The Magic Maker Read online

  And everything changed.

  Carol Langstaff had had a fragmented childhood, spending part of each year with Jack and Nancy (“At first, I slept on two chairs pushed together in their cute New York apartment”) and part with her mother, Diane. Her two worlds must have had wild discrepancies, but they were both full of music.

  After her divorce from Jack, Diane was married for a few years to Robert Guillard, a marine biologist and musician whom she met through the Country Dance and Song Society. Already fascinated by folk song and folk dance, she then moved to Greenwich Village, where the folk revival scene was bubbling away in the 1950s and 1960s. After meeting the expatriate Irish singers Paddy and Tom Clancy she went to Ireland, comfortably funded by family money, to record folk songs from their family and others, and she was entranced by the youngest Clancy, Liam. They traveled together throughout Ireland, recording songs, and Diane brought him back to New York, where in 1956 she founded a company called Tradition Records. Paddy Clancy ran it for her, and they issued about forty-five records, not only by the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem but by a range of major figures from the thriving folk scene, including Odetta, Ewan MacColl, and John Jacob Niles.

  The Langstaff divorce had truly been an amicable one. One of the first Tradition albums was a record entitled John Langstaff Sings American and English Folk Songs and Ballads, with Nancy Woodbridge at the piano.

  After the Clancys signed with Columbia in 1961, Tradition faded and was sold to Everest Records, but Diane went on collecting folk songs in Ireland and Appalachia. She had learned to play the dulcimer, and sometimes sang and recorded herself as well. In 1963 she married William Meek, who wrote about folk music for the Irish Times, and thereafter lived mostly in Ireland, where they had two sons and adopted two daughters. She had begun calling herself Diane Hamilton, after a character in folk song named Mary Hamilton, and when ten years later she divorced William Meek and married her fourth husband, John Darby Stolt, Mr. Stolt obligingly changed his name to J.D. Hamilton.

  Carol’s times with her mother thus often became song-collecting trips, across the southwest of the U.S. or to Ireland — a country that she too found bewitching, so that the unconventional dance company that she eventually founded and now directs, Flock Dance Troupe, exists both in Vermont and in Galway. After leaving the Potomac School, Carol studied for a year or two at the Longy School of Music, in Cambridge, sometimes acting at Harvard’s Loeb Drama Center and singing at the coffeehouse Club 47, later called Passim. In her teens she had found herself forming a warm relationship with her formidable grandfather Harry Guggenheim, who had had little interest in her when she was a small child. He took her to his favorite race meetings at Saratoga, and she stayed with him often at the family mansion Falaise, on Long Island; he told her she was too skinny, gave her money to buy warm clothes, and paid her medical bills.

  But Carol, who had grown up with song and dance, and at nineteen had joined Jack on a concert tour of Iceland and mainland Europe, was dedicated to a life in the arts, and this didn’t sit well with her grandfather. He had told her he hoped that she would move to Washington, D.C., and marry a diplomat, but instead Carol went to New York, where she studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse, and dance with Martha Graham, whom she came to regard as her mentor. At twenty-one she then moved to Vermont, where she later married a potter. Harry lent her the money to buy her Vermont house, and even came to visit — and eventually, among other generous acts, forgave her the debt in his will — but her talents and interests made her more a Langstaff than a Guggenheim.

  In 1970 Carol was in easy reach for collaboration with her father; she had a small apartment in the South End of Boston as well as a house in Vermont. He urged her to work with him to create a new, stronger stage Revels. “He talked me into it,” she says. She had already directed a Cambridge production of Noye’s Fludde in which Jack had appeared, and he knew that her enthusiasm for ritual celebration was at least as strong as his own. He took her to Harvard University’s wonderful Victorian edifice Memorial Hall and pointed out that it was the perfect place to do a Revels, and that it was empty at Christmastime.

  Memorial Hall, then as now, had high stained-glass windows and a pair of great heavy doors at either end of a cavernous central marble-floored lobby, its paneled walls lined with twenty-eight tablets commemorating Harvard graduates killed in the Union army during the Civil War. On one side of the lobby was Sanders Theatre, a marvelous lecture hall with stage and curved tiers of 1,166 seats, all of it inspired by Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theatre at the University of Oxford. On the other side was an enormous space known then as Alumni Hall, with stained-glass windows and a great vaulted roof. Today, after major renovations, it’s a dining hall renamed Annenberg Hall, but in 1971 Harvard used it for everything from dances to examinations — and it would, Jack and Carol thought, make a perfect communal dressing room and backstage area.

  Jack decided to make a telephone call to a friend at Harvard, Archie Epps, who was dean of students and a great music lover. Before long, Memorial Hall was available to him for two days in December — at a benevolently low rent, which rapidly grew, later, but was hugely valuable at the time. And he and Carol dived into shaping and casting the first Christmas Revels in Cambridge.

  Jack told the Orff Echo, later:

  When I first began, the idea was to start with things I had always been interested in as a layman, as a hobby: folk dancing, sword and Morris dancing, country dancing, Mummers’ Plays. I thought it might be very valid to put them up on a stage or to incorporate them into a little dramatic festival. So first I imagined a theater work. But as I got more deeply into it, I recalled those days in my parents’ house, and the fun of that big carol party at Christmastime. I guess I was looking for something that would touch the audience in the same way, and those participating even more. That kind of celebrating seldom happens in the formal theater.

  And, of course, he wanted to satisfy the hunger for ritual that he could sense ever more clearly in the secular society around him — and in his own psyche too. As a choirboy he had felt buoyed up by the power of the church rituals in which he was taking part — but he wasn’t a choirboy now. He said in another interview, with Maryn McKenna of Boston magazine:

  One of the only rituals we have in our country that isn’t church based is that incredibly poor piece of music “Happy Birthday.” Think about it. You go into a crowded restaurant and hear that tune and everyone will know what is happening — someone is celebrating an important passage in their life. That’s a very powerful thing.

  Now, working and planning with Carol, he began to think much more coherently about the kind of experience he wanted to create. This should be a ritual celebration of the winter solstice, a Christmas festival that — in spite of the name — was not specifically Christian or even religious. Belief should be irrelevant; if one member of a Revels audience felt she was celebrating the birth of Christ, her neighbor should be equally able to feel that he was celebrating the rebirth of the year. It should use the emotional forces of music, of dance, of words. It should be a celebration that would belong to its community, yet reach for artistic excellence. Perhaps he was reaching for a new kind of Mass, dedicated not to a specific God but to a celebration of the amazing mystery of life.

  He and Carol agreed that they should use some basic material from the New York program: the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, “The Cherry Tree Carol,” Morris dances, the Mummers’ Play. Jack, who had for so many years broken the rules of recital singing by talking to his audience about what they were going to hear, also wanted to abolish the fourth wall of the stage. As at the New York Masque, his Revels audience would not simply be passive, watching; they would sing. Certain carols would be part of the show; their words would be printed in the program, and at the beginning, before the house lights went down, he would come out onstage, tell the audience what they were to do, and rehearse them. He would even teach them to sing a round. In Latin. Dona nobis pacem. . . . In ev
ery Revels program he devised in the years ahead, “Rounds for Peace” were somewhere on the program.

  He wanted children in the program, of course — and now that he had been teaching at Shady Hill for four years, he knew where to find them. The school community could also be counted on as a base for the audience, since they had all embraced him with the same devotion as the students and parents at Potomac.

  And at the center of this Revels, and of every Revels thereafter, would be something that hadn’t been there in the early New York or Washington productions, or on television: a large chorus, drawn from the local community. The chorus was key to Jack’s whole vision of this celebration of the solstice; it was the link between performers and audience. He wanted amateurs, local amateurs, because he felt that audiences were more easily persuaded to sing if they could see a group of people just like themselves up there singing with them. But because he was also professional to the core, he wanted amateurs of professional standard. This wasn’t going to be a village pageant; he wanted no allowances made.

  And none were. There were — and still are — so many talented, trained, volunteer singers available in the Boston area, from the Bach Choir all the way through the alphabet to Youth pro Musica, that even the earliest Revels choruses in the 1970s sounded far better than anybody expected.

  Jack said that Carol had ideas that would never have occurred to him.

  She’s very good at opening things out, making country dancing alive, turning it into theater. Like taking the Abbots Bromley slower than they actually do in the village it comes from. In the “Apple Tree Wassail,” she wanted to get apples and take them out into the audience. And she felt you should get different ages of people in, older as well as young.

  So they kept this in mind when putting together their chorus, enlisting singers of all shapes and sizes, and with gray or white hair, as well as black, brown, or blond. And when Carol, as director, began blocking their onstage movements at rehearsal, she gave them an instruction that has held ever since: they should divide themselves into families. Each family held a husband, a wife, a child or children, perhaps a grandparent or two; these units would not move around the stage in self-conscious lumps, but just the awareness of the fictional relationships was enormously helpful to amateur singers who had never been taught how to behave “naturally” on a stage. Backstage, during the early Revels years, when the Memorial Hall was a single vast dressing room for the entire cast, you could see the members of each family hanging out together comfortably even when they weren’t performing.

  Almost everyone involved in that first 1971 Christmas Revels, except the leading musicians, was an amateur — performing, in the true meaning of the word, for love of the enterprise. Even the stage set was the work of volunteers. It was in fact not a set at all, but a vast array of small pine trees. “They brought them down from Vermont, loads of them,” Jack said. “We had pine trees everywhere, all over the stage, out in the lobby, up and down Mem Hall. It was wonderful. It smelled like Christmas.”

  A high point of the program was something that was to become the fulcrum of every Revels thereafter. It was based on the Shaker song “Simple Gifts,” written by a Shaker elder named Joseph Brackett in Maine, in 1848.

  ’Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free,

  ’Tis the gift to come down where you ought to be,

  And when we find ourselves in the place just right,

  ’Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

  When true simplicity is gain’d,

  To bow and to bend we shan’t be asham’d,

  To turn, turn will be our delight,

  Till by turning, turning we come round right.

  An English Quaker poet named Sydney Carter had put new words to Elder Brackett’s “Simple Gifts,” changing it to “The Lord of the Dance,” and he recorded it in 1966, in Britain. Oddly for a Quaker, he turned the gentle statement of Shaker ideals into a beautiful metaphor that was also an overt narrative of the last days of Christ.

  I danced in the morning when the world was begun,

  And I danced in the moon and the stars and the sun,

  I came down from heaven and I danced on the earth,

  At Bethlehem I had my birth.

  Refrain:

  Dance, then, wherever you may be;

  I am the Lord of the Dance, said he.

  And I’ll lead you all wherever you may be,

  And I’ll lead you all in the dance, said he.

  I danced for the scribe and the Pharisee,

  But they would not dance and they wouldn’t follow me;

  I danced for the fishermen, for James and John;

  They came with me and the dance went on.

  I danced on the sabbath and I cured the lame,

  The holy people said it was a shame;

  They whipped and they stripped and they hung me high;

  And they left me there on a cross to die.

  I danced on a Friday when the sky turned black;

  It’s hard to dance with the devil on your back;

  They buried my body and they thought I’d gone,

  But I am the dance and I still go on.

  They cut me down and I leapt up high,

  I am the life that’ll never, never die;

  I’ll live in you if you’ll live in me;

  I am the Lord of the Dance, said he.

  From the moment Carter recorded “The Lord of the Dance,” everyone tended to behave as though his words were just as much in the public domain as those of the original “Simple Gifts.” Perhaps this is the crowning compliment for a writer. Jack made only a few tiny alterations when he first sang it, in the version above, but years later, cautious of offending any Jewish members of Revels audiences, he asked Carter if he might also change “on the sabbath” to “for the people” and “the holy people” to “the high and mighty.” Carter, who once wrote that he believed in “nothing fixed or final,” amiably told him to go ahead. Jack had known the original Shaker song all his life:

  I’d done “Simple Gifts” often in concerts — and Aaron Copland put his version of it into Appalachian Spring. “The Lord of the Dance” I brought back from England, where Sydney Carter did it. I gave it to the Morris men in New York to do at a winter festival there, but it was Carol’s idea to turn it into a dance combining the singer and certain figures from the Morris. So she and Shag Graetz and Jonathan Morse worked out the choreography.

  “Shag” was J. Martin Graetz; he and Jonathan Morse were mainstays of the Pinewoods Morris team. So at the end of the first act of the Revels, in a quick segue, onto the stage ran four figures in Morris whites: a musician, the two dancers, and Jack, and his voice rang out as the dancers strode and leapt. It was and is a masterly piece of choreography, the movements echoing the words of the song, and the steps timed so that the Morris bells on the dancers’ legs punctuate both music and meaning. For the refrain, Jack danced with the two Morris men, and the audience sang. He had duly taught them all what to do at the beginning of the show, when rehearsing them in the carols they would sing in unison at various points in the Revels. In Sanders Theatre the rafters rang.

  Dance, then, wherever you may be;

  I am the Lord of the Dance, said he.

  And I’ll lead you all wherever you may be,

  And I’ll lead you all in the dance, said he.

  And so he did, since the lobby into which Sanders Theatre opens, now known as the Memorial Transept, is so enormous that he and Carol had decided to dance the audience into it. On the last line of the last refrain everyone onstage joined hands and Jack led them down through the house and out into this great vaulted space, collecting audience members on the way. With the brass quintet picking up the tune in a balcony, the audience found themselves singing, dancing, snaking in ever-diminishing circles until the last repeat of the refrain ended in a great communal shout. They loved it. They’ve loved it ever since.

  So the curtain had finally gone up on the reinven
tion of ritual celebration toward which Jack’s life and talents had been propelling him. December 1971 was the real start of his achievement as one of the Makers. There were two performances, matinee and evening, of that first Christmas Revels; Sanders Theatre was perhaps three-quarters filled, and a cast of sixty played to a total of 1,400 people. Carol directed; Jack rehearsed all the singing. Onstage, he was the heart of the show, as a charismatic presence and a soaring voice, and it was his passionate enthusiasm for this celebration of the solstice that fired the instant devotion of performers and audiences alike.

  The people who attended those two performances found a whole new kind of delight infusing their Christmas feelings, as if wine had suddenly become champagne, and they went home and told all their friends. Word spread through the Cambridge/Boston grapevine, and by the second year of the Christmas Revels, although there were still only two performances, on a single day, there were no empty seats in Sanders Theatre.

  Behind the scenes, to make the first Revels actually happen, Jack and Carol enlisted a wonderfully helpful range of friends. There was Fenton Hollander, an architect with entrepreneurial instincts who later founded Water Music, to present chamber music and jazz on cruises in Boston Harbor. There was Raine Miller, then a teacher at Shady Hill, a gifted artist who began as costume designer and soon evolved into one of the major pillars of the Revels. There was, before long, an impressive array of major figures in the local arts scene offering help, advice, and/or money: Terrence Tobias, Sheppard Ferguson, Sinclair Hitchings, and many others.