‘Skoolaz 3.0’, a pastel-coloured pantomime

The Jamaican pantomime has been around since 1941, initially a production of The Little Theatre Movement (LTM), but as of early this year, a Pantomime Company-owned musical. Skoolaz 3.0, the current show, is based on an original pantomime, Schoolers, with a story by Barbara Gloudon “from a concept by Owen Ellis and Michael Nicholson updated by Anya Gloudon and the Pantomime Company Workshop”.

For most of its life, it was a family show, with many of the themes, jokes, and references aimed at adults rather than children. This was true of the “topicalities” feature, for example, an inter-act segment during which the lead actor would comment humorously on topical issues for a few minutes. Oliver Samuels and the late Charles Hyatt were excellent at this.

That model suited the most prolific of the pantomime’s book writers, Barbara Gloudon, who started her career as a journalist – a reporter and columnist on current events at The Gleaner Company. Most of her pantomimes were commentaries on contemporary Jamaica, with Skoolaz 3.0, now playing at Little Theatre, being an example.

In later years, perhaps because most of the audiences comprised children, the story and production style have been directed more and more towards children. As the years have passed, most of the thousands of children who enjoyed the shows have become adults and have started taking their children and other young relatives to the event.

On Boxing Day, the traditional opening for the pantomime, adults far outnumbered children. I wondered why. Was it because nowadays children prefer staying home with their tablets, cell phones, and computers to going out to experience live theatre?

That would be a shame, though one must acknowledge that computers are fundamentally changing the way we get our entertainment, even, the experts say, the way we think. So, did the adults who attended the pantomime on Tuesday enjoy it?

LAUGHTER

If they did, it was probably not as much as the children, for throughout the show I heard more children’s than adult laughter, and you judge the success of a comedy by the extent of the laughter. I found the show lack-lustre and bereft of an energetic story.

“Lustre” relates first to the lighting by Rohan Gowie. It is mostly just the ordinary, steady white lighting used in homes – or schools – which would make it realistic, but not theatrical, which it should be. The major exception is in a rather tame “magic” scene, of which pantomimes usually have at least one. The usual variety of colours was missing.

Missing, too, was the usual variety of colours in the set, costumes, and props. Barbara’s daughter, Anya Gloudon, who heads The Pantomime Company, was responsible for all three, and she chose to use pastel and other muted colours.

Her designs in previous pantomimes had the vibrant colours natural to the tropics. Were her choices this time dictated by the realistic situation the characters are in? School uniforms and walls do tend to have rather dull colours. This is true of the walls of Sunshine Academy for Girls and Hattipha College for Boys and the uniforms of their students, around whom the story evolves.

That story largely remains the same as that of the previous two Schoolers, and the themes – which both playwright and journalist Gloudon tackled numerous times – remain equality of the sexes, education (and co-education) in Jamaica, the financial straits many teachers face and their desire to migrate, chauvinism, drugs in schools, and corruption.

Jamaicans are supposed to be able to “tek bad s’inting mek laugh,” but those problems appear to have weighed down the story. It is not as light and bouncy as the catchy overture promises, and the music generally turns out to be bland.

The programme states that it was arranged by Grub Cooper, a gifted musician who can usually be relied on to deliver delightful – and award-winning – songs, and he is also musical director. It is not clear, though, how much of the actual composition of the tunes and lyrics he is responsible for.

You should leave a musical humming at least one tune. I heard no humming as I left the theatre.

Happily, there’s a lot of energy in the acting of the 21-strong cast. The men work especially hard, and within minutes of the male students appearing on stage, especially when they dance under the hot lights, their school shirts are sweat-soaked. (The sight is off-putting. The problem needs to be solved. Fortunately, the females and the men in work clothes don’t suffer the same fate.)

Between the director, Michael Nicholson, and the choreographers responsible for the dance (or “movement”) numbers – Patrick Earle, Stacia ‘Fya’ Edwards, and George Howard, with Pierre Lemaire responsible for the many mime sequences (usually for the football matches) – the cast is always moving and/or expressing some emotion. A child sitting close to me in the theatre was fascinated by the show’s physicality and laughed continually.

The actors playing the main characters must be congratulated on immersing themselves in their characters – even though most are stock characters with little room for development. The “speaky-spokey” headmaster, Mr Dryer (Kevin Halstead), is an example.

Ray Jarret plays Papacita, the conniving, drug-selling janitor; Shama Reid is a dependable assistant headmaster; ‘Kiki’ Konfidence is the level-headed principal of Sunshine Academy; Tesalia Mair is one of her teachers; and Latoya Newman is Dorcas, the snack seller at the school gate. There is some doubling up of actors and roles, so some of these names will change for other shows.

While Skoolaz 3.0 does not entertain at a distinction level, it does achieve a good pass.

entertainment@gleanerjm.com