LONDON — Foreboding music begins. A scary green witch announces her arrival with a cackle. It's the opening of Wicked Witches, a British holiday-time play known as a "pantomime," at a North London ...

There is an old joke. A veteran actor takes a job in pantomime. One night, as he straps on the back-end of a panto horse, he wonders aloud what happened to his career. A wag replies: "It’s behind you!

British pantomime is vastly different from what people worldwide, including Koreans, typically imagine. The earliest form of pantomime, born around the 4th century BC by the Greeks, was a one-person ...