When my wife and I decided to visit England just after Christmas, to catch up on old friendships, I e-mailed Gerald, a London journalist we know. If he'd get four tickets to a play, I said, whichever he and his wife, Philippa, fancied, I'd pay. Gerald is a theater buff from a theatrical family, which led me to expect maybe the Royal Shakespeare or something new and brilliant on the boards in the West End. The tickets were for our first night in town. "What are we seeing?" I asked when the four of us met for a pretheater drink. "We're seeing panto," Gerald announced. "You can't understand the British if you don't know panto. It's a nationwide formative experience." Panto. It sounded like something to do with dogs. The English and their dogs, I said to myself. Now they're writing plays about them. Gerald explained that "panto" was short for "pantomime," a form of traditional British theater involving standard story lines, slapstick, risque humor, music, dance and spectacular costumes and stage effects.
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