Breaking Baz: UK Panto King Michael Harrison On How Andrew Lloyd Webber Put His Name In Lights, And William & Kate’s Family Night At Palladium

EXCLUSIVE: It’s quite something when Andrew Lloyd Webber, the West End’s biggest theater owner taps you on the shoulder and says he has something to tell you. Even more so when he leads you from the London Palladium‘s orchestra seats, up a couple flights of stairs where a beaming Madeleine Lloyd Webber is waiting to greet you, because they’ve designed a new lounge and dedicated it in your name.

That’s what happened to Michael Harrison, the 44-year-old producer behind Imelda Staunton’s triumph in Hello, Dolly! at the Palladium and her celebrated turn as Rose in a revival of Gypsythe Sunset Boulevard now on Broadway starring Nicole Scherzinger, The Drifters Girl and countless other musicals, directing three pantomimes — one in his native Newcastle, Birmingham and the annual Palladium Pantomime, now in its ninth year with Robin Hood opening there tonight. Plus he overseas 22 pantos the length and breadth of the U.K.

It’s a rare thing. And it happened to Harrison on Thursday night. On Friday, he was still stunned and deeply moved.

Forgive me, but these things are usually done posthumously. “That’s why I was so overwhelmed. This doesn’t happen when you’re alive, does it?” he smiles.

Harrison has been instrumental in revitalizing the Palladium with an annual summer show, always a musical, and the pantomime. Theaters are churches. Some are cathedrals and the Palladium is the Vatican. It’s the home of variety. Back in the day there was a TV show called Sunday Night at the London Palladium, and Brits in their millions crowded around their television sets to watch it. Harrison has helped make the Palladium a beloved national institution again.

To show their appreciation, the Lloyd Webbers unveiled a theater lounge they’d dubbed ‘Harrison’ spelt out in fluorescent illuminant lettering.

“We’re absolutely thrilled to be able to mark Michael’s remarkable contribution to The London Palladium in this way,” they wrote me.

“Since we took on this iconic theatre, no one has contributed more to its success than Michael. It is the least we could do for all he has achieved,” they added.

The whole thing was a closely held secret. A handful of LW Theatre executives and Jake Hines and Innis Robertson, Harrison’s two key longtime lieutenants at Michael Harrison Productions, were in the know.

“I knew nothing about it. I was downstairs working in the Palladium and I knew nothing about it,” Harrison says. “It’s such an honor.”

As it happens, I’d been following Harrison around for a profile. It involved sitting in on a gloriously funny rehearsal for Robin Hood over at the Jerwood Space rehearsal rooms in Southwark, South London, within spitting distance of London Bridge and the Tate Modern. And I sat in on an orchestra rehearsal at the Palladium.

The panto’s stars filed into the room. They included Jane McDonald, who was playing Maid Marion, Julian Clary as the eponymous hero of Sherwood Forest, Marisha Wallace as the Sheriff of Nottingham, ace ventriloquist Paul Zerdin, Nigel Havers, Rob Madge and Charlie Stemp. Tosh Wanogho-Maud was away that day and he was covered by Harrison Wilde.

I dutifully sat between Michael Harrison, with his directing hat on, and choreographer Karen Bruce, as Elaine Yeung, the deputy stage manager and show-caller, called on Madge, playing the Spirit of Sherwood, to kick off the show.

Then Stemp kicked his leg up, right up, and executed a tilt.

I thought, “Will he require medical attention after doing that?”

Even in this raw state, every gag penned by Clary, with input from Harrison, landed.

Yeah, landed in my lap.

Should have figured that I’d be a sitting target for their ribaldry.

Clary strolled on and did a scene that involved a stick of seaside rock, a long-ish tube of rock-hard candy. You can see where this is going, right? He walked up to me, with a wicked twinkle in his eye, saying that I could handle the stick of rock.

That wasn’t the end of it.

The dancers were doing a strenuous number, when all of a sudden one of the performers, by the name of Tom Inge, ripped off his sweaty t-shirt and threw it at me. I could have died of embarrassment. But it was funny. Presumably some unsuspecting soul in the front seats will be clutching Mr. Inge’s clothing tonight.

The jokes were wicked and raucous and laugh-out-loud funny.

Harrison tells a story about William and Kate, the Prince and Princess of Wales, although they were the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in December 2020 when they took their children Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis, then aged 7, 5 and 2, respectively, to a special edition of the pantomime called pantoland.

The show marked the first time the Palladium had been open since it shut its doors, as with all places of entertainment, nine months before because of the COVID pandemic.

Harrison had assembled a company that included Elaine Paige, Julian Clary, Beverly Knight, Charlie Stemp, Jac Yarrow, Ashley Banjo, Gary Wilmot, Paul Zerdin and Nigel Havers. “They did it for pennies” on a favored nations basis of £1,000 [$1,274] a week each for the socially distanced production.

With the Lloyd Webbers out of the country, it was left to Harrison to meet and greet the royal party.

“I knelt down at the kids and I chatted to them. George was standing there and I said, ‘Oh, I’m very worried about you coming to see this and listening to some of these jokes.’ And then William said to me in the interval, ‘Don’t worry. George has been explaining some of Julian Clary’s jokes to me!’”

William and Kate were “brilliant,” he says. “They came right down onto the stage at the interval, had a great chat with the cast. Gary Wilmot in full panto dame regalia, frock and everything, said to Kate, ‘I’m so sorry. I don’t know whether to bow or courtesy.’ Kate said to Beverly Knight, ‘I want those shoes.’ They were great that night.”

He continues: “And they said, ‘The kids probably won’t stay for the second act.’ And they did. They didn’t want to leave. And there’s an amazing photograph of the finale of the show. And to the right of the picture in the Royal box is the future king, George, leaning over the royal box, enraptured, watching the show. His first visit to the theater was to see pantoland at the London Palladium.”

George, he says, looked as if “he probably knew all the gags because of being at school, he was rocking with laughter a lot of the time.”

Harrison’s parents took him to his first pantomime when he was a wee nipper. It was to see Dana, who in 1970 had won the Eurovision Song Contest with ‘All Kinds of Everything’ from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. His grandfather used to take him to see comedians. He recalls watching comic legend Tommy Cooper from the back of the stalls gallery at the Newcastle Theatre Royal.

For the last two decades, Harrison has directed and produced a pantomime in Newcastle with the same cast led by local superstar Danny Adams. This year, they’re doing The Little Mermaid. A few days ago, Newcastle went on sale with Aladdin, next year’s pantomime. “And within four days, we’ve taken £1.5 million [$1.911],” Harrison tells me.

Harrison controls Michael Harrison Productions. For 15 years, he also worked alongside Nick Thomas, who founded Qdos Entertainment, until Thomas sold the company to private equity company Crossroads Live Holdings, chaired in the U.K. by Harrison’s old friend David Ian.

Thomas used to be billed as the king of pantomime. That’s Harrison’s moniker now.

Crossroads Pantomimes contracts Harrison to produce 23 pantos, directing three of them every year, and his production company has a general management deal to oversee them.

Then there’s Lloyd Webber Harrison Musicals, which produced the revival of Starlight Expressdirected by Luke Sheppard, and Jamie Lloyd’s Sunset Boulevard. They’re currently collaborating on the composer’s latest show, The Illusionist. Pantomimes only work financially, Harrison states, “if you produce en masse. That’s why whenever anybody tries to do a Christmas show on its own, they never really work. There’s the odd exception.”

“Because it’s all about economies of scale,” he explains. “You buy your glitter in bulk, 10 tons of it. You buy the material for costumes in bulk, your paint, your wood for the scenery. Everything.”

“If you just did one panto, each one makes a little bit of money. It’s only when you then put 23 of them together that you get something that is a business,” says the master showman.

Crossroads pantomimes has a huge warehouse where sets are built.

Julian Clary’s Palladium ensembles created by Olivier Award-nominated designer Hugh Durrant can cost roughly £25,000 [$31,800] each, depending on how outrageously extravagant they are. The trick is that those outfits will be repurposed for next year’s pantomime season for one of the other pantos Harrison manages.

Thousands of costumes are kept in a vast warehouse in Scarborough, North Yorkshire.

Next year, the sets and costumes from Robin Hood will head to Birmingham, which Harrison also directs.

After that the physical production of Robin Hood goes to Southampton.

“And then, so what the Palladium’s doing is giving the regions better quality pantomimes. So this year, the Cinderella that was built for the Palladium is in Edinburgh. The Palladium’s Dick Whittington is in Stoke on Trent. The Snow White is in Plymouth. The Goldilocks is in Bristol, all because of the power of the Palladium panto,” he explains.

Actually, in a sense, everything points back to the Newcastle Theatre Royal when Peter Sarah, its late general manager, took young Harrison under his wing and introduced him to London producer David Pugh who, at the time was producing Art with Albert Finney.

“David taught me many things, but the two most important things he told me were how to pour a large vodka at 8:30 in the morning and how to read papers upside down on somebody else’s desk. Because of course, that was always the thing, wasn’t it? When in the days of contracts and things, you would go in and people had papers everywhere. So you’d look and you’d say, what’s that contract for?

“And it was a real education because David was producing Art at the time. The Play What I Wrote had been a huge West End hit and then had gone to New York,” he says.

Pugh also educated him in “what he would call the management fee tour, which at that time was The Blues Brothers. It toured the regions, and if anything went wrong down in London, that paid for the running of the office.”

Pugh, whom Harrison hails as “a very wise man,” suggested Harrison take on a tour of Art with Hannah Chissick, who had been Matthew Warchus’ assistant on Artdirecting from her new base in Harrogate.

Cast was Christopher Cazenove, John Duttine and Les Dennis.

The capitalization for Harrogate was £35,000 [$44,600]. “David Pugh said, ‘Right, you’ve got to raise £35,000.’ You couldn’t buy a set of costumes for that now. I couldn’t raise tuppence, but ultimately I did.

“You start and you learn,” he says philosophically.

Robin Hood has sold close to £10M [$12,745,000] worth of tickets for a five-week run with 56 performances.

“It is the nation’s variety theater,” says Harrison.

“People love it,” he adds.

Oh, yes they most certainly do.