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written and directed by Rob Torr

Torrent Productions, Harbourfront Studio Theatre, Toronto

December 20-21, 2025;

The Hall at Emmanuel United Church, Odessa

December 23, 2025-January 4, 2026

“Can’t stop the feeling!” (Justin Timberlake, 2016)

Torrent Productions entertained Toronto audiences with its lively pantos from 2016 to 2019. Then Covid hit and Torrent (i.e., Rob Torr and Stephanie Graham) relocated to Lennox and Addington County in Eastern Ontario. In 2024 Torrent revived its panto production with Cinderella in Odessa, Ontario, 23 km from Kingston. This year Torrent Productions has returned to Toronto with three performances of Jack and the BeansTalk as part of Harbourfront’s Winterfest before the show transfers to Odessa for a longer run. See it if you can. The Torrent Production pantos are the most authentic pantos I have seen in Ontario.

Torrent’s current production is a revival of its of Jack and the BeansTalk of 2019. It has the same plot, the same characters, the same set, the same jokes and most of the same songs. Only some political references are updated. Is that a problem? Absolutely not! Just like you might return to see another performance of a favourite play, you return to see a Torrent production because you liked it so much the first time.

This fact points to a central difference between Torrent pantos and others around the province. Some, especially the large-scale Ross Petty-now-Canadian Stage pantos, have the notion that reimagining a classic fairy tale to reflect the time is the most important aspect of pantos. A panto about Robin Hood one year presents a different take on the story from the last time it was staged.

For Torrent, the raison d’être of a panto is audience participation. The story is merely a familiar structure to encourage the audience react vocally to songs, riddles, jokes, terrible puns and character entrances. Everyone knows to boo the villain, but the Torrent pantos are the only ones to encourage the whole wide range of possible audience responses. Sitting back and listening to dialogue is not an option. About every two minutes the events on stage call for an audible audience reaction.

As in 2019 Torrent’s Jack and the BeansTalk frames its familiar story as a battle of good versus bad. Good is represented by a Fairy who somehow has lost her wings and bad is represented by a man, Fleshcreep, who has wormed his way into the position of the Giant’s main flunky. We can tell that these two are semi-allegorical beings because, unlike all the other characters, they speak in rhyming couplets.

The main characters from the traditional story are present – Jack, his mother Dame Trot and their precious cow Daisy. To these central figures, Torr gives Jack a girlfriend, Jill, of course, and Dame Trot a potential love interest, the Squire. The tradition Buttons figure, best friend of the Principal Boy, has been doubled into Ed #1 and Ed #2. The only other change to the story is that Torr has changed the Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs to a chicken.

As one might expect six years later, this iteration of Jack and the BeansTalk has a mostly-new cast, except for Stuart Dowling and Greg Campbell, who provide a nice sense of continuity between the pre- and post-Covid pantos.

Curtis Sullivan, who has sung for both Opera Atelier and Toronto Operetta Theatre, makes a fine return to the stage as Fleshcreep. Sullivan has the full measure of the panto villain who must combine menace and comedy. He speaks threateningly and insults children but is really a coward. In particular, Fleshcreep is cursed with the inability to resist dancing to the polka “Die Ententanz”, better known as the “Chicken Dance”, with all the movements. Sometimes when Fleshcreep is attempting to be most frightening, the band will strike up the “Chicken Dance” and Fleshcreep can do nothing but join in. Sullivan makes Fleshcreep’s one weakness an hilarious continuing motif.

Margaret Thompson is a delight as the Fairy. Thompson plays the Fairy as so unpretentious, sunny and kind we feel reassured that everything will work out well. She possesses a lovely operetta-like soprano which makes each of her songs a pleasure.

Keenan Smits is a real find as Jack. Jack may be a bit dimwitted but Smits brings out Jack’s effervescence, friendliness and good will so well that we can’t help but think of him in a positive light. Smits also has a strong, youthful voice and gives us a arousing rendition of “Can’t Stop the Feeling!”

Torr has conceived Jill as warrior woman in training whose first words whenever she enters are “Don’t be afraid”. Kendall Ackland is fully aware of how to make this stance sound heroic and silly at once. The band tends to drown out the words of Ackland’s first song, but she later comes back in force with “Holding Out for a Hero”, even though at that point she has been transformed into a harp. Torr and choreographer Stephanie Graham make an already comic sequence even funnier by having Jill joined by four backup singers who appear out of nowhere to sing the chorus of “du du DU” and “Whaaah” with some “Whish” thrown in for effect.

Benjamin Cameron and Ben Cookson make a great pair as Ed #1 and Ed #2. Their dialogue of multiple mutual misapprehensions is rapid-fire and precise and they have mastered the art of speaking simultaneously. Not only that, but the two are fine singers and dancers. They expertly lead the audience in a big community sing-song of the children’s song “Beans, Beans, the Musical Fruit” in ¾ time with one half of the audience singing the words and other doing an “oom-pah-pah” accompaniment in the form of raspberries. If you wondered why title includes the word “BeansTalk”, here’s the explanation.

Stuart Dowling is an easily flustered Dame Trot, who is a dab hand at making terrible jokes, all duly punctuated by a “ba-dum-tss” from the percussion. Dowling sings a fine rendition of “You Can’t Hurry Love” which receives several reprises during the course of the show.

As the Squire, Greg Campbell is as funny as ever. Not many people could wander through the audience asking, “Has anyone seen my chicken?” with absolute seriousness. Dowling and Campbell make Dame Trot and the Squire’s growing interest in each other an amusing sideplot to the main action.

As usual with Torrent, the production is minimally staged. Three-three-panel screens arranged in various ways serve as the scenery rather than the giant LED screen used by the Ross Petty/Canadian Stage pantos. This adds to the comforting home-made aspect of the show but more importantly serves to stimulate rather than supplant the audience’s imagination. In particular, the adults in the audience applauded the ingenuity with which Torr staged scenes one might not expect to see on a stage. These included the beanstalk growing gradually until it was taller than the proscenium, Jack climbing the beanstalk up into the heavens while actually remaining on the stage floor and, most clever of all, the Fairy, once she regains her wings, soaring into the sky.

As it was in 2019 the highlight of the show was the cast’s performance of a music hall routine called “If I were not upon the stage” in which one actor after another sings about what profession he or she would like to do accompanied by movements or the arms and /or feet illustrating the job. All eight members of the cast were involved beginning with the Squire and added to one by one, acting out everything from being a policeman to window-washer to a ballerina to a soccer-player and more. When seven actors are singing together the intricacies of the near-misses and suggestive gestures of their mechanical motions is a wonder to behold. The fact that the Villain, as the last to join, can’t fit in, brings the hilarity to an even higher level.

One feature of the performance I attended was quite different from all the other performances of Torrent pantos I attended. At this evening performance adults far outnumbered children. Initially, I was unhappy that the adults’ stronger voices tended to drown out those of the children. Then I realized that something quite remarkable was happening. The adults were responding with so much excitement because the panto made them feel like children again and able to react in ways that years of “being an adult” had tamped down in them. I have written often about how liberating pantos are for children in giving them a feeling of agency over adult actions. This time I realized that pantos are also liberating for adults in permitting them, at least for the show’s two hours, to free their inner child. To succeed in making adults from 20 to 80 boo, cheer, sing silly songs and double over with laughter is the best holiday gift I can imagine.

It’s great that Harbourfront invited the company to bring the Odessa panto to Harbourfront’s Winterfest this year allowing a wider audience to enjoy the fun. Let’s hope this is the start of a tradition.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Keenan Smits as Jack; Margaret Thompson as the Fairy; Greg Campbell as the Squire and Stuart Dowling as Dame Trot; Benjamin Cameron as Ed #1, Ben Cookson as Ed #2 and Curtis Sullivan as Fleshcreep. © 2025 Torrent Productions.

For tickets visit: torrentproductions.com.