The Pearly King is everything.
I want to spend a moment reflecting on the person of the Pearly King. The Pearly King is the nickname for the stage persona Henry Croft who appeared in this years Christmas Revels, Washington DC edition. For those who do not know what the Christmas Revels are - there is little I can say here and now that would help. What sum I know indicates to me that it is some type of theater meme that has propagated from New England, I believe (Boston most likely), out across the land. I saw the production at the Lisner auditorium last weekend for the first time. It is my sister's thing to go to this, and has been for years. It was pretty much everything I understood it to be: An evening of earnest, well rehearsed, studied nonsense of the singing dancing revue variety. Designed to place one in a suitable mood of holiday cheer, irrevocable for the duration of the season.
The next day I found myself back at the theater as the brief run closed, at the children's cast party. Piccadilly Pipsqueeks by name, of which my niece Nicole was one. The passion of the mother has passed on to the daughter. Further, those boards nailed end on end are walked on by the dawning generation. Now this is where Henry - the Pearly King makes his true appearance realized by James Houton. Mr. Houton arrives down in the lower lobby of the Lisner where the children's party is underway to put in a brief appearance and grab some food. He immediately finds himself surrounded by a cloud of 9 and 10 year olds. The concept of a pearly king resonates strongly with this crowd. The real Henry Croft was a costermonger and amateur philanthropist in London of the 1880's (a story of sorts underlay this production).
The wee folk take his pearly hat, they took briefly his pearly jacket, and then they chased him and were chased by him running around room with it, playing keep away. They pummeled him and poked him and they make him sign all their shirts. And yet James stayed. He stayed on suffering through several rounds of this abuse. The teenagers of the production showed up after a while and stood in the back in a group, James behind them, as the children sat in a circle to receive their presents and keepsakes from the director and handlers. Watching the teens I understood something. They themselves had sat in that same circle of flush bright-eyed intensity only some few years before. I have mistakenly held the belief that a cast party was like any other party; simply words to lie on a page or spoken to fly through the air. I never understood the power of the thing. The sense of accomplishment and belonging, of community and creation. I understood that the relatively small group of Pipsqueeks represented the heart of this production in many ways. The special hold of the theater is being inoculated in them for some to take lasting root. A sense of possible ways of being awakened. James, late the Lord of Misrule to a London borough built on the stage of the Lisner stayed through to the end as the little troupe was fetted and celebrated, then retrieved his pearly hat and handed back all glitter-markers and vanished up the staircase into the December night.
9:34:36 AM  ;;
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