The Shout panto? Sounds interesting.
No, it is a sequence of lessons & carols.

Oh really? Why not go to St. Paul’s for the carol service? It’s wonderful - and free.
Well, it wouldn’t be quite the same. The ‘lessons’ are very bizarre – extracts from the New Testament Apocrypha, diary entries from, for example, Jean Cocteau and Robert Scott the polar explorer, a scientific analysis of the problems of flying reindeer….

I thought the point of a Shout performance was the singing. What are the ‘lessons’ for?
To make connections between songs, to provide context for the singing. I Saw Three Ships is introduced by an extraordinary mystical passage from the Gospel According to James. An entry from James Woodforde’s diary about Christmas dinner in New College Oxford in 1775 introduces a song about dodgy ingredients in bought Christmas puddings. The show is utterly serious at times, utterly daft at times. We move from Rosa Luxemburg in prison to Joan Wyndham getting into a drunken argument at a Christmas party. We move from a stonkingly ferocious arrangement of the medieval carol Personent Hodie to The Marcels’ sublime doo-wop Blue Moon.

So it isn’t all carols.
No. There is a mixture of carols & songs – some familiar carols, some unfamiliar carols, some Christmas songs, some songs connected obliquely to Christmas – pop songs that were in the Top Ten at Christmas, songs about shopping, songs about cooking…. Yes there is In the Bleak Midwinter but no there isn’t White Christmas – instead there is the wonderful Frank Sinatra song It’s Been A Very Good Year sung by Greg Wain, who sounds a lot more like Frank Sinatra than Robbie Williams does. There are medieval carols you’ve never heard, & pop songs you never thought you’d hear again. There is no Jingle Bells.

Yes yes yes it all sounds desperately familiar – every self-respecting carol service has an ‘interesting’ selection of carols these days, some tiresome medieval thing followed by a Tierra del Fuegan folk song, every supermarket has Elvis crooning Away In The Manger – I’m afraid you aren’t being as radical as you think you were.
What makes it unusual & interesting is the approach. The carols & pop songs are sometimes conventionally arranged and sometimes subverted by their arrangements. There is improvisation where there is normally no improvisation. A carol might exist in a version which owes more to Islamic music tradition than Christian. A pop song might end up sounding more like an Indian ghazal. After all, in the Shout there are committed Christians, lapsed Christians, atheists, agnostics, Hindus & Jews; & instead of ignoring this fact, the show uses it as a basis for action.