The Magic Maker

Many months later, Americans and Russians came together. Here’s part of a description I wrote at the time:

  Dmitri Pokrovsky is rehearsing the Revels chorus in a church hall, a dark-red sweater pulled over his shirt against the first chill of October. His right hand holds a sheaf of music, his left hand beats time; he is teaching American singers to make sounds they’ve never imagined before, in a language they can’t understand. “Like this, like a sheep!” he says to a soprano, and drops on all fours, bleating. Challenge overcomes hilarity: down on her knees, the bemused soprano finds herself producing perfectly the strange nasal vibrato of Slavic folk song. Then she stands up, opens her mouth to go on singing — and sounds instantly like an American. Dmitri grins, and points her to her knees again.

  The rehearsal bounces along for hours, through energetic stamping dances taught step-by-step to our delighted, sweating American chorus by Pokrovsky and his associate, Tatyana “Tanya” Nekludova. Pokrovsky is in shirtsleeves now, his forehead glistening; he rolls his eyes, but gives a last spirited fast-footed demonstration. Then he is back with the music, teaching a tongue-twisting sequence of syllables that the chorus can learn only through blind phonetic faith. One singer wails that she will never get them right.

  Dmitri gives her a big reassuring beam. “Listen! If you make mistake nobody will know, because they don’t speak Russian. And me I will forgive you. And Tanya she will block ears.”

  He murmurs to Tatyana in Russian and obligingly she covers her ears. Dmitri begins leading the chorus again: “Pie-doo vwee-doo dah nah voo-lee-tsoo . . .”

  Tatyana Nekludova led most of the subsequent Cambridge rehearsals of Russian material, but she spoke no English, so assistant producer Kate, our only Russian speaker, made the chorus a helpful list of phonetic translations under the heading “WHAT IS SHE SAYING?!” It went on to offer a range of phrases they might find handy in communicating with the ten chorus members of the Pokrovsky Ensemble, most of whom spoke no English either. For instance:

  KAK DYELA’? (How are things?)

  And in answer:

  KHA-RA-SHO’ (Good)

  NAR-MA’l-NO’ soft L (Not too bad, the usual)

  NYE SPRASI’ (Don’t ask!)

  The Pokrovsky Ensemble took off for Alaska in early November, to begin a concert tour that would end with the two Revels productions, first in California and then in Cambridge. While they were gone, Jack had some chest pain that even he couldn’t ignore, and his cardiologist gave him a stress test whose result was so abnormal that it was reported as “strange that he didn’t suffer pain during it.” An angiogram showed “widespread arterial disease,” and he went into the hospital for an angioplasty. I flew back that day from giving a lecture in Seattle and found a note on my desk saying, “Jack is fine after this morning’s op — a bit groggy, but he says he’ll be at rehearsal next week.”

  And so he was. His family and his close friends knew that every day of his presence thereafter was a bonus, but it was easy to forget because Jack himself, though taking his pills and paying due attention to diet and exercise, declined to give the matter any attention. He was far too involved with living to give any thought to death, which is probably a major reason why he lived on until 2005.

  He didn’t sing and dance “The Lord of the Dance” in the Russian-American Revels, however; Mark Baker and David Coffin alternated in performing it for him. Nor did he direct the show; it was produced by Revels veteran Lynne Beasley and directed on both coasts by Paddy Swanson.

  Both in California and Cambridge, this Revels electrified its audiences, from the moment when a great blast of horns at the back of the theater heralded Dmitri and the other Russian men bounding down the aisles singing at the tops of their voices: “Cossack Epic Song,” it was called, and it certainly was. A riotously bicultural show ended with breakneck Appalachian and Russian Mummers’ Plays sharing the same death-and-rebirth theme, and the entire company dived together, more or less bilingually, into the traditional Revels “Sussex Mummers Carol.”

  After which, Sanders Theatre erupted into a roar of celebratory glasnost delight. It was a joyous show, and the collaboration was repeated later in the Houston Revels and on a CD — though Jack never achieved his ultimate goal of taking it to Moscow.

  Six years later, Dmitri — less fortunate than his American twin — died in Moscow of heart failure. He was fifty-two years old.

  In his seventies Jack became a busy missionary, traveling from one Revels to another, advising communities who wanted a Revels, lecturing, teaching, and giving workshops on teaching music to children, at colleges and universities all over the United States — at home, notably at Simmons, Lesley, and Wheelock. Both he and Nancy were deeply involved in promoting the place of the arts in the classroom; after joining the faculty at Lesley, Nancy eventually founded and ran its Creative Arts in Learning master’s program, with Jack as one of the artist-teachers. He still kept up his connection with the Pinewoods music camp; he still sang the occasional concert; he never stopped going.

  This kind of routine was not popular with his cardiologist, but Jack’s attitude toward his health had a lot in common with Queen Victoria’s famous remark about the Boer War: We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat; they do not exist. Angioplasty had provided only temporary help for his diseased arteries, and by November 1993 he was in the hospital for a quadruple bypass operation. He spoke of it rather as if it had been a tiresome attack of the flu, and he had no compunction about appearing in a Mesoamerican Revels in California in 1998 stripped to the waist, with his railroad-track scar clearly visible on his chest.

  But he became a little more careful after the bypass; his energy was no longer unlimited. David Coffin, who took over what he refers to as “the part that Jack built” onstage at Sanders Theatre, remembers Jack performing for the last time in Cambridge at the twenty-fifth-anniversary Revels in 1995:

  He was doing the evening shows while I did the matinees — he was conserving his strength. “The Twelve Days of Christmas” was in that show, and it’s long; the audience is divided into three parts and you have to direct them — it takes a lot of energy. One night I was standing there in the chorus, and just before the song I suddenly felt a firm hand on my back and Jack’s voice in my ear: “David, you do it.” And he propelled me to the front of the stage. No warning. And twelve hundred people looking at me expectantly.

  So he did it, of course, for the man he — like so many — describes as his mentor.

  I learned so much about being onstage just from standing behind him, the first ten years I did Revels in Cambridge. Today when I teach the audience the songs for the second half, I feel Jack’s presence. And when I sing “The Lord of the Dance,” it’s his voice I still hear, not mine.

  We all learned from him. Even as a writer, I learned from him. Sometime in the 1990s I mentioned to Jack that I was haunted by the idea of writing a book about a modern boy actor who finds himself transported back to play in Shakespeare’s company at the old Globe Theatre. Then I wrote a different book instead.

  A whole year later Jack said, “Are you going to write your Shakespeare book?”

  “Oh . . . I don’t know.”

  “I’d love to read it,” he said.

  But I was busy with a screenplay, on some wildly different subject.

  A few months later he presented me with a copy of John Bennett’s Master Skylark, a long out-of-print book that he had managed to hunt down in a secondhand bookshop. It’s about an Elizabethan boy actor.

  He said, “I thought it might encourage you to write about your boy.”

  I groaned. “I’d have to do so much research.”

  A few weeks later he rang up and said, “Are you writing your Shakespeare book yet?”

  So before long I was deep in academic histories of sixteenth-century theater companies, and flying to London to examine the rebuilt Globe Theatre. When my book King of Shadows came out in 1999, I sent Jack the first copy. Inscribed, of course, “For Jack, without
whom —”

  It had been his persistence, not mine, that produced one of my best books, but he shrugged off any suggestion of responsibility. At the dinner celebrating Revels’ twenty-fifth anniversary, he listened to people praising his accomplishment, with an expression of discomfort bordering on pain. The pattern hadn’t changed since he was a choirboy: he loved the power his singing had over an audience, and enjoyed the applause, but once offstage he flinched from any exposure unrelated to his voice. It was almost as though his talent were an independent entity (“the Voice,” he had called it, in those early letters home), and he its servant. Maybe he felt, in some cavern of the unconscious, that creating Revels was part of the service. As Paddy Swanson once put it, “Jack has no visible ego whatsoever.”

  Here’s one other instance. In the early drafts of the script for the Victorian Revels in 1977, there was always a gap before the final “Sussex Mummers Carol.” Jack had written simply, “Verse.” This being an age before the arrival of Google, I spent months scouring every available anthology, and offered him verse by Robert Herrick, T. S. Eliot, Walter de le Mare, Longfellow, and William Morris, and that productive person Anon. He kept shaking his head regretfully. One poem by Eleanor Farjeon nearly made the cut, but in the end he shook his head again. “It’s not Revels,” he said.

  So I wrote him one. It was called “The Shortest Day,” and although its fifteenth line originally included a reference to the “Old Queen” for the Victorian Revels, this is the way it ended up:

  So the shortest day came, and the year died,

  And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world

  Came people singing, dancing, to drive the dark away.

  They lighted candles in the winter trees,

  They hung their homes with evergreen,

  They burned beseeching candles all night long

  To keep the year alive.

  And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake

  They shouted, revelling.

  Through all the frosty ages you can hear them

  Echoing, behind us — listen!

  All the long echoes sing the same delight

  This shortest day,

  As promise wakens in the sleeping land;

  They carol, feast, give thanks,

  And dearly love their friends, and hope for peace.

  And so do we, here, now,

  This year and every year.

  Welcome Yule!

  Jack liked it, which was a great relief.

  I said, “And after you shout that last ‘Welcome Yule!’ maybe the chorus can shout it after you.”

  “Good idea,” said Jack, but he was smiling that faintly evasive smile that always meant he was dodging something.

  “You are going to do it yourself, aren’t you?”

  “Well . . . I don’t know. . . .”

  “Why not?”

  “Well . . . I might forget the words.”

  “You’ve been learning words all your life, for Pete’s sake!”

  “That was for singing,” Jack said, still evasive.

  “Jack, I wrote it for you.”

  But even emotional blackmail didn’t work. The chorus did indeed shout, “Welcome Yule!” and so, instinctively, did most of the audience, but the poem was recited by Robert J. Lurtsema. He did it very nicely, but it wasn’t what I had heard in my head. To get Jack to stand up onstage at that particularly theatrical moment, I should have written a song.

  Almost two decades later, in 2003, Jack sent me a postcard from Greece, where he was on vacation with his family. It was a long time since we had collaborated on a Revels, and I was living in Connecticut, married by then to Hume Cronyn. Jack’s postcard was a picture of the amazing amphitheater at Epidaurus, where, they say, even a whisper from the center of the stage can be heard anywhere in that great hemisphere.

  “Susan dear,” Jack wrote, “I knew Hume had once stood here and done a speech, so I thought of you both yesterday as I stood at the center spot and recited ‘The Shortest Day.’”

  The poem is still a part of every Christmas Revels, and I do have a tape of Jack reciting it for a radio program, but I wish I’d been there that day at Epidaurus.

  Until Revels’ twenty-fifth anniversary, Jack, Paddy Swanson, and George Emlen were a happy artistic triumvirate, with Gayle Rich as Executive Director of the whole still-growing enterprise and longtime Revels mainstays like Alan Casso and Sue Ladr heading a staff of eight. Paddy was directing all the shows in Cambridge and some elsewhere. Jack made frequent western trips, as Revels acquired its eighth city in 1993, with the Puget Sound Revels, in Tacoma, Washington, and its ninth in 1995, in Portland, Oregon. In 1995 he handed over artistic leadership to Paddy, became Director Emeritus and “retired”— but went on giving Revels performances in California, Minnesota, and Illinois, and working on the educational outreach programs that are today as important a part of Revels, Inc., as its solstice celebrations.

  One of these was the Langstaff Teaching Video Project. To finance it, Lisby Mayer, the remarkable psychoanalyst who was also founder and director of the California Revels, had in 1992 already begun the hefty task of raising $87,000. Filmed in California, this enterprise eventually produced two sets of two videocassettes in 1995, Making Music in the Classroom and — for use at home — Making Music with Children. They show just that: Jack teaching children to make music. Quite apart from their practical value for parents and teachers, they are probably a better record of the man who made the Revels than any documentation of the things he actually said about the Revels.

  He had two groups of children, about fifteen in each: one group aged four to seven, the other seven to ten. We see him teaching them, every morning for two weeks, interspersed with his commentary on what’s happening, and gradually we see them learning, more by a kind of osmosis than by overt instruction. Jack gets down on the floor with them but he doesn’t talk down to them; he just talks, sings, shows them what to do, and does it with them. He says in voice-over commentary, at one point: “Everyone’s got this — let’s bring it out of them.” It is all very much the way he used to rehearse the Revels chorus children, in the early years: there was always an implicit assumption of success, as if he were not teaching a land animal how to swim, but teaching a fish how to swim better.

  George Emlen says today: “It was unusual to teach songs the way Jack did. The way he sits on the floor with them in the videos — most people would be at the piano, talking to them over their shoulder. He had that sense of spontaneity, having fun yet always able to quell a disturbance by going past it. There was always joy bubbling up.”

  A small child says, in the film, beaming, “When I feel like singing, I just can’t hold it in, I have to sing.”

  Jack teaches them the traditional songs and singing games that he had recorded and used in the Revels, and on BBC radio and television decades earlier: “Sally Go Round the Moon,” “Over in the Meadow,” “Cocky Robin” . . .

  Who killed Cocky Robin?

  Who killed Cocky Robin?

  I, said the Sparrow,

  With my little bow and arrow,

  It was I, it was I.

  Who saw him die?

  Who saw him die?

  I, said the Fly,

  With my little teensy eye,

  It was I, it was I.

  Who caught his blood?

  Who caught his blood?

  I, said the Fish,

  With my little silver dish,

  It was I, it was I. . . .

  The children love it, and when he asks them if the song is sad or happy, unanimously they choose the second. It’s all about death, and in considerable vivid detail, but as he points out in commentary: “They say it’s a happy song — because of its sassy little tune.” The music has more power than the words. And he keeps the children moving, and makes them listen to the notes they are singing. “All song should have the quality of dance,” he says.

  In the video of the older group in particular, y
ou can see a telling progression in the children’s ease with rhythm and the patterns of music. There are small bemused faces at the start, when he goes around the circle making each of them find a rhythm in the words of his or her own name, but before long they are moving and chanting to “Mango Walk” (“Spit out the words!”), coping with a mix of simultaneous street cries, singing a little two-part canon. By the end he even has them taking part in the collaborative pattern of a very basic orchestra.

  He says, “Working with children, with music, you are working with magic, really.”

  In 2004, Jack performed in Britten’s Noye’s Fludde for the last time. Over the years he had played Noye often; this time, he was the Voice of God in a Revels production directed by Paddy Swanson and conducted by George Emlen — at the same First Church in Cambridge where Revels had first had its offices. God is the only speaking part in Noye’s Fludde, and Britten specified that “he should ideally be placed high up and away from the stage.” So Jack was in the balcony; you can hear his voice ringing out, obeying Britten’s stage direction “tremendous,” in a video posted on YouTube by Sue Ladr of Revels. He observed to George afterward that it was extremely strange to be looking down on the Ark after all these years, instead of looking up at God.

  George, who gets to lead thousands in song at the Revels’ annual RiverSing, an outdoor celebration of the autumn equinox, is one of those who consider Jack their mentor.

  He had that quiet but powerful energy — he taught me how to engage and hold a crowd of any size with simple gestures, sincere intention, and utter conviction. He had incredibly high musical standards, and he was passionate about his art. And there was nothing ordinary about anything he did or thought — every day was an adventure. Anything could be “quite wonderful”— a performance, a meal, a drink, a poem. He’d say excitedly, almost conspiratorially, “I’ve got some Meyer lemons — they’re the best. Come on, I’ll make you a martini with Meyer lemons; they’re incredible.”