varies – I tend to programme visiting shows anything from three to eight months ahead of time, but with pantomime we start planning the show over a year in advance.
We know when we open a pantomime what the show will be the following year, and some audience members book tickets for the next year as they leave the theatre.

In the aftermath of the pandemic, we are still trying to stabilize that time-line.
This autumn’s big musical was originally programmed early in the pandemic and has been rescheduled several times, so while that has been logistically challenging we have at least known about the show.
With pantomime, the same doesn’t apply.

Last year we took the decision to change the structure of our pantomime, with a smaller cast and a change in our usual stage set, to make Covid-safety easier to achieve.
That meant we couldn’t look ahead a year, as we didn’t know whether we’d be able to upscale again, or how popular the new model might be.

In the end, we suffered the best and the worst outcomes. Audiences absolutely loved the new style of show, but with almost all of the cast contracting Covid at one point or another we ended up having to cancel the final two weeks of the show – the most lucrative weeks in our year.

Because of that, it took until late spring this year for us to finally confirm our plans for this Christmas, working out the impact of the lost income over the previous Christmas, but thanks to huge customer loyalty with many people transferring bookings to a future production, we are now able to move forward with what has become a staple part of the borough’s festive celebrations.

With Anthony Spargo, our Offie-nominated villain of the past 10 years, returning to play the Sheriff of Nottingham in a panto version of Robin Hood – with a script that he will also write – the show will boast a number of familiar faces, all keen to return to the Greenwich family as we reopen in full.

Martin Johnson and Lizzy Dive are back, along with our musical director Steve Markwick – himself also an award-nominee for his work on the Greenwich show.
All of this is exciting, but means that the show is on sale far later than usual.
I’m sure that our reputation as producers of one of the capital’s finest pantomimes will bring audiences back, but it is clear that the fallout from the pandemic is much longer-lived that we might all have hoped.

Pictured top:  Anthony Spargo and Martin Johnson will return to the Greenwich pantomime. Picture Robert Day