Charing Cross Theatre

Pantos have so much crossover with queer performance, it always feels odd that most mainstream productions act straight. London’s biggest queer panto Jack and the Beanstalk: What a Whopper! helps redress this imbalance, with enough dick jokes to butt you into the new year. Created by the team behind the previous pantos at the now sadly shuttered LGBTQ+ venue Above the Stag and now in its second year at the Charing Cross Theatre, this gay adult affair has a stellar dame, but the energetic cast are restrained – not in a sexy way – by a disappointingly droopy script.   Writers Jon Bradfield and Martin Hooper – who wrote the ATS pantos for over a decade – thrust us into the rolling hills of Upper Bottom in the Yorkshire Dales. Under the cock-like clouds of David Shields’s glittering set, our randy protagonist Jack (Keanu Adolphis Johnson) is attempting to make it as a farmer in his wellies and tiny thigh-busting denim shorts. In swoops closeted Reverend Tim (Joe Grundy) for a quick fumble in the graveyard (‘Forgive me father’, they sing between the headstones, ‘for I have rimmed’). As light sexual shenanigans ensue and a cute cow (who sweetly gets her own bio in the programme) is swapped for a handful of magic beans, textbook evil villain Lady Fleshcreep (a swaggering Jordan Stamatiadis) stomps around town, trying to ruin Jack’s fortunes and steal everyone’s land.   All pantos work to a formula, but the best carve out their own identity. Beyond finding a hundred words for...