by Susan Cooper
The audience sang the carol in a state of mounting amazement, as magnificent gleaming props were danced in with every verse, and a great silver mound grew in the center of the stage. It glittered there magically through the climactic “Sussex Mummers Carol,” and through the cheers for the cast’s curtain call, and since Sanders Theatre has neither proscenium nor curtain, there it stayed until the last member of the audience had left. As they all pulled on their coats and shepherded their children out of the theater, you could see their heads turn back toward the stage for one last look, before they went out into the snow.
And the Salvation Army band serenaded them on their way home.
The mail from devoted audience members that year, Jack reported, was almost equally divided between those who called the Victorian Revels the best ever, and those who mourned their peaceful Renaissance program. “That’s a healthy mix,” he said with satisfaction, and proceeded to design a Revels for the following spring that would be even further from the Renaissance, focused on ships and the sea. Against all advice, he insisted on having a great forty-foot mast raised onstage during the singing of sea chanteys; the local fire department was very nervous, and the audience was delighted.
Before you could say knife, he was bubbling with ideas for a Revels that would be predominantly French. He wrote in a letter:
Not to distract you, but I’ve written to Claude Roche-Fogarty (Black Wheat Theatre) in France; and I’m looking about for something that could be used at Christmas from the conte-fable of the Middle Ages. Heard about a book by an Englishman, Russell Hope Robbins, a translation of the Old French Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, which I must look up. The Arthurian Sir Gawain has French roots too, doesn’t it? . . .
He added that he had some wonderful French music for the Quadrivium and the Voice of the Turtle, that he would like the Mummers’ Play put into Franglais, a Chartres Cathedral stained-glass window projected onto a scrim, French tapestries hung onstage, and the windows of Sanders Theatre lit from outside by the fire department. And, he said, it would be great to have John Fleagle sing the thirteenth-century Orientis Partibus, a mock celebration of the Flight from Egypt, known as “the song of the ass,” with a real donkey onstage.
Remembering the backstage habits of the live ewes he and Carol had put onstage in one Spring Revels, I wrote back:
Oh, Jack. Dear heart. Real sheep we managed, a real mast we managed — but this year you’ll be singing in Hanover AND New York AND Cambridge AND you want a real donkey?
He did indeed sing in three different cities in succession that year, but for the French Revels in Cambridge we managed to dissuade him from including the donkey — he made do with a couple of hawks, borrowed from the Boston Children’s Museum. One of his other ideas, however, was to end the show with a sixteenth-century French carol called “Sing We Noel,” which he had never used before.
The tune was beautiful, and he wanted an English lyric for it. I began it Over the snowy hill the travelers go. . . . and wrote three verses; words and music were printed in the program, as are all Revels songs intended to be sung tutti, and the audience was rehearsed by Jack at the top of the act. It’s a heady experience to hear a thousand people singing words you have written, and I would stand at the back of the theater for the show’s climax, feeling an extra Christmas glow as the last verse rang out. But Revels was an institution by now, and its audiences were accustomed to the climax of their Christmas ritual being the “Sussex Mummers Carol.” They felt deprived. One night, having finished “Sing We Noel,” they went right on and sang the “Sussex Mummers” anyway.
The ideas went bubbling on. He came up with a lively Afro-Anglo-American Revels one spring, enlisting a talented Boston company called the Art of Black Dance and the brilliant jazz saxophonist Stan Strickland, who has been a mainstay of Revels programs ever since. The following year he added the singer Bessie Jones and some of her Georgia Sea Island Singers, first recorded by Alan Lomax, for an even livelier show. There were several Sea Revels, a Celtic Revels, and an Appalachian Revels that he built around the memories and voice of the folksinger Jean Ritchie. And once he came up with a Christmas Revels that was a startling breakaway from the others, the result of an idea taken to an extreme.
A remarkable number of the children to whom Jack had taught music at the Potomac School grew up to be very interesting people, and one of them was Christopher Janney. He studied architecture and music and then did a master’s degree in environmental art at MIT; his thesis project became a wonderful installation at the Boston Museum of Science called Soundstair, in which light and sound are triggered by — and as a result, affect — your movements as you walk up or down a flight of stairs. Since then he has created all manner of marvels, mostly in public spaces like airports — though one of the most celebrated was his 1998 Heartbeat, in which Mikhail Baryshnikov danced to the varying beat of his own heart. In 1987 Jack conceived the notion of getting together with Chris, me, and the avant-garde composer David Moss to create a Christmas Revels that would combine sound, music, and words on the theme of the Light and the Dark. The result was controversial, but managed to express two of Jack’s lifelong passions: the Everyman quality of his favorite figure in all myth and folklore, the Fool; and the deep conviction that whatever conflict and destruction mankind may bring upon itself and the planet, somehow, in the end, all will be well.
This was the Revels that included John Fleagle’s perilous and beautiful moment as a flying angel. Jack also broke with tradition by giving it a Mummers’ Play performed in silence, by mimes. Above all, though, it was a reiteration of the Quaker-like pattern he loved to use in Revels, of spreading peace over man-made chaos. Its climax involved not only the entire cast but more technology than any Revels before or since:
Ghostly in half-dark, with the chorus lost in shadow at the back of the stage, the Morris men and the mimes have moved through the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, and as they disappear, just one of them, David Zucker as the Fool, is left onstage. And things change.
Alone onstage in the dim light, the Fool has a little pair of cymbals in his hand; he strikes it, once. Listens to it. In the air, there’s a child’s voice, over a background of playground noises, children laughing, it says:
I wish I wish this wish for you
I wish I wish your dream come true;
I wish I wish this wish beside —
You may not see the nightmare ride. . . .
And in a red light we see children playing, laughing, batting a balloon to and fro. The Fool strikes his cymbals again for them, more flamboyantly, and as if in response, light onstage begins to grow, and with it a sound of voices saying hundreds of words that we can’t yet quite hear, layers of words. (They are on tape, but the live chorus is echoing them.)
Behold, I show you a mystery. . . .
They shall have stars at elbow and foot. . . .
What wondrous life is this I lead? . . .
This is the key of the Kingdom.
Of the Kingdom this is the key. . . .
And on and on, line after line, including a number from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. The voices fill the air, continuous, overlapping.
The Fool strikes his cymbals again, again, pleased and proud, and we see that the growing light comes from a great sun starting to glow behind him. The children are gone but he doesn’t notice. He finds that the high sweep of his arm makes the voices louder; pleased, he does it again, reaching up, and they respond.
The sun grows brighter, brighter, and proudly the Fool brings it on, striking his cymbals, reaching to make the voices louder — to a point where the whole theater is bright with the blaze of this blinding, round sun. Then the sound of the Fool’s cymbals is picked up on tape, deeper, louder — and suddenly drowned, in the deafening boom of a great bell.
The sound is overwhelming, and a black edge of shadow begins to creep over the sun’s giant disk. The Fool panics, cowering, clutching his cymbals to silence them, but he can’t stop the sound. It grow
s and grows, the layered taped words — different, darker words now — running faster, deeper, denser, with a drone from the chorus beneath, and the light fades as the eclipse swallows the sun.
The Fool spins around, arms wide, in an appeal for help, but he finds a chaos of small bright points of light around him (the chorus, whirling about with a light in each hand) in the growing dark — and then the eclipse is total. A red ring surrounds the black sun, the whirling lights engulf the Fool, and the chaos of noise is like a great terrible apocalypse.
Then gradually the whirling lights onstage grow still, moving into three clusters, and through the appalling noise the audience begins to hear music, the sound of voices singing “Dona Nobis Pacem.”
There are chorus members out in the house as well as on stage, singing their hearts out, and the audience picks up the timing from them and begins to sing too, in the three divisions that Jack gave them at intermission. And gradually, gradually, the music quells the chaos that the Fool’s hubris has produced. As they all sing, the noise begins to die and the light begins to return; the black disc and the red ring fade away and all you can hear is the whole house singing, and every light in the place is up full, flooding the house and the stage.
Jack is at center stage now, conducting, and he brings the voices down, softer, softer, pianissimo, until the song is no more than a whisper. The children run across the stage, playing, unaware, as they had at the beginning, and over the last of the song comes the clear childish voice we heard before:
I wish I wish this wish for you
I wish I wish your dream come true . . .
And suddenly the air is filled with dancing golden points of light, so that you can hear the people in the audience catch their breath as they look up. It is one more touch from Chris Janney: the release of tiny pieces of gold Mylar from the top balconies of Sanders Theatre.
Then — to return to reality and the past tense — a trumpet sounded, and they all launched into “Sing We Noel.” And the audience wasn’t deprived of their “Sussex Mummers’ Carol” because Jack and the cast led them out into the cavernous lobby and everyone sang it there — discovering that Chris had planted the whole lobby with reminders of magic, his effect called Reach, so that if they were in the right place they could reach up an arm, like the Fool, and trigger a chord of music out of the air.
When they first heard about the shower of gold, the more practical Revels people had protested. Sanders Theatre would have to be laboriously swept free of little gold Mylar flakes, they pointed out, after every performance.
“No, it won’t,” Jack said. “You wait. Chris says the audience will take them home.”
And he was right: they did.
One other moment from that show was pure Jack, even though he wasn’t there to witness it. Before and after each performance, bells tolled out from the tower of Sanders Theatre — not real bells, but a tape Chris Janney had made of the bells of Lincoln Cathedral, in England. Access to the tower had been limited since it was badly damaged in a fire in 1956, but one night after the show Chris took me up to the point where he had installed his speakers.
“Look,” he said. “Just look!”
So we looked down from the tower, as the bells pealed out into the cold air. Snow had been falling, and all the roofs and streets of Cambridge were white. Way below us, writing their footsteps on the snow, people were streaming out of the theater in couples and groups, muffled and booted, going home to glowing Christmas trees and expectant stockings. There were no cars to be seen; you wouldn’t have been surprised if a Dickensian horse and carriage had come jingling into view. It was a wonderful picture of Christmas, classic, timeless, impossible to forget. It was . . . well, it was the Christmas Revels.
Jack was still a good fit as director of the New England branch of Young Audiences; he had all the right talents, not just to discover bright young artists, but to help them devise ways of grabbing the imaginations of audiences in schools. He enjoyed working with them, and he certainly enjoyed finding them. But by 1981, he was so deeply occupied with Revels, and was brimming with so many plans for its future, that the Revels Board managed enough creative fund-raising to offer him the paid post of Artistic Director. Though the salary was only $20,000, it was enough to allow him to give up his day job.
He wrote a letter to the Board of Young Audiences:
Dear Members of the Board,
It is not without difficulty that I have decided to terminate my work with Young Audiences. As you know, the other half of my professional work has been in graduate teaching, my own concert work, and direction of the Revels, which has grown incredibly since I first produced it. Revels, Inc., is at a crucial point now where the Board has asked me to take on a full-time job as it expands its outreach, publications, recordings, education, and research. If I don’t go into this fully, the new directions can’t be realized. It is a tremendous challenge. . . .
The concept of Young Audiences is one I will always believe in, and my admiration for what you are doing to make it work is steadfast. It has been a pleasure working not only for you, but with you.
He remained something of a nomad; this was still the period when one felt his real desk was the paper-littered backseat of his car. The official home of Revels, Inc., was still the little space in the basement of the First Church, near Harvard Square, but now it had a paid staff of three: Jack as Artistic Director, Raine as Artistic Coordinator, Beth Wilbur as Business Manager. The Board of Directors, on which Jack and Carol both sat, met regularly to guide the future. They argued a lot, often about Jack’s artistic decisions, but it was probably the work of those solidly practical early people that turned Revels into a viable organization.
But the Cambridge shows were multiplying, and now Revels was making records too; for the first of them, Jack had taken a handpicked chorus into Sanders Theatre and invited an audience as well, so that the recording would sound like a live Revels performance. After that he used Harvard’s Paine Hall, which is smaller. The recordings too began to multiply; now there was another company, Revels Records, and the conducting was shared by Jack, George Emlen, and Jerry Epstein.
George Emlen, musician and choral conductor, who is now as essential to the music of Revels as Jack once was, is a Revels person whom Jack first recruited without even knowing it. George was teaching in Maine when he and his wife first heard about the Revels in the mid-1970s.
We didn’t know Sanders Theatre, and we asked for seats in the front row. So our first experience of Jack, as for so many, was having this joyous presence burst onstage, thrust out his hands to us, and cry, “Sing! Sing!” We were bowled over. We went backstage and met him. . . . and from then on became die-hard Revels fans. I staged a Revels-like event at the College of the Atlantic, where I was teaching, and I think the thing that most impressed Jack was the fact that we’d done it for two hundred dollars.
Over the years, George visited Jack at the Young Audiences office, and in 1980, a year after getting a graduate degree in choral conducting from the New England Conservatory of Music, he went to a “How to Revel” workshop given by Jack, Carol, and Raine at Andover. By that time he scarcely needed the workshop. Jack’s recruiting instinct was already at work.
He loved the fact that as well as sharing his classical background, I’d played accordion in a contra dance band, and called the dances. And in 1984, when I came down to sign a contract to teach at Noble and Greenough School, I stopped in at a rehearsal of the Sea Revels in the Old South Church. I told Jack that I was going to be in Boston, and he said, “Good! Now you can direct the chorus!” So I’ve been doing it ever since.
Since Jack had neither the time nor the energy to come up with a totally new concept for each year’s Revels, there was now a certain amount of duplication; Cambridge scripts were used in other cities (with emissaries sent to report on them, since Jack was much concerned with quality control as the Revels name spread), and the Cambridge company itself performed revised versions of the Victorian,
Anglo-French, and Appalachian Revels. But the audiences enjoyed the repetition, and the shows still sold out — and one repeat of a Spring Revels was illuminated by two stories from New England’s master storyteller Jay O’Callahan.
Jack recognized a kindred spirit right away; he invited Jay back to Revels several times after that, and the two of them made a CD together called Stories and Sea Songs. They were both at the National Storytelling Festival at Washington College in rural Tennessee in 1985, and Jay remembers seeing Jack faced with a challenging roomful of seasoned storytellers, magicians all in their own way. What did he do? “He gathered everyone in a circle, turned the lights off, and sang ‘Wild Mountain Thyme,’” Jay said. “Storytellers all over the country still remember it. No one remembers what we talked about that week. They call it the ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’ conference.”
He also remembers the archetypal Langstaff reaction when he showed Jack the room where he was to stay for the conference. “Washington College was on lean times. I showed Jack his room. His window was broken, his cot sagged, the walls were cracked, and there was nowhere to hang his clothes. Jack looked out the window. ‘Cows!’ he said. ‘Great! And right by my window. Great!’”
By 1986 there were four other Revels companies, in Hanover, New York, Washington, D.C., and California, and their dates were staggered so that Jack could perform in all of them. Inquiries about starting similar celebrations had come in from Maine, Virginia, Washington, Ohio, Colorado, Texas, and British Columbia. The year-round pressures of Revels and all the rest of his singing and teaching life multiplied. Nudged by his family, his friends, and his board, he began shifting responsibilities, and in the course of the 1980s George Emlen became Music Director, Paddy Swanson became Associate Artistic Director, and Gayle Rich became General Manager. Revels acquired a proper set of offices overlooking a loading dock at 1 Kendall Square, Cambridge, near MIT, and a permanent staff of five. Over the next seven years, it gradually became clear that Jack was aiming the organization toward a point where he could leave and devote himself to all his other projects.