The Magic Maker

  Any Christmastime, at Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The snow is deep outside. Into the cavernous, echoing lobby stream hundreds of families, all the generations mixed, coat-wrapped and scarf-wound, their breath clouding in the cold air. Christmas is in their heads, and this is a peak of it: their anticipated celebration, familiar as Mass to a Catholic or pantomime to an English child. The happy thunderous babel of voices washes over you like a sea.

  “The dragon with the big claws,” says a very small boy insistently, “will the dragon be there, like last year?”

  “Betty!” cries one harried mother to another, barely visible through the bobbing heads of her tribe. “I never see you except at the Revels!”

  “Wouldn’t be Christmas without it.”

  “Daddy’s going to sing the carols,” says a small confident girl.

  “You sing, I’ll listen,” says her lugubrious father through his overcoat collar.

  The lights go down, the voices hush, and the families are deep suddenly in reawakened echoes of winter festivals from two thousand years past: pagan and Christian, Celtic and Nordic, Anglo-Saxon and Hebrew, and a dozen other cultures. A clear solo voice sings the lilting Hebridean “Christ Child’s Lullaby”; eerily horned dancers stalk through a fertility dance as old as Stonehenge; in a bright swirl of medieval costume, a procession of musicians and chorus sings its way through the house to the stage. The dragon duly cavorts; beribboned Morris men leap and dance; a troupe of players brings brave Sir Gawain to challenge the Green Knight. The audience roars, laughs, sings, and at last finds itself winding in an immense singing, dancing line through the crowded lobby, led by a smiling, dark-haired man whose voice rises strong over the rest:

  Dance, then, wherever you may be,

  I am the Lord of the Dance, said he . . .

  And the lugubrious father is singing and dancing there too in the throng, overcoat flapping wide, a look of bemused delight on his face.

  We stand, John Meredith Langstaff and I, in the dim-lit theater, among the empty seats, discussing a forthcoming spring production of the Revels. He waves at the air: “I want a great forty-foot mast to go up, in Act One, right here. Men hoisting it, singing sea chanteys the way they were meant to be sung.”

  “That’s lovely, but it’s crazy. We’ll hit that chandelier.”

  “There’s some marvelous material — windlass chanteys, chanteys for hoisting sail —”

  “Too dangerous. And what about the sight lines?”

  He says craftily, “We could have the mast sway, in that storm at the end of your seal story. Wouldn’t that be great?”

  “It won’t work, Jack. We might brain half the audience. It’ll be too heavy. Too complicated. Too —”

  Three months later, a thousand people cheer as a tall shining mast rises dramatically in the middle of Sanders Theatre, bringing timeworn sea chanteys vividly alive. When the artistic director of the Revels has dreams, they tend to come true. . . .

  In the thirty years since I wrote those words in The Horn Book Magazine, John Langstaff’s Revels has spread across the United States: its Christmas — and spring or summer — productions are a seasonal landmark not only in Cambridge but in Hanover, New Hampshire, in New York City, in Washington, D.C., in Oakland and Santa Barbara, California, in Houston, Texas, in Tacoma, Washington, in Portland, Oregon, and in Boulder, Colorado. It has spawned similar celebrations in many smaller towns, the range of outreach work is enormous, and the scope of the whole network continues to evolve under its new leaders. An idea has become an institution. The major beacons in all the arts depend not only on artists, performing or creative, but on Makers: charismatic visionaries like Joseph Papp, Jacques d’Amboise, Tyrone Guthrie, Martha Graham — and John Langstaff.

  As you may know from experience, it’s hard to define the Revels. It is not commercial theater; it isn’t folksy; it isn’t a concert; it is neither religious nor pagan — yet it combines certain strong elements from all these into a peculiar form of theatrical magic. The National Endowment for the Arts, giving Revels a grant in its early days, called it “a new and different form of musical theater.” Using a core of professionals and a chorus of amateur singers, Langstaff contrived to weave song, dance, and drama into a celebration of the winter solstice. He hit a nerve, providing an answer to that submerged yearning for ritual, and for the marking of ancient landmarks in human life, which lies very deep in all of us and which very little in the American Way can satisfy. (In Britain, that same yearning is probably the reason why the monarchy survives.) Telling signs of emotion have always appeared in letters from the fiercely possessive audiences who buy out every Revels production in every city: “I can’t remember the last time I felt such a personal involvement in a performance,” ran one typical example. “I left with an incredible glow of joy.”

  I am a writer, mostly of books published for children, though overall I’m more of a GP than a specialist. I joined the Revels family in 1975, after being recruited by Jack (nobody ever called him “John” for more than five minutes) backstage at the previous year’s Christmas production. For the next twenty years I wrote verse, short plays, stories, lyrics, program notes, record notes, and any other words Jack felt he needed. We became working partners, linked by respect, understanding, and the pleasure of the job we were doing; we grew to know most of each other’s strengths, failings, and foibles, and when he died in 2005 I lost one of my three closest friends.

  A year or so before that, after a series of tentative references to “a project I’d like to talk to you about,” he had announced that he wanted to write a book that he thought would be called The Choirboy. “Starting with that extraordinary childhood of mine, going away to choir school for years at the age of seven. I’ve been thinking about it a lot — so much that happened later must have been sparked back then. . . . Will you help me?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  But time ran out on us. So I’m doing it for him, using our notes, his papers, my own files and tapes, and some invaluable recordings made by the Revels’ Music Director, George Emlen, and its Marketing Director, Alan Casso. I owe particular gratitude not only to George and Alan but to Gayle Rich, to Nancy, Carol, Deborah, and David Langstaff, to Paddy Swanson, Brian Holmes, Sue Ladr, Roger Ide, David Coffin, Jerry Epstein, Jay O’Callahan, and many others. This is not a full Langstaff biography, nor a history of the thriving, complex organization that Revels, Inc., has become today, but it shows, I hope, how Jack Langstaff’s Revels began.

  Here is a portrait of one of the Makers, and — now and again — a personal record of a working friendship.

  On the morning of April 6, 1918, the film star Douglas Fairbanks (senior) flashed his gleaming teeth on the steps of the New York Stock Exchange and launched a Liberty Loan drive “to support our brave soldiers.” It had taken the United States three years to join in the Great War that had been devastating Europe since 1914, but now public opinion supported President Wilson so enthusiastically that the drive would raise more than $4 billion ($60 billion in modern terms) within a month.

  The peril of war is a great promoter of matrimony. In another part of New York that day, one of those brave American soldiers was getting married. Captain Bridgewater Meredith Langstaff of the 77th Infantry Division was thirty-three, tall, dark, and dashing, and his bride, Esther Knox Boardman, was vivacious, very pretty, and just nineteen years old. It was an ironic pre-echo: though this was supposed to be “the war to end all wars,” twenty-five years later their first son would be propelled into marriage with an eighteen-year-old by another world war.

  After the Armistice of 1918, the Langstaffs set up house in Brooklyn Heights: first in Columbia Heights, then in a three-story brownstone at 39 Garden Place. Meredith
, a lawyer who eventually specialized in public utility cases, had been born in Brooklyn. He came from a long line of Langstaffs with roots in the north of England and a genetic tendency to independence of spirit. The first American Langstaff, Henry, had come to New Hampshire in 1605, and his descendants moved initially to New Jersey (to escape the Puritans spreading north from Massachusetts) and later, being loyal to the Crown, to Canada (to escape the Revolution). But Meredith’s father, John, a doctor, moved back in the nineteenth century from Canada to practice in New York, and he sent his sons to Harvard.

  Meredith was class of 1908, along with the cardiologist Paul Dudley White and the historian Samuel Eliot Morison, and went afterward to Columbia Law School. Eventually he became part of a New York partnership called Donovan, Leisure, Newton, Lumbard, and Irvine. The firm had been founded by another Columbia Law graduate, William “Wild Bill” Donovan, who also founded the OSS, precursor of the CIA. (“My father had an amazing range of friends,” said Jack Langstaff once, “including a famous spy.”)

  Pretty Esther Langstaff may have been fourteen years younger than her husband, but she was a remarkable girl, from a cultivated and intensely musical family. Her mother had a very high coloratura soprano voice and had given concerts in Paris, and Esther’s brother Arthur inherited the vocal talent and became a notable Wagnerian tenor. Esther sang too, but was usually to be found at the piano; she was an instinctive pianist, of the kind who can play almost anything at sight, or by ear. Perhaps she never regretted choosing marriage over a formal musical training; perhaps there was no element of frustrated ambition in the phenomenal energy with which, later, she propelled her firstborn son into a career as a singer. At all events she was to become, among many other things, an accomplished example of what is now called the Theater Mom.

  Meredith and Esther’s first child died, stillborn perhaps, in 1919. There’s no knowing whether young Esther deliberately decided that her second should be a Christmas baby, but he certainly was. Family legend has it that she ran up and down the stairs and moved heavy furniture around to encourage labor to begin, and sure enough, John Meredith Langstaff was born on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1920. When he was two, the little family moved to the house at 39 Garden Place and rapidly put down roots; before long Meredith had founded the Garden Place Association, and he remained its president for the next fifty-four years.

  Number 39 was full of music. There was a constant stream of visiting musicians, not one grand piano but two, and a rousing carol party every Christmas, on the Sunday before Christmas Day. Jack’s father too sang; he had what Jack later described as “a nice lyric tenor voice,” and he had sung in the glee club at Harvard. He had also grown up in a home where (as he once told a newspaper with the splendid name of The Brooklyn Heights Press and Cobble Hill News) his mother held a salon every Wednesday evening “and all the stars of the opera companies would gather to sing and give recitals.” And it was music that had introduced him to Esther. Posted to Camp Upton, Long Island, he had organized a Christmas party for lonely soldiers, and had found himself singing to the piano accompaniment of “a beautiful and talented young lady who was a neighbor of our host for the evening.” They were married four months later.

  It’s quite likely that Jack Langstaff began to sing before he could walk or even talk. He probably heard his family’s first carol party from the womb, since it was held five days before he was born. (After Meredith died, at ninety-seven, his sons found four books detailing all the Christmas party carols — dating from 1920.) By the time he was five years old he had two brothers, Kennedy and David; their one sister, Esther, later known as Terry, was born in 1929, when her mother was thirty, and was the last of the children. There are some fairy-tale photographs of the beautiful children and their beautiful young mother.

  The carol parties were always a peak of the family’s year, with the smell of hot wassail — spiced wine, rather than the traditional medieval English spiced ale, cider, or mead — drifting up through the house from the kitchen. So many friends came that the boys would be dispatched beforehand on frequent trips to the Episcopal church around the corner, tugging their little wooden wagons, to bring back loads of borrowed folding chairs. Jack said, fifty years later, remembering:

  The house would be crowded with people, a candlelit house, with my mother at one piano and someone else at the other, and my father and his friends would sing carols — he must have collected three or four hundred carols from all over the world. Everyone sang — we did “The Twelve Days of Christmas” as a family, with everyone acting out parts — we did canons and rounds, eventually we even did Bach chorales. There were people of all sorts of religions there; it didn’t matter, they all sang.

  Meredith always sang his own solo carol, “King Herod and the Cock,” with Esther at the piano; he was still singing it at ninety-six, not long before he died, though by then a little shaky on the order of the verses. While the boys were young they took turns singing the Page to their father’s Good King Wenceslas; all three of them had clear, true soprano voices in childhood. Jack’s particular solo was the haunting “I Wonder As I Wander”; he had learned it from its composer, John Jacob Niles, who briefly came, dulcimer and lute in hand, as one of the musical visitors to this very musical house.

  And it was Jack’s voice, and its care and training, that became Esther’s mission.

  “We all sang music every night, with her at the piano,” he said. “I don’t know why she concentrated on me. She always believed in it, somehow. As far back as I can remember, I sang, she accompanied me. She insisted on the right intonation — it couldn’t be even a little bit off. And she was very hot on diction, whether it was clean enough. Then when I was seven, she decided I should sing in a choir, so she took me to the choirmaster at the church two blocks away.”

  Jack was not only very young but very thin, and the choirmaster at Brooklyn Heights’ Grace Church told Esther that she should bring him back when he had grown up a little. Esther paid this absolutely no attention. Instead she carried Jack off to another Grace Church, the beautiful, lofty neo-Gothic Episcopal church on the corner of Broadway and 10th Street in Manhattan; her entrée there was perhaps the fact that her brother-in-law had at some point been its assistant minister. Ernest Mitchell, the choirmaster at this Grace Church, had not only a celebrated choir but a choir school; it was the oldest in New York City, founded in 1894 for 16 boy sopranos (and surviving today as Grace Church School, for 400 boys and girls up to 8th grade).

  So seven-year-old Jack faced Mr. Mitchell and sang Stainer’s “God So Loved the World” with his mother at the piano, and Mitchell offered him a place at the choir school and helped to mold his life forever.

  It was a boarding school, next door to the church, and the boys were allowed to see their parents only on Sundays, for three hours. The change in small Jack’s world must have been drastic; up to this point he had been spending half days at the progressive Woodward School (“Maybe Father could afford it then”), which had just been founded in Brooklyn. Now, off he went to the Grace Church Choir School, and stayed there for five years. He was away from home during the summers too, with a singing scholarship at a music camp for boys. Music enveloped his life completely.

  He later claimed he was never homesick.

  I wasn’t lonely, missing my parents — well, probably at first, but they kept you so busy. It was all rehearsals, going, going, going. Mitchell was a wonderful teacher. The way he trained our voices . . . it wasn’t the usual hootie-flootie sound that you hear in cathedrals in England, it had a ring to it. And he was an outstanding organist, a great technician, with all the repertoire including the then far-out music of Charles Tournamine, who’d been a pupil of César Franck. All the young organists about town used to turn up at our Evensong services, to hear Mitchell and his boy choir.

  Within two years, Jack was the choir’s soloist. Esther was still a busy background influence during his years at the choir school. She took him to sing for the celebrated or
ganist Norman Coke-Jephcott at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and for David Mackay at St. Bartholomew’s Church, and both men later hired him to sing soprano solos with their adult choirs. Since the Grace Church choirboys were paid for their singing at weddings and funerals, before he was ten years old Jack was making a welcome contribution to his family’s income — the Great Depression having had its effect on the Langstaffs just as on every other American household.

  Eventually Jack had a gig at CBS Radio as well. “My mother would pick me up at five AM and we’d be at CBS to perform by seven, along with all kinds of soloists and some awful poetry. . . . They’d pay me twenty dollars, or even fifty, and that was a lot then.” His repertoire included all the classic pieces then sung by boy sopranos, like “O for the Wings of a Dove,” but it also went way beyond. David Blair McCloskey, the singer-teacher who was John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s voice coach in his 1960 campaign, once reminisced about singing the baritone part in a performance of the Brahms Requiem in which young Jack Langstaff sang soprano.

  Two years after Jack became a chorister, his brother Kennedy joined him. Since Ken had a tendency to sleepwalk, Jack was charged with looking after him. “He’d go toward the window, and I’d go and put a chair in his way.” Ken too had a beautiful voice, but he had not been given his brother’s sense that his voice was his identity. He was much less restrained than Jack in expressing his longing to be back at 39 Garden Place. Esther Langstaff kept every letter that her children ever wrote her, and after they had grown up she chose the letters she felt should be preserved, typed them all out, and had them compiled in seven leather-bound books. The two elder boys’ letters from choir school show a telling contrast.

  Here is Jack at twelve, writing home on Mother’s Day 1933.

  Dear Mother,

  I love you so much that it is very hard to write because it would take up so much room.