Cheeky smile ... Mickey Rooney prepares for his role in Cinderella. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod
What's the panto world coming to? Celebrity Love Island star Paul Danan is sacked from a Preston production of Jack and the Beanstalk for swearing; early reviews of the Barbican's Jack and the Beanstalk lament the good old days before the advent of the so-called "posh panto"; and a recent interview in the Sunday Times Magazine found eight-times-married Hollywood legend Mickey Rooney reporting that "God is a big part of my life." That last, uh, revelation should presumably make for jolly Christian evangelical group outings to the Sunderland Empire production of Cinderella, in which the 87-year-old Rooney is the unexpected star. And you thought this particular seasonal entertainment was just a simple knees-up? Those, it seems, really were the days.
Rooney's presence in so quintessentially British an entertainment comes as a major surprise - though I suppose not much more so than the star casting in Wimbledon and Woking last season of Henry Winkler and Patrick Duffy in Peter Pan and Cinderella, respectively: the look of vague bemusement plastered across Duffy's face has stuck with me ever since, while poor ol' Winkler didn't stand a chance against the unstoppable verbal barrage of co-star Bobby Davro, who at the performance I caught was suffering from a bad cold that made his comic onslaught rather ferocious. (Winkler has shifted his Peter Pan production this season to Woking, while fellow American Paul Michael Glaser is offering a rival Captain Hook at the Churchill Theatre, Bromley.)
But it's the Danan scenario that has particularly sparked my interest, his inadvertent call to a crowd full of families to "make some motherfuckin' noise" resulting in both the sack and a reported £100 fine for what ought to have been the comparatively benign task of turning on the Christmas lights. Or perhaps Danan hasn't been around long enough to have clocked the extent to which, in show biz as in so many endeavours, context is everything. Julie Andrews may be adored forever as Mary Poppins but that didn't stop her baring her breasts for film director husband Blake Edwards in the 1981 movie S.O.B.: a film about precisely that discrepancy between one's public and private personas. Judi Dench, in turn, regularly tops polls as the most beloved actor in the land, which hasn't stopped the dame from racking up a catalogue of deliciously naughty indiscretions onstage and off. Those include her final National Theatre performance of A Little Night Music in which she turned and faced her American co-star, Laurence Guittard, opening her dressing gown to reveal a corset bearing the words, "Yank go home!"
The point is, do we want our performers to be goody two-shoes, even in panto season? I highly doubt it, in which case the supremely mischievous Torchwood star John Barrowman wouldn't be appearing in Aladdin at the Birmingham Hippodrome. It's just that Danan doubtless picked the wrong moment to transgress and too blunt a tongue with which to do so. On the other hand, I can't help wondering what the impish Mickey Rooney of yore might have said in exactly the same situation. In the days, that is, before he found God.
