Goldie Frocks and the Bear Mitzvah review: The Jewish panto that fits just right

Goldie Frocks and the Bear Mitzvah is convoluted, blundering and deeply cringe-inducing. Of course it is. It’s a panto. Pure British silliness meets a whole lot of Yiddish in Nick Cassenbaum’s new production, and spreads wonderful Jewish joy.

This is an archetypal panto. Plot-wise, we tick all the boxes: Goldie Frocks and the Bear Mitzvah is to the traditional Goldilocks tale what an off-brand Wicked would be to the Wizard of Oz. In this show, we are given the elaborate back-story to the titular character’s home invasion. Our Goldie Frocks is, of course, a worker in an East End clothes workshop run by the evil Calvin Brine, who wishes to remain eternally youthful and who, in order to do so, must skin a cub before his bear mitzvah and wear the fur as a coat. 

Telling her that he wants to make clothing for and not from bears, Calvin Brine sends Goldie to the Behr residence the day before Baby Behr’s bear mitzvah, where, hungry and tired in their empty house, she samples various food items and furniture, eventually finding something “just right”. The better-known fairy tale plays out in one short scene, and quickly our spin-off is resumed: once discovered, Goldie sews a dress for Mama Behr, teaches Baby Behr the Aleph Bet and meets a man named Morris Bloom, who tells her that Calvin Brine’s workshop is rightfully hers! Before she can intervene and stop Calvin Brine, however, Baby Behr is captured and chained up in the workshop. He is eventually rescued by a collective formed of Goldie, Mama Behr and Morris Bloom, and the show ends, after a not-so-brief musical interlude, with Baby Behr celebrating his bear mitzvah.

Children and parents alike will be entertained by this show. For the children, Morris Bloom, the Spirit of the East End who has been banished and lost his magic, is a treat, performing tricks in front of hundreds of awestruck little eyes. When he asks who in the audience knows a magic word, one brave voice from the front row pipes up with “abracadabra please,” which Morris dutifully employs for the rest of the show. Ian Saville’s performance is not just for the kids — when the audience launches into choruses of “oh yes you are,” he dismisses us with a flick of the wrist, announcing that “We don’t have time for that; we’ve got a quick turnaround today.” At moments, Saville seemed to be grasping for the lines somewhat, but I’ve decided to conclude that this was a creative choice — the slightly repetitive, long-winded delivery with a wry smile and a hint of exhaustion was an entirely recognisable form of older-Jewish-male communication. 

The stand-out performance came from Debbie Chazen as Mama Behr. Her wit and assertiveness, combined with Cassenbaum’s writing, meant that despite appearing in an art form that depends on formula, she wasn’t a blatant stereotype of a Jewish mother — or, at least, not an unpleasant one. She’s no real subversion — from a punning perspective, there was no way Cassenbaum could give up the opportunity to use the word overbearing — but this story avoided some of the classic pitfalls of depictions of Jewish mother-and-son relationships. When Baby Behr becomes besotted with Goldie, the script resists the urge to portray his mother as jealous of the new woman in his life. It is Mama Behr, along with Goldie and Morris, who rescues Baby. She may be fretting over RSVPs, making chicken soup and kissing her son’s face ad nauseam, but Chazen is utterly charming, and, through many layers of petticoats and a bagel headdress, presents a character with more depth than anticipated. 

There are, naturally, a few missteps. Calvin Brine’s clothing business only creates very small sizes — an apparent dig at the Brandy Melville up the road — and while this body-shaming is attributed to a villain and therefore condemned, the result is that the show features a lot of talk about skinniness. Mama Behr is vocal about the self-consciousness that comes from being unable to fit into Brine’s designs, and it’s impossible to say how many bodies like hers are in the room. Once the workshop is rightfully returned to Goldie, she vows to create clothes that are size-, shape- and species-inclusive, and this constitutes a happy ending — but the messaging throughout is clear that some bodies are considered more desirable by the mainstream than others. Little ears are always listening, and shoehorning the topic into a celebration of culture and tradition for children feels misjudged. 

Among the show’s more numerous strengths is the music. Musical Director Josh Middleton has brought a lot to the production. In 2023’s debut JW3 pantomime, Middleton decided that “all music must be Jewish music”, and this year that principle has been extended to incidental instrumental snippets in scene changes. The score is the perfect amalgamation of cheesy hits, rewritten pop songs and sheer randomness, all, of course, imbued with some chutzpah: Doja Cat’s “Kiss Me More”, rebranded as “Teach Me More”, is sung by Baby Behr as Goldie educates him on how to read Hebrew, "Mein Herr" is up-cycled to “Mein Bear”, and the show finishes with a jubilant mash-up of “Hava Nagila” and “Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner”. Lots of the cast have quite lovely voices; Chazen’s duet with Heloise Lowenthal to a reworked “Total Eclipse of the Heart” is particularly impressive. The choice of a three-piece klezmer band to bring this soundtrack to life is a brilliant one: the musicians are not only talented but expressive, with Daniel Gouly on the clarinet particularly fun to watch. I’m not sure any of the parody lyrics are likely to stick in my head, but the convictions of the performances will.

In short, the whole thing is ludicrous. That’s exactly as it should be. At a Sunday matinee showing, in a  theatre overflowing with small children, the tangles of the storyline come second to the exuberance of the script and the execution. But it’s not only fun — it is genuinely moving to imagine the generation of children who will grow up seeing the quintessentially British and the quintessentially Jewish existing in such harmony. In a show like Goldie Frocks and the Bear Mitzvah, aspects of identity that can feel forcibly separated don’t just coexist — they hold hands on the British stage, and dance the Hora.

Goldie Frocks and the Bear Mitzvah is playing at JW3 until 5 January 2025.

Hannah Davis (she/her) is a final-year Spanish student at Oxford University.