Mime Your Own Business

Florida Brits might not be your regular tea-and-crumpet Anglophiles, but they still celebrate Boxing Day and think pantomimes are a gas. The Gold Coast Theatre continues its tradition of droll storybook divertissement for the whole family with Mother Goose Goes to Mars, a show whose cross-dressing high jinks draw as much from the stylings of commedia dell’arte as they do from the lowbrow sensibilities of Monty Python. Pantomime (known as panto among diehards) is a time-honored British tradition of Christmastime fare for the family -- replete with song and dance numbers and skewed fairy tale plot lines. The show stars Mike Winters as the eponymous nursery rhyme dowager and spins a seasonally appropriate yarn about good and evil. Mother Goose is the blissed-out guardian of the Village of Happiness, but when her abode is threatened with conversion into a discount strip mall, a cosmic quest to get the balance right ensues. The woes of gentrification may not be the typical stuff of panto enchantment, but Mother Goose is sure to be good rollicking fun today at the Byron Carlyle Theater.
Sun., Jan. 8, 3 p.m.