Mark Jaster As Thaddeus Hatcher Vesta Victoria & Henry Croft, The

The Washington Revels Presents Of Sentiment & Melodrama A Victorian Carols & Comedy, EntertainmentIn Celebration Of The 2002 Winter Solstice Featuring The incomparable Mark Jaster As Thaddeus Hatcher With His Perambulating Penny Farthing The celebrated Vesta Victoria & Henry Croft, The Pearly King The talented Covent Garden Costers, Carolers & Bells The beloved Piccadilly Patterers & Pipsqueaks The renowned Mellifluous Music Hall Minstrels The remarkable Foggy Bottom Morris Men & The amazing Pickwick Mummers Troupe Under the astounding & unsurpassed direction of Roberta Gasbarre, artistic director • Clif Hardin, music director Monica Mohindra, production manager • Cindy Speas, executive director & producer At Lisner Auditorium of The George Washington University 21st & H Streets NW, Washington DC December 6 - 8 and 13 - 15, 2002 The Washington Revels Celebrating Twenty years! ore than thirty years ago local teacher and noted concert baritone John Langstaff gathered M students at the Potomac School to create seasonal celebrations from early and medieval English traditions. Little did anyone know what would spring forth, creating a momentum so strong that it has reverberated around the country. In those days were sown the seeds of what has become a treasured Washington cultural institution, nurtured for two decades by founder Mary Swope and a large community of Revels supporters. The Washington Revels today has become a year-round organization dedicated, through performance, community outreach and education, to reviving, nourishing and promoting communal celebrations of the cyclical renewal of life that have drawn and bound people together through the ages, across all cultures and generations. Our path toward year-round activities started with nineteen years of May festivals beginning on two urban, tree-lined blocks in D.C., growing to include festivals at Malcolm X/Meridian Hill Park with groups of children from nearby public schools performing, and culminating last year in an historic partnership with the 64 year-old Flower Mart at the Washington National Cathedral. In an effort to deepen and broaden the impact of Revels material year-round, there is a growing schedule of interactive family-oriented workshops, classes and open rehearsals designed to spread the magic of music, dance, drama and ritual beyond Lisner Auditorium. Additionally, the Washington Revels is now in its third season of partnership with The Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution’s Discovery Theater. Programs with Revels chorus members, ‘tradition bearers’ with first person presentation and Library curators introduce, in a lively and interactive way, the resources of these public institutions to school children. Through these programs, Revels has discovered a new way to bring traditional material from previous Christmas Revels productions to thousands of area students and countless others around the country through continuous web broadcasts. The broadened scope from a small gathering of students to a winter audience of 10,000 and year-round performances before thousands of area students may seem dramatic, but the energy and spirit behind that growth will continue to inspire the Washington Revels well into its third decade and beyond! THE PROGRAMME Introduction o celebrate our twentieth season, The Washington Revels conjures, for your inestimable pleasure, T Queen Victoria’s London just after her Golden Jubilee in 1887. In such a time and place, we honor the Golden Jubilee of the current Queen of England as well as the richness of British traditional music and ritual that inspired the first Revels’ celebrations over 30 years ago. We find ourselves in a crowded 1890’s London open street market, much like Covent Garden, where costermongers (cart merchants), patterers (who call out the news of the day or sing a newly minted tune for pennies), sign carriers advertising shop wares or theatricals, and buyers of all economic levels crowd the loud, busy streets during the holiday season. Everyone you meet on the street and in the audience will soon be invited to celebrate together at a party in the Lyceum Theater, just after the closing of a popular Music Hall theatrical. We are swept up in the incredible energy of the times—an enterprising and rising merchant class, the urban conglomerate of immigrants from all over the British Empire, the large underclass of mill-workers and unemployed displaced in the larger cities during the Industrial Revolution, the joyful music and class-leveling humor of the Music Halls, and the resolute striving of the upwardly mobile, family-centered middle class searching for roots and consolation in medieval customs. The hanging of evergreens, the riotous mummers’ play, the evocative and mysterious Abbot’s Bromley Horn Dance are among many solstice rituals we share today that might have died, were it not for the Victorians’ determined efforts to record and preserve such ancient customs. Given the conflicts and cares of the times, both then and now, a chance to come together on the shortest day of the year gives hope to all of us that sunny days will soon be longer and the optimistic light of a new year will come once again. PART I 1. Street Cries Victorian London echoed with the wonderfully varied sounds of street criers, who after centuries of hawking their wares have gradually been silenced by 20th century advertising. A few can still be heard today, like the newsboy, and the fruit seller in the street markets. Peter Akroyd’s Biography of London notes that the city “has always been characterized by the noise that is an aspect of its …its energy and of its power.” The cacophony fell somewhere between anarchy and expanding personal liberty. COVENT GARDEN COSTER S PICC ADILLY PATTERER S & PIPSQUEAKS 2. Brass Street Band The British Brass band tradition started in the earlier part of the Industrial Revolution with employers financing factory bands to decrease the amount of political activity by the working class during leisure time. By 1860 there were over 750 brass bands that trained a large repository of players for competitions, political campaigns, the temperance movement and The Salvation Army bands (formed around 1880). In hard times, there were often pick-up bands to be found playing any tune to earn a living on the streets. BRIGHTON ROAD BR ASS 3. Pennysheet Songs Sold by “patterers” or street orators who thought themselves socially and intellectually well above costermongers. They ran or roved from street to street selling jokes, news, playbills or political literature. They also might have earned pennies from selling sheets with lyrics such as Kate Kearny and Poor Kitty, the Fruit Girl written to popular tunes. STEPHANIE MILLER, SINGER 4. The First Nowell An English 17th century carol harmonized by Sir John Stainer in 1871 and published for the first time in a Victorian carol collection. The country custom of wassailing from house to house became institutionalized when towns began hiring groups of musicians called ‘waits,’ an old term related to ‘awake.’ Our carolers, however, are simply London neighbors of various trades and professions. COVENT GARDEN C AROLER S & BELL S PICC ADILLY PATTERER S & PIPSQUEAKS BRIGHTON ROAD BR ASS When invited Everyone Sing! (Last verse) The first Nowell, the angel did say Was to certain poor shepherds in fields where they lay, In fields where they lay keeping their sheep On a cold winter’s night that was so deep. Nowell, nowell, nowell, nowell. Born is the King of Israel. 5. Hark! The Herald Angel Sings Familiar words, written in 1739 by Charles Wesley, and set to a Mendelssohn chorale in 1856 by W. H. Cummings. After the Salvation Army was founded in 1880, it became a favorite of the Army bands, whose music and charity were familiar features of the London Christmas season. ENTIRE ENSEMBLE Everyone Sing! Hark! The herald angels sing Mild He lays His glory by, Glory to the new-born King! Born that man no more may die, Peace on earth and mercy mild, Born to raise the sons of earth, God and sinners reconciled! Born to give them second birth. Joyful all ye nations rise, Ris’n with healing in His wings, Join the triumph of the skies, Light and life to all He brings, With th’angelic host proclaim, Hail, the Sun of Righteousness! Christ is born in Bethlehem! Hail, the heav’n-born Prince of Peace! Hark! The herald angels sing Hark! The herald angels sing Glory to the new-born King. Glory to the new-born King. 6. The Broom Dance A traditional English folk dance from Devonshire performed to the tune Weel May the Keel Row, a Border song about the flat-bottom barges that carried coal up the river Tyne to Newcastle and their tough, hardworking keelmen. KEEGAN C ASSADY AND BILL HOFFM AN, DANCER S STEVE HICKM AN, FIDDLE 7. Oranges and Lemons & Pop Goes the Weasel Oranges and Lemons, a children’s game naming the great bells that rang out from London’s many steeples. First appeared in Walter Crane’s Baby’s Opera published in 1877. Pop Goes the Weasel, a Cockney children’s song. A Cockney is traditionally a person born within hearing distance of the sound of bells from the Church of St. Mary Le Bow in Cheapside, London, and refers to an East London accent. Cockney rhyming slang is a secret language, thought to have originated during the Victorian era by costermongers to communicate with each other while trading. In rhyming slang “weasel” comes from “weasel and stoat,” which rhymes with “coat.” “Pop” is slang for “pawn.” Thus “pop goes the weasel becomes “pawn the coat.” PICC ADILLY PIPSQUEAKS The Introduction of Mr. Thaddeus Hatcher and his Perambulating Penny Farthing to Mr. Henry Croft, the First and Foremost Pearly King. 8. I’m Henry the Eighth I Am A favorite sung by the famous Henry Champion who epitomized the exuberance and energy of the1890’s music hall.

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