Boston Globe REVIEW: Midwinter Revels Serves Up a Frolicsome ‘Feast of Fools’

By Jeffrey Gantz, Globe correspondant. Updated December 18, 2023, 3:04 PM

CAMBRIDGE — The Feast of Fools arose in medieval Europe as a Christmastide ritual in which a mock bishop or pope was elected and low and high officials changed places. The inspiration came perhaps from the birth of the Christ child in a humble stable and the idea that the meek will inherit the earth. The Feast of Fools is alluded to in Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” where Sir Toby Belch serves as the Lord of Misrule, and in Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” with Quasimodo getting elected the Pope of Fools. It’s a natural theme for a “Midwinter Revels,” and this year’s sumptuous “Medieval Celebration of the Solstice” gives us three fools for the price of one.

Jeremy C. Barnett’s set is anchored by a massive half-timbered fireplace festooned with lights and flanked by wooden benches, pewter tankards, and straw-covered wine bottles. It could be a great manor hall, or a monastery refectory, but we’re actually in the peasant village that the King (Vincent Ernest Siders) has selected this year for his traditional Christmas visit. In preparation, his three fools, Folly (René Collins), Fiasco (Eliza Rose Fichter), and Flop (Roger Reed), are ordered to clean the floor; they begin by using the wrong end of the mop and wind up in the stocks. The King then arrives and proposes to celebrate “with song and dance and local beer,” but when they cite the custom of the Feast of Fools, he’s bound to release them and surrender his crown.

The fools stage entertainments that include a group juggling act and a pantomime show in which the King fights monsters and Death to win light back from the dark. They select a Lord of Misrule from the audience to sit on the King’s throne and declaim macaronic nonsense (“propter propter helicopter”). It’s all innocent fun until the King tries to light the solstice candle from the Yule log. Because he’s not wearing his crown, Death (Susan Dibble or Laurel Swift) is able to steal the light — which means the fools will have to fight the monsters and Death to retrieve it. As the first act ends, the trio set off in their ship of fools, Fiasco impressively wearing the vessel as a headpiece. Their hellfire-hued monster is a Red Dragon (Mark Ward); they entice it to skip offstage to “The Lord of the Dance,” but to defeat Death, they need, and get, the help of the Angel Gabriel (Athéna-Gwendolyn Baptiste).

This narrative is, as always with Revels, skillfully embellished with song and dance. The Solstice Chorus contributes the carols “Personent hodie,” “Sing We Noel,” “Noel nouvelet,” and “Veni veni Emmanuel,” plus Palestrina’s sublime motet “Sicut cervus.” Accompanying herself on a hurdy-gurdy, Barbara Allen Hill is austerely chilling in 12th-century German abbess Hildegard von Bingen’s antiphon “O cruor sanguinis,” and she’s joined by the Solstice Chorus for the Catalan carol “Ríu Ríu Chíu,” the Basque carol “Gabriel’s Message,” and the pilgrim hymn “Stella splendens.”

The Evergreen Children are up to their usual high jinks in “There Was a Pig Went Out to Dig,” “Old Roger Is Dead,” and “Tomorrow the Fox Will Come to Town”; the animal headdresses are adorable, and so is Flop as the poultry-stealing fox who grinds salt and pepper over his anticipated repast. The spirited peasant dances choreographed by Dibble never take themselves too seriously; the Pinewoods Morris Men have similar fun with the hand-clapping “Mrs. Casey.” Music director Elijah Botkin’s arrangements for the Revels Brass Ensemble and medieval-flavored String and Buzzy Walking Band run from the plainchant “Dies irae” to a seductive Astor Piazzolla tango for Fiasco and Death.

Even though the solstice candle has been rescued, the fools are still in charge till the end of the day, so it’s the King’s job to provide entertainment, and he devises a novel version of the St. George and the Dragon mummers play. The Hero (Collins) and the Green Dragon (Heather Koerber Nunes) face off as French chefs, but it’s the Green Dragon who’s sporting Julia Child’s “École Des Trois Gourmandes” logo and brandishing the bigger knife. Just as the Hero seems to have gotten the upper hand, the Red Dragon reappears. Inevitably, the Hero falls; just as inevitably, the Doctor (Reed) fails to resuscitate him, despite pulling out a string of sausages from the body and employing a wire whisk and a baster. It’s mistletoe, as always, that brings the dead back to life.

All the longtime Revels favorites are here: the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance, “Dona nobis pacem,” “The Lord of the Dance,” Susan Cooper’s “The Shortest Day,” and the concluding “Sussex Mummers Carol.” Ageless and irreplaceable master of ceremonies David Coffin leads a hilarious “Twelve Days of Christmas” sing-along that includes special audience participation for the “gold rings” of the fifth day. But it’s the irrepressibly inventive Folly, Fiasco, and Flop who remind us that there’s no end of wisdom in foolery.

Jeffrey Gantz can be reached at jeffreymgantz@gmail.com

MIDWINTER REVELS: THE FEAST OF FOOLS

Directed by Patrick Swanson and Debra Wise. Music direction, Elijah Botkin. Choreography, Susan Dibble. Set, Jeremy C. Barnett. Costumes, Heidi Hermiller. Lighting designer, Jeff Adelberg. Presented by Revels. At Sanders Theatre, Cambridge, through Dec. 28. $20-$105. Streaming Dec. 25 through Jan. 7, $40.50. 617-496-2222, www.revels.org

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