‘Why is this panto different from all other pantos?’

This time last year, JC2’s drama critic John Nathan said that in two decades or more of reviewing theatre he didn’t think he had seen anything quite like JW3’s first Chanukah panto, a Jewish version of the uniquely British form of seasonal entertainment.

The show was called Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Pig and buoyed by its success, this year we bring you another Jewish panto with a conjoined title: Goldie Frocks and the Bear Mitzvah. 

I am the panto’s musical director and I’ve worked closely with the writer Nick Cassenbaum to make its soundtrack a joyful homage to Jewish music. In fact, that’s our rule for these pantos that are different from all other pantos: the music must be Jewish.

That means that all the songs are either written by, or have been sung by Jews, or they come from what we refer to as the canon of Jewish folk music, even when some of the original composers’ names have been lost in the mists of time.

Does that sound restrictive? It’s not. There are so many composers of Jewish descent in musical theatre, film and commercial music, I am yet to get in a song by Bob Dylan or Billy Joel.

And there is music for everyone. For the little ones there’s Hokey Cokey by Al Tabor – yes, the person who wrote Hokey Cokey was a member of the tribe! For the older crowd and lovers of 80s music Total Eclipse of the Heart by Jim Steinman; for the musical theatre lovers we have Everything’s Coming Up Roses by Jule Styne & Stephen Sondheim; and on the pop music side of things, I’m pleased to share that our evil villain sings Uptown Funk by Bruno Mars & Mark Ronson (Singer and Co-writer) and a Hebrew bear mitzvah lesson takes place to the tune of Kiss Me More by Doja Cat.  Expect too references to some of the great works by Jewish composers including Howard Shore’s The Lord of the Rings, Jerry Bock’s Fiddler on the Roof and even Jerry Goldsmith’s Gremlins. There are many more numbers too, but let’s retain an element of mystery for the night.

I’m a klezmer accordionist and bandleader who has spent his working life working on the klezmer circuit, playing everything from Charedi weddings to Reform b'nai mitzvot to London’s first gay Jewish club night, Buttmitzvah, so I was never going to simply do the keyboard-with-backing-track thing. I wanted something unique not to mention more heimishe, so I arranged the songs for a three-piece klezmer band myself and nabbed two of the UK’s leading klezmer musicians to play them.

Daniel Gouly is on clarinet and bass clarinet. (I have worked with Gouly for over a decade and can testify that what he doesn’t know about klezmer isn’t worth knowing.) Then for rhythm, instead of a drum kit, we are lucky enough to have Christina Borgenstierna on the poik, the Ukrainian klezmer drum. Having played for many years in the klezmer ensemble She’Koyokh, she is one of Britain’s only professional poik players.  The instrument gives a very shtetl sound. 

In fact, my aim was a musical score that imagines what a panto would have sounded like in the shtetls of the 1800s: something with real musical integrity that is rooted in tradition, while also being fun. Having a band cover Uptown Funk on three acoustic klezmer instruments is certainly as silly as it is difficult for the musicians! 

But as well as being entertaining I hope this JW3 pantomime will be a celebration of British Jewishness and, hopefully, a new annual event in the communal calendar.

Goldie Frocks and the Bear Mitzvah is at JW3 from 8 December to 5 January