Robinson Crusoe and the Carribean Pirates, Beauty and the Beast, Sleeping Beauty

Robinson Crusoe and the Carribean Pirates - Gaiety Theatre, Dublin Until Jan 29 6.30pm/7.30pm (mat 11am/1.30pm/2.30pm) €15-€35 0818-719388 gaietytheatre.ie. Beauty and the Beast - Everyman Palace Theatre, Cork Until Jan 8 8pm €30/€25 021-4501673 everymanpalace.com. Sleeping Beauty - Tivoli Theatre, Dublin Until Jan 15 6.30pm (Sat mat 2pm) €20-€29.50 01-4544472 panto.ie

Each year as our stages fill up with pantos, you realise just how limited the options of this venerable entertainment can be: a forest of beanstalks, a slumber party of sleeping beauties, a drift of snow whites with a short stack of dwarves. This year, however, things seem better choreographed: just two Scrooges and six ghosts. And while there are a pair of Beauties, only one of them posseses a Beast.

Nobody in panto could ever be accused of originality. It demands repetiton of plots and the seasonal reissuing of jokes, a form so lacquered in history and ritual that its only rival in unaltered spectacle may be the Latin mass – similarly fond of colourful display and men in frocks.

The Gaiety Theatre fits the familiar pattern of fairytale plotlines, he's-behind-you frolics, topical gags and minor celebrities for us to cheer or hiss. This year Samantha Mumba appears as Girl Friday in Robinson Crusoe and the Carribean Pirates.

The title sounds like a more Disneyfied makeover than The Everyman's Beauty and the Beast(traditional enough to feature a Cork City Councillor as its villain) or the Tivoli's soap-operatic version of Sleeping Beauty,from which model Georgia Salpa pulled out at short notice in a blaze of publicity. Oh yes she did!

Can't see that? Catch this

The Little Prince The Lyric, Belfast