Imagine Theatre’s Sarah Boden gives us an update as panto season wraps for another year.

The curtain has come down on Imagine’s 2023/24 Christmas season.

This year has been our biggest ever with 19 pantomimes and 3 Santa shows. 1,014 performances selling over 520,000 tickets takes an army of people to stage them and we’ll tell you more about what happened over Christmas 2023 when we can finally come up for some air!

In the meantime, we often get asked what it’s like at Imagine HQ in the middle of panto season when everything is out. Does our store get REALLY empty? The answer is it gets quite empty, but never completely as you will see from the photos.

There are always a few ‘stragglers’ which remain with us – sometimes because there just isn’t enough space in the theatre that particular production is going in to, or we might have swapped out a scene for something different.

What we can do is take the time to complete maintenance work on our building. Things like repairing lights, fixing the roof, doing a huge clean up, repainting the floor (one of the pictures shows Anna doing just that!) and lots of other little jobs and things we just can’t do during the year because we can’t get to it all as there are very large sets and special effects in the way! So just when it’s crazy busy with rehearsals and performances, we add a full building maintenance schedule into the mix too!

It’s never quiet in Pantoland… and we wouldn’t have it any other way!

So a huge thank you to everyone who has been involved this season. Together we have made wonderful, magical memories for hundreds of thousands of families across the UK.