by Susan Cooper
“For the first Christmas Revels, David Rockefeller lent Carol five hundred dollars — so did John Lewis,” Jack said. “And she managed to pay them back afterward. Graham Gund said to Raine, ‘If you have any loss, I’ll back it.’ People were amazing, in all kinds of ways.”
These were the people who made the Revels a reality, turning it from the personal vision of a single passionate artist into a powerful community institution. They wrote letters, made phone calls, drafted contracts, wrote checks; they advised and organized and schlepped. They were — and are — typical of the unsung heroes of all the artistic institutions created by the Makers. Drawn by the candle flame, these dedicated, accomplished folk devote themselves to keeping it alight. With an assortment of benevolent motives, they raise the money, they sit on the Boards, they make things happen. People rarely write books about them, but without them, books like this one could never be written, because there would be no story to tell.
Jack was the same polymath he had been before, teaching at Shady Hill, performing, working on picture books based on folk songs, speaking at educational conferences on the place of live music in a school curriculum. Now he had to incorporate a lot more into this complex pattern: all the letters and meetings and phone calls that would help raise the money and enlist the performers and production staff for the next Christmas Revels, and the next. Fund-raising was never his favorite occupation: Carol remembers a meeting with a wealthy couple at which, in spite of their constant inquiries about how they could help, Jack could never bring himself to stop describing his ideas for Revels and actually ask for money. On occasion he also had to force himself to listen to cautionary or even negative advice from the more experienced of his volunteer advisers, which was a little like trying to mute the sparkling of a very lively firework.
In 1973, with Nancy thriving as a teacher at the Cambridge Friends School, he gave up his post as music director at Shady Hill, causing almost as much mourning among students and parents as he had at Potomac. Instead he went to a little office on Joy Street, on Boston’s Beacon Hill, to become the New England director of Young Audiences, a job that would prove to make a useful contribution of its own to the development of the Revels. He enjoyed it enormously, he reported.
Young Audiences is a national nonprofit organization for bringing the performing arts into schools. I work with terrific young musicians, actors, and dancers on special programs for this, and I help them to develop ways to relate their presentation to kids, and actually involve the students in their music, et cetera.
Young Audiences Arts for Learning, as it’s now known, was founded in 1952, and reaches seven million schoolchildren a year through affiliates in more than thirty cities. In the arts-deprived schools of today’s economy it’s probably even more valuable than it was then. Performances and workshops bring live drama, painting, music, and verse to kids with starved imaginations fed only by images on screens. Jack loved his new job; his missionary zeal blossomed on Joy Street just as it always had in classrooms. And as a nonprofit, Young Audiences taught him about the difficulties of raising money for the arts, particularly from foundations and government agencies. Above all it gave him the chance to hunt out, hear, and see even more of the talented performers working in New England than he knew already. Over the years, the best of them would turn up not just in schools lucky enough to be served by Young Audiences, but on the Sanders Theatre stage at a Revels.
Carol was his collaborator in these early Christmas Revels, but she was also Mrs. Peter Duveneck, raising small children on a farm in South Strafford, Vermont, four hours’ drive from Lexington or Cambridge. Part of her artistic ethos was and is a very strong sense of “earth and community,” and it was beginning to tug her imagination to Vermont rather than Sanders Theatre. She and Jack still worked closely together, however, and they collaborated on a book for Doubleday, a collection of street games and rhymes called Shimmy Shimmy Coke-Ca-Pop! (“Bring a yo-yo, a bouncing ball, your hula hoop, and your skip rope,” ran their instructions to children attending an outdoor celebration based on the book, at the Newton Free Library, near Boston.) And their shared sense of ritual led them, after the success of the first two Christmas Revels, to add another Revels celebrating the spring.
Christmas and Easter, the two great festivals of the Christian calendar, had been the peaks of the singing year for Jack as a choirboy. His Christmas Revels employed not only the name but much of the music of the Christian festival, even though he always took care to stress that it was rooted in the far-older celebration of the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, when sunlight begins at last to take back the hours muffled by the winter dark. But his Spring Revels had very little connection with the Christian Easter; it was a joyous celebration of the new life of all green things and all creatures, and it was held in May, the time of the spring fire festival of the Celts, called Beltane.
Sanders Theatre being otherwise occupied in May of 1974, the first Spring Revels was held at Kresge, the big auditorium of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was filled with music and dance for the greening of the year, and Carol had chorus members running into the audience to hand out daffodils. Like every Christmas Revels, it had a focal point at the end of the first act, drawing the members of the audience to their feet to dance and sing. At Christmas this magic was worked by The Lord of the Dance, in spring by the ritual of the Padstow Hobby Horse, otherwise known as the Obby Oss. Led by Jack, the Morris men, and the masked figure of the Oss, out came the audience into the green field surrounding Kresge, jigging and singing in delight.
Unite and unite, now let us unite,
For summer is a-come in today,
And whither we are going, we all will unite,
In the merry morning of May. . . .
This was the kind of thing Jack always loved: a theatrical simplification of a cheery ritual that has been taking over the town of Padstow, in North Cornwall, every May for as long as anyone can remember. (There’s another one in South Cornwall, the Helston Furry Dance, but with a Mummers Play called Hal-An-Tow instead of the Oss.) The roots of the Padstow Maying go down into the mythic soil shared by those of the Green Man, of all May Day ceremonies, and all the variants of spring sacrifice listed in James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Today it’s performed for fun, but as Jack instinctively knew, the subconscious compulsion that keeps it going is still the ritual celebration of death and rebirth.
The Oss looks rather like a circular black tent, with a man’s masked head emerging from its flat top, and his dancing feet visible underneath; a “Teaser” dances with and around it. At the end of each verse of the “Maying Song” it droops down and “dies,” to be revived again as the chorus roars into the refrain, Unite and unite. . . . In Padstow itself there are in fact two Osses, dancing their way through the streets in separate processions; the whole village is decked with flowers and flags and everyone wears white, so that the whole place seems to be filled with Morris men.
Jack didn’t go quite this far, but he kept the bouncing musical accompaniment of accordion, drum, and sometimes brass — and also the Oss’s trick of making an unexpected tilting rush to trap the nearest pretty girl under its black tentlike robe. In Padstow, tradition has it that any girl caught even for a moment by the Oss will be married or pregnant before the year is out, but this didn’t appear in the Revels’ program notes.
The Spring Revels had immediate and joyful audiences among all the weary New Englanders who had survived their six months of winter. It was clear to everyone concerned with the show, from Jack and Carol on down, that they would have to do it again the next year. So now there were two complicated new theatrical institutions to be kept going. Soon there would in fact be three, since Carol’s belief in the power of community was driving her to establish the first of many offshoots: Revels North, in Hanover, New Hampshire, presenting a parallel Christmas Revels at the Hopkins Center on the Dartmouth campus.
The Christmas Revels was a regular event at Sanders
Theatre now, each year brilliant but brief: the 1974 Revels consisted of three performances crowded into one day. Production costs inevitably rose as the shows multiplied, but Jack was firmly opposed to raising ticket prices, which in those distant days were $3 for an adult and $1.50 for a child. There was no commercial motive behind this enterprise; he would have made Revels performances free if he could. Reality caught up with him, however, through the forceful reasoning of his collaborators; if he wanted a nonprofit enterprise, they pointed out, Revels would have to be legally registered as such.
Carol says, “We really had to talk Dad into incorporating — it was hard for him to swallow. He didn’t want a board; he wanted to keep it a Mom-and-Pop thing. But Fenton and I had been running Revels through my checkbook, and that couldn’t go on.”
So Jack’s brainchild was incorporated under the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as Revels, Inc., “a nonprofit tax-exempt educational organization to further the production of The Christmas Revels and The Spring Revels and related projects.”
This was a key time for Revels. If it had been based on a warm, fuzzy idea in the head of a dilettante, it would have had a small local success among aficionados and then faded away. But the immediate audience response proved that it did indeed fulfill what Jack had described as “this need — the lack of opportunity in people’s lives to have any communal celebration.” And because he was at heart a professional, with determinedly high standards, in his several separate worlds he inspired not just admiration but respect. Soon there was a growing list of benevolent Friends of Revels, who made their annual tax-deductible donations and had their names gratefully listed in the program in return. And before long, the first grant came from the National Endowment for the Arts, describing Revels as “a new and different form of musical theater.”
Ironically, for an institution based primarily on goodwill but almost belligerently non-Christian, the first foothold of Revels was in a church (and is again today, when the thriving hub of Revels, Inc., occupies a floor of offices owned by St. John’s Church in Watertown, a mile or two up the road from Cambridge). After an initial year or two of what Jack described as “tickets all over the bed,” Revels set up a tiny office in the basement of the First Congregational Church in Cambridge — which also contained a large meeting room in which the early Revels choruses rehearsed. Known as “First Church,” this handsome brick church with a rooster on its tower is actually Victorian, but in 1633, looking rather different, it really was the first church in Cambridge.
This was the home of Revels’ mostly voluntary staff for years, though the rehearsals soon migrated to the hall of a public elementary school, the Peabody School, half a mile away. Jack wore a little track between the First Church, his Young Audiences office in Boston, and the Lexington house where he still lived — with Nancy, her piano and her harpsichord, his sprawling collection of books and music, his beehives and his grapes, and sometimes the now college-age children. At the end of each Revels season, after the months of preparation and rehearsal and the brief exuberant day or two crammed with performances, the Lexington house was the scene of a joyous party for cast and crew. Chorus members and volunteers ate, drank, sang, and danced their way through the small low-ceilinged rooms of the eighteenth-century house until their energy ran out. It was like an enormous family party.
Nancy stood in a doorway watching them all, at one of these parties in the 1970s. It was very late, and she probably had to teach the next day. Jack was in the midst of the crowd, his arms raised to conduct the music as he laughed and sang, and she looked at him with a smile that was enormously affectionate and perhaps a little rueful.
“There’s Jack, totally in his element,” she said.
As Maker of the Revels, Jack Langstaff had to deal with more complicated situations than he did as singer or teacher. Revels itself was complicated, being nonprofit and incorporating a great many amateurs. He had to maintain its identity as an essentially communal celebration but at the same time reassure his professional principals that they were taking part in an enterprise with seriously high standards. He also had to woo them with a serious fee, particularly if they belonged to one of the musicians’ unions. For a man who hated making direct requests, all this took persuasiveness, charm, and his own particular brand of apologetic diplomacy.
Wooing musicians took the least effort; most of them were already his friends. For his soloists, in the beginning he needed early musicians, since the first few Revels were set in a more or less medieval England, with the robes of the chorus giving rich color to the wooden paneling of Sanders Theatre’s stage. Luckily Boston was then on its way to becoming the early music capital of the world; its celebrated Early Music Festival wasn’t founded until 1980, but the talented musicians were gathering. Most of them had their beginnings in the Quadrivium, an extraordinary combination of voices and early instruments created by Marleen Montgomery, and Jack knew them all. So it was Marleen’s group and its offshoots that brought the eerie purity of early music to a lot of Revels audience members who had never even heard of a shawm or a krummhorn or a sackbut.
The offshoots founded by members of Quadrivium included legendary groups like Alexander’s Feast, Libana, and Voice of the Turtle, and all of them became beloved staples of Revels for the next three decades. Carol Langstaff says that it was Jack who put together the musicians who made up Alexander’s Feast, using them initially for the schools served by Young Audiences and later for Revels. Tolerant and devoted, all these early musicians sang, played, and did almost anything Jack asked — even, in the case of the tenor John Fleagle, to the point of undergoing stark terror.
John had one of the most beautiful tenor voices I have ever heard, with the same unearthly quality as the English singer Peter Pears; he also had wavy golden-brown hair and looked like a Florentine angel. At Christmas 1987, Jack indeed requested him to become an angel: to sing, a cappella, the fourteenth-century carol “Angelus ad Virginem” from the top balcony of the stage as part of an experimental Revels that became known as The Light and the Dark.
“The theater will be dark,” Jack said to him eagerly, describing his vision, “and then we hear conch shells blowing, and the sounds of the wind, and the sea — and poetry ending ‘And all about the courtly stable / Bright-harnessed Angels stand in order serviceable’ — and then suddenly we see you up there, spotlit, singing! It’ll be great!”
John didn’t show quite the same enthusiasm for this prospect, but he was a trouper, and he loved Jack. He nodded.
What Jack hadn’t yet mentioned was that John wouldn’t simply be singing from the stage balcony; he’d be hanging from it.
And there John was, when the time came and his lovely voice pealed through the theater: a gleaming winged angel, shrouded in mist, suspended in the air above the dark stage. Part of the magic was of course due to the stage crew who operated the great helium-filled wings, the dry ice producing the mist, and the harness that kept the angel from crashing to the hard stage floor fifteen feet below. But mostly it belonged to John, and his devotion to his artistic director. What he hadn’t mentioned to Jack was that he was absolutely terrified of heights.
One of the most versatile of the early musicians didn’t need to be recruited; he volunteered. David Coffin wrote to Jack from New York asking if he could be in a Revels because he longed to play the tune for the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, and he couldn’t think of anywhere else to play it. Jack put him in touch with Carol, and the next year David duly performed in her Hanover Revels. The year after that he moved to Boston, and although he was sent a letter inviting him to be in the Cambridge Revels, he was also asked to audition.
The same thing happened the next year, and the next. I sort of resented having to audition each year, having already sung solos and played instruments, so I decided to sing the same song at each year’s audition — “Four Green Fields.” After four years of this Jack started singing the song with me — and I never had to audition again. . . . Onstage, Jack
always seemed to be floating just a few inches off the floor. His very presence elevated him, and we all held our heads high just to see him, to sing with him. You wanted to sing with him, you couldn’t help yourself.
There were plenty of people in the world of folk music and dance who wanted to join Jack too, after his decades of singing and dancing with the Country Dance and Song Society. May Gadd, grande dame of the society, had just retired after decades as its director, and Jack lured her to the fourth Cambridge Revels and listed her on the program as Traditional Dance Director and Consultant. The Pinewoods Morris Men, one of the best teams on either side of the Atlantic, had been a basic part of Revels ever since their members Shag Graetz and Jonathan Morse had joined Carol in devising the choreography for “The Lord of the Dance,” and they came back almost every year. Among the dozens of cast members in the vast dressing room of Memorial Hall, they tended to keep to themselves, and were deeply respected for their capacity for beer.
Pinewoods and the CDSS also provided Jack with Jerome Epstein, who lived and worked in New York but from 1970 onward came to accompany him whenever and wherever he gave a folk-song concert. One of Jack’s most devoted friends, Jerry became a familiar presence on Revels stages with his concertina or accordion, and he rapidly grew accustomed to regular phone calls from Jack requesting a new arrangement of a song or carol. (Another Revels arranger was an even older friend, Nancy’s sister, Marshall, by now known as Marshall Barron.) Jerry helped bring the Revels to New York in 1979, and was its music director there for fifteen years.
Nearly everybody found Jack’s enthusiasm irresistible; he launched into relationships as eagerly as he sang a new song. Another musician who found himself answering requests for arrangements was the horn player/composer/physicist Brian Holmes, who was part of the excellent Cambridge Symphonic Brass quintet hired for every Revels from 1974 onward. Jack loved to use the brass for a rousing overture, which Brian generally wrote, and for its power in the dramatic build of a carol sung with the audience. Brian remembers his enthusiasm as having the intensity of a teenager.
