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What's on in London: Little Miss Christmas

Who will win the Candy Cane Crown?

Gaydar

13 Dec 2025 — 6 min read

Making a bid for your festive entertainment schedule, Little Miss Christmas is currently on at the Southwark Playhouse.

Created and performed by Patti Boo Rae, the production features a different guest performer each night as they navigate a pageant in which they're vying for the Candy Cane Crown.

This is an entertaining show and Patti is an accomplished and engaging performer. On the night we were there, the guest was Duane Nasis - who delivered a sexy boylesque performance to La Minogue's classic track, Slow.

Fun, flirty, and festive, this is exactly the kind of Christmas show that makes London the place to be at this time of year.

Little Miss Christmas will run at Southwark Playhouse until 3 January

Patti Boo Rae on How To Date Men

For our podcast, How To Date Men, we caught up with Patti Boo Rae for a behind-the-scenes look at Little Miss Christmas.

In the conversation, we talk pageants, guest stars, and the emotional complexity of the festive season.

Listen to the episode

Little Miss Christmas brings a pageant to the stage. What was your inspiration for creating this production?

I wanted to do a kind of real old school variety show where you've got like, you know, song, lip sync, dance, strip, joke, you know, just like bam, bam, bam, one after another. And I was struggling to find the right format. Then I thought, well, you know, a pageant would be perfect because it's got all these categories, swimsuit, evening wear, interview, talent.

So the form that the show took is that each pageant category kind of becomes a different type of act in a variety lineup. And then I thought in the spirit of variety, wouldn't it be fun if we had a different guest artist every night?

All my work tends to be narrative. I like to tell a story. And so I won't spoil it, but the guest artist in Little Miss Christmas kind of makes the story happen and they also mean that it's never the same so I never know what's going to happen going into a show and and every show is different.

How does that work in practice? How do you prepare for something like that?

That's part of the fun of it is that you can't really prepare for it. Not to go too kind of big brain about it, but I do feel like that is sort of the USP, if you will, of live performance is that everyone knows that they're seeing something that could go catastrophically wrong at any moment. And if that happens, like it's happening in front of you, you can't change it, you can't fix it before it meets the audience.

That's kind of the fun of it to me is bringing myself and the guest performer and the audience all into a space where no one quite knows what's going to happen, but also making sure that we're all there to have a good time.

Last Christmas, you performed this show in Newcastle. This Christmas, you're bringing it to London. Has it evolved at all over that time?

Every time I remount a show, I just want it to be bigger and better. I've had a little more time to redo costumes, order new hair, that sort of thing.

I wear 10 costumes in 90 minutes. So I've gotten to kind of revamp some of those and make them even better than last year.

That's a lot of quick changes!

It's a lot of quick changes and they are quick. And that's part of fun of it too. That's the secret talent. The real magic trick is the one that no one actually gets to see, which is me just frantically tearing my clothes off and pulling them back on. I've got them all lined up backstage, just kind of like pooled on the ground and I step in, pull them up, pull the hair on and then go.

I think the real difference is it's a longer run in a bigger venue. It feels like it's kind of taken a step up and I'm very glad to have the theatre that commissioned it and put it on last year, Alphabetti up in Newcastle, joining us as co-producers for this run. So that's really nice. It feels like it's still kind of keeping it in the family and bringing that kind of fringe scale show from the Northeast and putting it on a London stage.

Of course, being in London, I've got a whole new pool of incredible talent to draw from when it comes to guest artists. So that's been quite fun as well.

Do you have a wish list of guest artists? Is everyone open to the idea of being in the show?

No, they're not. But from most people I've had a warm response overall. People are up for it. Especially with drag and cabaret performers, you just kind of have to say, sure, and see what happens.

I basically say, would you like to come compete against me in a pageant of my own design? You can bring any act you want. A little bit of Christmas is good. I tell them a bit what to expect, but part of the fun of coming to the show, I think is watching them figure out what's happening as it's going.

We've got drag queens, we've got drag kings, we've got drag things, drag clowns, but also we've got standup comedians, we've got burlesque, we've got dancers. Depending on what might you come, that specialist act could really be anything, which keeps it fun.

Pageants can have a pretty intense energy. Are you a naturally competitive person?

I am quite competitive,

Christmas is quite competitive, I think. Christmas is a time where we can feel like we're competing against each other or against ourselves and where a lot of us feel like we are being evaluated and scored, whether that's by a panel of judges or just by your mother-in-law.

I think that's part of the appeal of the Christmas pageant to me is thinking about the competitive side of the holidays, dialling that up to the extreme and seeing what happens.

Is that the point of view that you're getting across in terms of the fun side of competitiveness, but also how that search for validation can lead you down some dark paths?

It starts with the fun side, then as the show goes on, that starts to get a little out of control. Patti Boo Rae may or may not learn the true meaning of Christmas by the end of the show.

The conceit of this year's pageant is that Patti thinks that she is competing unopposed because she's with the reigning Little Miss Christmas - five years running. And then with the arrival of the guest artists, we see some surprise challengers and that doesn't go down very well.

Do you have any Christmas traditions or is Christmas something that really resonates with you?

I love Christmas.

I like to host Christmas parties. That's kind of the highlight of the season for me. I love having people over.

I think that's why I like doing the show so much because it really does kind of feel like hosting a little Christmas party every night - I get to welcome people into the space and throw a party.

What do you hope that people feel when they come along to Little Miss Christmas?

I really love the holidays because they are quite a complex time emotionally for a lot of people.

I know it's holly jolly and jingling all the way, but I think for probably most people, that's not actually their experience of the holidays - it can be quite stressful, quite isolating and to me, that's kind of what it's all about, right? Like that's why we put all these lights up at the darkest time of the year.

I think the world in general feels very dark right now. So with this show in particular, I just wanted to make something that feels really warm and really fun and really uplifting without being too sticky sweet.

It's a show that you can come to even if you're not really feeling the Christmas spirit, that's okay. I think this show might be for you.

I hope that people just feel a little warmer and a little lighter coming out of the show and heading into a new year.