December is the darkest month, but for years, Upper Valley residents could count on a suite of shiny entertainments to take their minds off the lack of sunlight.
Northern Stage would install a crowd-pleasing musical, and in recent years Opera North would stage Amahl and the Night Visitors. And the Christmas Revels would celebrate the return of the light in Dartmouth College’s Spaulding Auditorium, delighting the multitudes.
Last year, things were different.
Revels North made a short film for its devotees to watch. Northern Stage presented It’s a Wonderful Life as a radio play, and Opera North was quiet as the winter surge in coronavirus cases rolled through.
This year, though COVID-19 case counts are higher, much of the Upper Valley has been vaccinated, and all three organizations with “north” in their names are inviting audiences back, albeit for performances that still aren’t quite what they once were.
Northern Stage holds preview performances of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe through Friday before opening night on Saturday. Opera North performs All Is Calm, about the World War I “Christmas truce,” at Lebanon Opera House this weekend.
And the main event, Christmas Revels, is readying an outdoor Revels Festival for Dec. 17 to 19 in Lebanon’s Colburn Park, as well as three separate live performances in Lebanon Opera House.
The productions are all adaptations to the pandemic, to some extent, and as such are one-offs, unlikely to be repeated.
“This is such a unique production, in terms of how this functions at Northern Stage,” Eric Love, the White River Junction theater company’s education director and associate artistic director, said this week.
Instead of a big musical with actors from New York and roles for young Upper Valley performers, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe will be acted entirely by local teens. Divided into two complete casts — dubbed Team Witch and Team Lion — the company comprises 30 actors, Love said.
With eight shows a week through Jan. 2, it made sense to divide the work, Love said. That plan gave more actors a chance to participate and provided Northern Stage with some backup if a student-actor had close contact with a COVID-19-positive classmate or family member.
Love has been working on this production for four years, and staged it informally three years ago. C.S. Lewis’ classic story of the four Pevensie children escaping the London blitz only to stumble through the back of a wardrobe into Narnia has been made into a feature film, but theater lacks the special effects required to generate, say, a family of CGI beavers, or the massive lion, Aslan.
“It can really easily tip into children’s theater and we really want to elevate it into a more mature expression of the story,” Love said.
The story is set largely in winter, and features a visit from Father Christmas, Love noted.
Tickets ($29, $19 for students) are available at northernstage.org and by calling 802-296-7000. The website also contains information about the theater’s COVID-19 protocols, which include masking and proof of vaccination or of a negative test in the prior 72 hours.
All Is Calm, which Opera North first produced in 2019, is an outlier in the opera repertoire, said Louis Burkot, the company’s longtime artistic director.
First, since its characters are all soldiers, the cast consists entirely of men. And second, there is no orchestra, no instrumental music at all, and the hourlong piece is sung a cappella.
“Those two things, in and of themselves, were interesting to me,” Burkot said.
Add to that the realism of the story and All Is Calm stands alone. The Christmas truce took place in 1914, early days in the Great War, when troops weren’t sure why they were fighting and thought the war would end within days or weeks. German and English troops spent Christmas together singing and playing soccer. The opera draws on letters that men on both sides wrote home about the experience.
Rather than conduct, Burkot will be on stage performing, another rarity. He wanted to keep the production as free as possible of theatricality.
Stage director Nora Winsler opted to cleanse the stage of any prop weapons, so the war, soon to engulf the troops, remains separate. The performers, all of whom are drawn from Opera North’s resident-artist program, create the sense of fear and danger in the background, Winsler said.
There’s an echo of the coronavirus pandemic.
“People completely also have this understanding of this omnipresent threat that we can’t see,” she said.
Two years ago, the performances were in the Briggs Opera House, but this weekend’s will be in Lebanon Opera House, a hall better suited to a show featuring 10 male voices, Burkot said.
Performances are scheduled for Saturday at 5 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets ($25-$50) are available through the Lebanon Opera House box office at lebanonoperahouse.org or 603-448-0400. Coronavirus protocols include distanced seating, masking and vaccination requirements, similar to Northern Stage’s.
Planning for the Christmas Revels starts in January, and the big decisions about guest artists and major themes are made in short order. Caution about COVID-19 led Revels North to program an outdoor festival, said Brian Cook, executive director of Revels North.
“We did feel like we wanted to create something that could withstand COVID at its worst,” he said.
Titled “Lighted Candles in the Winter Trees,” the outdoor festival will contain the elements Revels fans look for: the Lord of the Dance; a recitation of The Shortest Day, Susan Cooper’s poem about the winter solstice; the mummers’ play; and the song Dona Nobis Pacem, a traditional plea for peace.
The festival is a partnership between Revels North and the No Strings Marionette Company, which designed and built a puppet representing Revels founder Jack Langstaff for last year’s film. The puppet makes a return this year.
Performances are scheduled for 3:30 and 5:30 p.m. Dec. 17, 18 and 19. At around half an hour, and with free admission at Colburn Park, the performances are an introduction to the Revels’ earnest, uplifting blend of song, dance and spoken word.
Seats are available to reserve for a donation of $35, an offer that ends Saturday.
In addition to the festival, Revels has booked three performers from very different traditions for separate shows. As coronavirus cases declined and vaccinations set in over the summer, indoor performances seemed more reasonable, Cook said.
Violinist, vocalist and dancer Eden MacAdam-Somer performs at 7:30 p.m. Dec. 17. MacAdam-Somer spans musical genres, from jazz and traditional Appalachian and Jewish music to songs she learned during multiple teaching stints at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music in Kabul.
Tickets cost $11 to $37. Revels North is making free tickets available to Afghan refugees who have resettled in the United States this year.
Dec. 18 brings Richard Antoine White, the principal tubist for the Santa Fe Symphony and the New Mexico Philharmonic, to the opera house on a wave of national acclaim.
White has become one of the most inspirational musicians in the country after the release this summer of his memoir, I’m Possible: A Story of Survival, a Tuba, and the Small Miracle of a Big Dream. The book recounts his story of how music kept him off the streets as a young Black man in Baltimore and gave him a route to worldly success.
Adult tickets to the two shows, at 1:30 and 7:30 p.m., cost $37; all youth tickets to the matinee are $8.
The third guest artist, the celebrated Celtic band Coig, is well-known to Upper Valley audiences, having performed at the opera house several times before. They play two shows, at 1:30 and 7:30 p.m. on Dec. 19. Tickets are $11 to $37.
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
Correction
Tuba player Richard Antoine White grew up in Baltimore. An earlier version of thi s column named an incorrect city.
