The Christmas Revels, now in its 39th annual production at Sanders Theater (through Dec. 27th), may sometimes appear, at its surface, a corny family-friendly holiday show where a bunch sometimes amateurish performers hop around the stage in patched overalls and bonnets singing long-forgotten songs. But, it’s actually engaging in a very necessary act of cultural preservation, as important and as intellectual as any other cultural institution’s output that I can think of.
Revels works to bring to the stage each year the most pure, essential, and neglected American musical repertoire. Forget about the death of classical music, because folk music is really hurtin’ and that’s a shame because as a country, it’s something we have that’s so beautiful and unique and I think we have a responsibility, maybe not to keep the traditions alive, but to at least keep the culture alive through performance, not to mention airplay and recordings. We, as Americans, owe as much to Shaker hymns, Gospel music, the Carter Family, and Odetta as we do to Beethoven or Rossini. Revels meets this challenge of preservation in such an personal way, that’s so true to the music it sustains. Let me quote the program book.
And that brings us to another essential element in the Revels amalgam: our amateur chorus. While we bring the highest production values to the Sanders Theatre stage, we very deliberately select a volunteer chorus, who do not necessarily come with professional acting or singing credentials. We do this because it is the amateurs – literally, those who love – who exude the passion and verisimilitude of a village community and transform the performance into a true celebration of the season. The same goes for our children: not a polished choir of angelic voices, but a rough-and-tumble crew of neighborhood kids playing and singing together for their own amusement.
This is the strength of Revels and why they can get hundreds of people to sing and dance their way right out of the theater and into the lobby for intermission. (And standing during Messiah is a big deal?) The audience feels like part of the show. The program feels like hymnal. The production has such a sense of community about it that nobody is embarrassed to belt it out when the house lights come up and it’s time for a round. It always feels close and communal, despite the historical gap between the audience and the subject matter.
The village on stage somehow feels just like home. While a woman seated to my left felt the need to loudly opine during the (albeit weak) sketch Wicked John and the Devil as if she were Toby Zinman…”this is stupid…stupid…more stupid…mediocre,” the woman to my right left her hearing impaired headset on her lap and sang along to the songs she seemed to know well. Some dialogue from the second act’s Mummers’ Play, where a old tyme travelin’ theatre troupe passes through the Revels’ village setting, further speaks to this.
We are not actors who act up on this here floor
We are your friends and neighbors who you’ve seen before
Featured Christmas Revels performer Suzannah Park, traditional singer from North Carolina (Thomas Ames. Jr.)
Of course, consummate professionals do make appearances. This year the show stars Suzannah Park (above), the talented Appalachian singer, clogger, and preserver of shape-note hymns, as well as gospel singer Janice Allen. Park, always with a beaming smile, coached the children’s chorus through Appalachian counting song-games like Angel Band and gave a wonderful rendition of Bright Morning Star with the women’s chorus that made intelligent use of the Sanders space with surround-sound harmonization. The performers brought in by Revels Inc. are not cast to fill a particular role, but are each an expert in a particular musical tradition that informs the program; Come Let Us Sing and Brother Ephus were sung by the Armstrong Family, Park’s grandparents.
Creative lighting for Angels Hovering ‘Round turns Sanders into a planetarium. The Stony Point String Band and the Cambridge Symphonic Brass Ensemble provide rousing music for the vocalists and dancers. The show joins together geographically and historically diverse musical traditions with a common iconography of American trees–the Native American Tree of Life, Shaker Tree of Light (below), and a good ol’ Christmas tree. The Christmas Revels gives us a very different kind of Christmas than we’re used to, but one that is no less authentic and true to our roots. I wish I had gotten to this earlier because if you squeeze in one more holiday show this season, I’d make it this.
Hannah Cohoon's classic Shaker drawing, Tree of Light, painted around 1845 at the Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield
The Christmas Revels through Dec. 27th @ Sanders Theater. Tickets: $10-$52 (discounts for kids) @ the Harvard Box Office.
