Sammy Sausages is a Dublin panto institution. After a quarter of a century of entertaining families at Christmas, Alan Hughes knows well that Sammy’s fame precedes him.
“I get stopped in shopping centres by kids going: ‘Oh my god, it’s Sammy Sausages,’” he said. “It is mad; kids run up to me and ask for pictures.”
Sausages was created by Hughes’s husband, Karl Broderick, when they were still running the pantomime 20 years ago in St Anthony’s Hall on Merchants Quay.
They wanted a character who could be a recurring fixture in the show, a kind of Dublin version of Buttons, the character in Cinderella who serves as a kind of conduit between the play and the audience.
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Initially, he had a different name, Timmy Tiddles, but when that name didn’t quite land with audiences, they employed a name change and the character immediately took off.
“Sammy Sausages is the narrator, he brings the kids through the show, making sure they know that difference is sometimes good, and that good always triumphs in the end,” said Hughes, who is known beyond panto audiences as a TV presenter on Virgin Media.
In a world that has changed dramatically — streaming television, live music, video games, social media, and more discerning and demanding audiences — this peculiar form of Victorian music hall entertainment seems only to have become more and more popular.
Why do people love the panto so much? For Donal Shiels, the chief executive and artistic director of the Civic Theatre in Tallaght, it’s the immediacy of the pantomime that makes it so enduring.
“It’s live, that’s the bottom line. There’s only so much Netflix you can look at, only so much Disney on film, only so much gaming you can do. And sometimes they’re a solitary thing,” he said, compared to the lively interactivity of a good pantomime.
For Leo McKenna, the line producer of the Gaiety panto, the success is a reflection of the essential nature of the pantomime — word-of-mouth growth from one year to the next, from one generation to the next.
“People will often come and see the panto and walk out and buy a ticket for the following year,” he said.
“While children are our audience, they’re not our customers. We sell tickets to parents, they come back if the children leave happy,” he said.
“So hopefully in 25 years’ time those children will be buying tickets for their kids based on what we did today. It’s up to us to keep that tradition strong because success breeds success and failure does the same.”
Sourcing firm figures on just how big the pantomime sector has become is trickier than it looks. There are more pantos — amateur and professional — than ever before, but no aggregated figures to show total ticket sales, or revenue, or economic scale, and the various panto companies guard their figures closely.
But the Gaiety Theatre, home to the best-known panto, now into its 151st year, can give some sense of the scale.
By his calculations, there’s about 60 people daily involved in running the Gaiety show, including 25 performers — actors, dancers, signers — on stage, with six band members and six backup musicians, 17 people backstage in costume and lighting, and 30 front-of-house staff including bar staff, ushers and the box office team.
“All of that is serious money that we spend to get the show up and running and stays in this country and supports the people of this industry,” said McKenna.
It’s possible to calculate the revenue generated from a simple calculation. The Gaiety sells about 100,000 tickets for the panto every year, at an average price of about €30 per ticket, meaning it probably makes roughly €3 million overall from ticket sales alone, before anyone calculates the sales of snacks and drinks.
That revenue is even more important for smaller theatres, according to Donal Shiels. “If we don’t do a panto, we’re in the red, and if we do, we’re in the black.”
The costs of putting on such a show are enormous, he said, heading in some instances towards the operatic, with expensive sets, music, sound and lighting all required. It is only getting more expensive, as the old-fashioned pantomimes of generations past are updated with digital screens, high-wire performances and modern special effects.
When Alan Hughes and Karl Broderick put on their first panto, it cost £22,000 (€27,000) to stage, “and we were terrified”, he said. “This year it will cost us €300,000.”
“You’re in it to make a profit. No theatre is putting on a panto to make a loss,” he said. “This is the one time of year you can enter a market and make a profit.”
All that money has wrought very noticeable changes on stage, according to Joe Conlan, the long-standing panto dame of the Gaiety Theatre, who has seen those changes over the course of his life, first as an audience member, then as a cast member.
Conlan still remembers his first panto as a child, watching Danny Cummins and Maureen Potter in Humpty Dumpty.
“I can still see Thelma Ramsey, the conductor, with her white gloves and white baton,” he said. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh my god, I want to be up there.”
He performed in his first panto alongside Potter and Johnny Logan, but today’s panto is a very different beast in some respects, not least because Conlan will be flying over the audiences’ heads on no less than four occasions thanks to high-wire social effects.
For Conlan, the traditional elements of the pantomime remain unchanged, such as the dame, the themes of good and evil, and the resolution in the end, not to mention the centrality of good songs.
Perhaps the most important thing is the involvement of audience participation, he said.
“As an actor, if you go on the stage and you can feel they’re not with us, you’ve to pick up the pace. Other nights you go on and there’s rocket fuel in the audience,” he said.
There’s a view in the world of pantos that the form doesn’t quite get the recognition or the support it deserves, no matter how popular and profitable it has become.
For Shiels, the robustness of Christmas pantomimes illustrates the strength and depth of performing talent in Ireland, even if many of them have to go to the West End in London to make a career of it.
“We’re a musical country; we’re the only country with a musical instrument as our national symbol. We have a brilliant comedy tradition and a deep tradition of music and writing. And we’ve got good actors who can put depth into comedy or into a good musical,” he said.
While Dublin will probably never rival the West End or Broadway, he said, it could become a kind of nursery for successful musicals in the future.
“It’s not about producing Hello Dolly or Mary Poppins; we can’t compete with that, but we can make work that is relevant and entertaining or funny,” he said.
“I don’t see why it should not be included in something like Arts Council funding.”
Pantos will continue to anchor the theatrical season for so many actors, theatres, and audiences, and Alan Hughes has no intention of slowing down.
“When people ask me how long I will keep doing Ireland AM, my answer always is as long as I’m enjoying it and healthy and fit enough to do it,” he said, referring to the Virgin Media show he co-presents.
“I’m running around the stage twice a day, and still loving it, loving the interaction with the kids, and loving our new venue,” he said. “So Sammy Sausages will be around for many years to come.”
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