The Magic Maker

by Susan Cooper

  His voice is a permanent feature of my mental landscape, that sweet baritone — and his way of offering positive feedback on everything. And that enthusiasm . . . sometimes it went beyond what was practical. I remember standing with him and the producer on the stage of Sanders a week before a Revels was to open, and Jack announcing that he wanted me to write a descant trumpet part to be played from the balcony. The producer cringed, since this would have increased the cost of the brass by about twenty percent.

  Though Brian eventually moved away from Cambridge, he went on writing for Jack — and playing his horn in Revels, which by then had spread to both his subsequent homes, New York and California. Today, as a composer, he finds that a third of all the music he has written is connected with Christmas. “In some ways Jack has been like a father to me,” he says.

  He didn’t specifically interact with me as a composer — I think that because his image of Revels came from his experience with folk song, he wanted his material to be authentic. I remember he told me several times not to put major seventh chords into the arrangements — that wouldn’t have been authentic, I guess. But I would put them in anyway and he always praised the arrangements, so maybe he didn’t mind. Or maybe he didn’t notice. . . .

  Brian Holmes thinks back to standing onstage at Revels intermissions and “playing my horn to help the audience along” while Jack taught them to sing the “Sussex Mummers’ Carol.” He thinks back to visiting Jack the summer before he died, and finding him working hard to finish the Revels book of sea chanteys. He says, remembering, “It was like warming my hands in front of a fire to see him again.”

  One of the first nonmusicians Jack recruited was Robert J. Lurtsema, known to listeners of Boston’s WGBH-FM and other public radio stations as Robert J. He was a local celebrity. Quirky and self-confident, Lurtsema was a classical disc jockey who since 1971 had run a program called Morning Pro Musica for five hours every morning, seven days a week. He had a voice like dark chocolate and was known for beginning his program with several minutes of unannounced birdsong, indulging in long pregnant pauses, reading his own news bulletins, and expanding the program to include live studio performances and interviews. Carol had met Lurtsema through the folk scene of the sixties, when she was singing at Club 47 and he was running a radio folk show. So she called him, and he interviewed her and Jack on WGBH. Jack admired Lurtsema’s speaking voice and knowledge of music and guessed, rightly, that he had an itch to perform.

  So he said, “Bob, I wonder if . . .”

  Before long Robert J. was a regular part of the Christmas Revels, declaiming the only two pieces of prose or verse Jack had ever included: a few lines from Hamlet, and a truncated quotation from the sixteenth-century priest-architect Fra Giovanni Giocondo:

  I salute you! There is nothing I can give you which you have not; but there is much that, while I cannot give, you can take.

  No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today. Take Heaven.

  No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present instant. Take Peace.

  The gloom of the world is but a shadow; behind it, yet within our reach, is joy. Take Joy.

  And so, at this Christmastime, I greet you, with the prayer that for you, now and forever, the day breaks and the shadows flee away.

  Lurtsema also played Father Christmas in the Mummers’ Play, whose cast was truly community-based and included a wild variety of talents from the chorus. Being short, balding, and rotund, with a fringe of gray beard, he made a highly suitable Father Christmas — and took pride in earning a round of startled applause at each performance by turning a cartwheel across the stage. At the first rehearsal, this surprised even Jack; he hadn’t known that in Robert J.’s versatile youth, before he settled down and became a magisterial radio voice, he had briefly been a trapeze artist in a circus.

  Jack’s recruiting instinct never slept; he was always ready to reach out to someone who might be useful to Revels. At which point, this narrative has to switch into the first person, since my own recruitment was a classic example of the Langstaff technique.

  I first set eyes on Jack Langstaff in 1974, eleven years after I married an American and moved from London to the United States. Chronically homesick for Britain and its layered past, I had just finished writing the fourth in a sequence of five myth-haunted fantasies called The Dark Is Rising; they dealt with the powers of the Light and the Dark, though set in the real world. One book was shaped by the winter solstice and the twelve days of Christmas; another included a spring carnival based on the Padstow May Day celebrations. I’d never heard of Jack or his Revels.

  One day in December my New York editor, Margaret K. McElderry, came to stay, and we went to the Christmas Revels at Sanders Theatre. We were all entranced, especially my children, Jon and Kate, aged seven and five. Since Margaret was also Jack’s editor, she insisted on taking us backstage to meet him.

  “But I’ve read your books!” cried Jack, shaking my hand. “You should be writing for the Revels!”

  “I’d love to,” I said, still on a Christmas Revels high.

  He looked at me more closely. “Really?”

  “Really. But what could I write?”

  “I’ll be in touch,” he said.

  About six weeks later, sometime in February 1975, he came to call on me, bringing Raine Miller with him. The Revels budget then was still tiny, and a large part of it went to the rental of the theater; sets were still minimal, and Raine had become legendary for the glowing medieval costumes that she contrived out of next to nothing. She looked a little like someone from a medieval painting herself, with flowing brocade garments and long straight hair. It soon became apparent that she was the more practical member of this team, acting as a kind of sea anchor to Jack’s flights of imagination.

  Jack said to me, “Do you know Sir Gawain and the Green Knight?”

  “Well, as it happens —” I went to the bookshelves and produced the Tolkien & Gordon edition of the original Middle English text, heavily annotated in my nineteen-year-old hand. After battling with compulsory Anglo-Saxon at university, it had been almost a treat to learn Middle English.

  “I thought it might be fun to have a dramatized version in the next Christmas Revels,” he said.

  “Great,” I said. “Would you like me to try?”

  “Do you really think you could find the time? It’s a lot to ask, I know how busy you are — I wouldn’t want to overload you —”

  He went on like this for several minutes, intent and concerned. It was his modus operandi, though I hadn’t learned that yet: instinctively he made requests with such self-deprecating reluctance that it would have seemed deeply churlish to deny him what he needed.

  Raine said to me, “We have a terribly small budget.”

  “Oh, well now,” said Jack, embarrassed. “I’m sure we . . . I know you must . . . We can come to some . . .”

  “That’s all right,” I said cheerfully. “You can’t afford me. Let’s not bother about money.”

  “Oh, my,” said Jack. “Oh, come now — we can’t possibly —”

  Raine grinned. “OK,” she said. “Thanks.”

  “The Gawain’s rather long, of course,” Jack said, suddenly down-to-earth again. “Maybe just do the first half. Then if they like it, we could do the second half next year.”

  So I became a Revels person. That’s how people were said to become part of the Revels in those early days, and no doubt still are; it’s a matter of personal chemistry, a subjective judgment. Someone could be a talented singer, a natural performer, a skilled manager, but in the end there was always the same question: “Is he — or she — a Revels person?” The only time I can recall the answer seeming perhaps to be no was in the case of a researcher who became one of our producers, whose manner was so diffident and academic that it took her years to stop addressing Jack as “Mr. Langstaff”— and she turned out to be so good at everything that she was clearly a Revels person inside.

&nb
sp; Jack recruited people who shared his own attitudes. A “Revels person” had to have enthusiasm, dedication, an instinctive emotional response to traditional material — but above all a respect for it. People who liked simply to dress up in tights or robes for a Renaissance Fayre and play at being Elizabethan did not qualify for a place in a Revels cast, though he was perfectly happy to have them in the audience. A Revels was fun, but at its heart was something deeply serious. Like all ritual, it was not to be treated lightly.

  I duly turned the first half of Sir Gawain into a kind of play-poem, and it was staged within the 1975 Christmas Revels by Esquire Jauchem and his Boston Repertory Theatre, whom Jack had already recruited while wearing his Young Audiences hat. The following year, we did the second half. And somehow, in the course of that twelve months, I became Jack’s tame writer for the next twenty years.

  Perhaps he needed one more collaborator. He still relied on Carol to devise each show with him, but she was also busy in Vermont with a Revels of her own. (In 1976 there were four performances of the Christmas Revels in Cambridge and two in Hanover.) Up to this point, he had never even had a script for any Revels: just a running order, with a collection of photocopied pieces of music for the chorus. Wherever he went, he was carrying a battered briefcase with paper spilling out of it. His car was full of paper; I sometimes felt his car was his real office. He made barely legible notes on envelopes, on the backs of letters, on cocktail napkins, and was always hunting for them.

  Nancy tried to help keep his life in order, but her own was increasingly busy. Raine Miller tried too; by now she had left Shady Hill School to run a small preschool in her Cambridge house, and her spare time overflowed with work for Revels. Besides designing and making costumes, she kept track of all of Jack’s Revels ideas and commitments and was his highly competent liaison with practically everybody.

  That left the planning of the material. Jack came calling again.

  “Susan — about spring. Do you know Howard Pyle?”

  “American illustrator, yes? Children’s books?”

  “Robin Hood!” said Jack, with a nostalgic gleam in his eye. “He did a wonderful Robin Hood, I used to love it. You know all those stories, of course you know all those stories. I’ll bring you my copy.”

  “Little John . . . Friar Tuck . . . Allan a Dale . . . D’you want me to turn one of them into a play?”

  “Well, if you have . . . I know how busy you are . . . If you really think you . . .”

  We decided on a short play about Robin Hood and Little John, and he began listing the things he wanted to fit into the next Spring Revels. He was like a Roman candle, fizzing with ideas.

  “A Scots pipe band, wouldn’t that be wonderful? And Scottish dancing, there’s this amazing group . . . and a great Indian sitar player called Peter Row, and some wonderful dancers . . . and Tony Barrand and John Roberts and their lovely pub songs . . . and that great gospel hymn ‘Shall We Gather at the River?’ — and Purcell’s ‘Bartholomew Fair’ — and do you know ‘Nottamun Town’? . . .”

  He half sang a couple of lines of it, in that breathy sketch sound that real singers use in order to spare the Voice. It was a haunting tune and I’d never heard it before. Jack had been singing it for decades; he’d recorded it in London when I was still in high school.

  He said, “But I’m having trouble with the shape. . . . I wonder if you . . .”

  So we began a sort of talking tennis game that evolved into a narrative form for the next spring show. So far, each Revels had been a collection of rather disparate musical elements, but Jack’s theatrical instinct made him want to give them a shape. In his usual indirect manner, he asked for some verse passages to frame the songs and dances he wanted to use, and there were other casual requests along the way.

  “‘The Lyke Wake Dirge’ — it’s very long and it’s all in old Scots — could you simplify it?”

  “Sure.”

  “And the Feast can do ‘Miri It Is.’ You might need to write some new words. . . .”

  This tennis game went on at intervals until Jack — simultaneously discussing everything with Carol — was happy with the form of his Revels, and on my little Olivetti portable typewriter I tapped out not just the things I’d written but, for the heck of it, the text of the entire show. Nobody had ever had time to do this before, and the stage management team were delighted to have a real script that they could annotate with lighting, moves, entrances, and so on. We didn’t have many copies in 1977, however, because Revels couldn’t afford the photocopying bill.

  In my files, the typefaces of the Revels scripts change, year by year, from typewriter to word processor to computer, because I went on doing all this — joining the planning debates, typing the script, writing lyrics, plays, and the program notes, for Christmas and Spring Revels — until around 1995. Like all Jack’s enormous professional family, I’d been recruited. I was a Revels person, for life.

  For that Spring Revels with the Robin Hood play, he changed someone else’s life as well. Patrick Swanson, known as Paddy, was an accomplished young English actor-director who had recently come to the U.S. with his girlfriend, Danielle. “In the spirit of adventure” they had answered an ad in the Boston Globe for a couple to run an organic farm owned by a doctor.

  One evening when Paddy came in from his chores, the doctor, Josephine, told him that her clinic had been visited by a group of singers sent by Young Audiences to sing music from The Magic Flute to the patients. She had been chatting to a very nice man who was looking for a Robin Hood, she said, and she had told him that she had one at her farm. The next morning, Paddy found himself at the local school, where the same group was to perform.

  And Jack Langstaff intercepted me as I came into the room. “Hallo,” he said. “Here’s a place, sit down here and listen to this. Children like Papageno. Look at them! Josie has told me all about you. You don’t mind if we sit here, do you?” We sat on the floor surrounded by ten-year-olds, and as a Magic Flute aria filled the room the conversation went on in an urgent whisper. “Of course you probably won’t be able to do this, I know you have the cows to milk — how did you learn to do that? — Josie told me, but we have this play about Robin Hood and Little John and I have a good actor who could do Little John and it would be wonderful to have an English Robin. . . . Oh, by the way, there’s a Morris team who could do the Padstow May ceremony — do you know about that? — and outside the theater there’s a grassy area and I thought someday we might do a sheepshearing. You don’t know where we might find a sheepshearer, do you? . . .”

  So there was Paddy, a few months later, onstage at Sanders Theatre playing Robin Hood:

  — and singing, among other things, a mysterious ballad called “Nottamun Town.” I shared the stage with a chorus of volunteer singers, a gaggle of children, two English balladeers, a group of Indian musicians, a Morris dancing side, a Spanish dance company, three ewes, and a lamb. I had come under the influence of Jack Langstaff and the spirit of his creation — the Revels.

  And he stayed there, first as actor and then, increasingly, as a director, and when Jack retired as Artistic Director in 1995, Paddy Swanson took his place.

  Jack’s memory was a lucky bag of talented performers. For certain kinds of British folk song he would bring in Robin Howard, the actress-singer with whom he had toured in Voyages during the 1960s; she had a strong, beautiful, faintly Irish voice. For pub songs or sea chanteys he enlisted Tony Barrand and John Roberts, whom he knew from Pinewoods: two transplanted English singer-dancer-teachers who had linked up at Cornell, and whose wonderful repertoire of folk song, from classic to bawdy, masked a couple of doctorates in psychology. And a plan to do a Revels based on Victorian and Edwardian material produced an instant string of names:

  Ron Smedley, that’s who we need. Ron Smedley, countryman of yours. And David Jones, you must know David. And that marvelous Irishwoman in New Bedford, Maggi Peirce — you’ve heard Maggi —

  He always expected the members of his
many small worlds to know the members of all the rest. Within each of those worlds — lieder, choral music, folk song, music teaching, children’s books, Revels — everyone did indeed know everyone else, but Jack was the only one who crossed all the boundaries. He had heard Maggi Peirce sing at her coffeehouse in New Bedford, Massachusetts. She came from Belfast, had an all-embracing motherly smile, called us all darlin’, and looked like the personification of British music hall. David Jones was from Jack’s folk-song world, another great performer of traditional British songs and chanteys; he came from London and sounded just like my dad.

  As for Ron Smedley, he still lived in London; Jack had met him in the 1960s while working on his BBC TV series Making Music. Television administration was Ron’s day job. His true love was dance, in all its forms, and he taught at the Royal Ballet School and directed the enormous festivals that the English Folk Dance Society held each year at the Royal Albert Hall. When he eventually turned up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for rehearsals, he began teaching selected members of the chorus the hilarious “animal dances” from ragtime America — the Bunny Hug, the Turkey Trot — which had outraged conservative English Edwardians around 1910, and the delight of his dancers was wonderful to see. They couldn’t stop smiling when they made their way home from rehearsals. Nor could we; nor, in due course, could the audiences. The sight of dignified, beautifully gowned and tailored ladies and gentlemen suddenly kicking up their heels to a jingly string band was a high point of the seventh Christmas Revels.