Interview with Christopher Moore

CONTENTS

Introduction

WTH = W. Thomas Huyck
CM = Christopher Moore

20 - 1961

York Cycle

WTH: We're talking now about something referred to as the York Cycle...and this is in 1961.

CM: Going back to the 1950's, the teamwork between Eleanor Lewis and myself in and around and for the Church was multifaceted, anchored by the choir but not confined to it. And we were invited -- I think along about 1958 --to a performance of a group that I think called itself Stage 58, but was down at Rick's Restaurant downtown and they were doing Sartre's "No Exit." We worked out an experiment in which they performed Sartre's "No Exit" with discussion afterwards in Woolman Hall upstairs [at First Unitarian Church] as theater in the round. And a couple of the key people in this were Boardman and Sarah O'Connor - - Boardy was working for WTTW as tech director or one of the senior tech men of that time and WTTW was down here in the Museum of Science, which is how we at the same time got involved in working on telecasts for the Chicago Area Council and finding it very convenient with no budget at all -- we could all just walk down there. But, the No Exit performances, in fact, led to the development of a theater company that called itself "Company of the Four" -- Sally and Boardy being two of the four -- which came to live in that Woolman Hall space and share it with the choir and the church school. By 1961, one of the things that they wanted to do of a different sort was scheduled -- namely a performance of selected plays from the York Cycle...the English Mummer's dramas of a certain period in British theatrical church-related community arts.

WTH: Yes, very early.

CM: Very early. And there was music referred to or texts referred to in some of these items which could be sung, and we worked out together what the singing of these would be, and that winter when the York Cycle was performed for a series of nights in the main church, the choir was part of the music for that. They were the choral singers with a series of items scattered throughout the evening. It was a unique experience. A lot of fun. One side thing that is not musical but damn good theater.

1963

Ravinia Pablo Casals oratorio | Tim Black | Kip Perkins | Donald Hollins

CM: Now the next thing that happened in that process was that Ravinia signed Pablo Casals to open the 1963 season at Ravinia with his own oratorio Elpha Zapha, and it required a boy soprano. We were at a very strange point at that moment in the story of the choir here at First Unitarian because about two years preceding we had had the largest losses due to families moving away at the end of the season in June, at the end of the University year, that we had ever experienced. We lost, due to moving away and the voice changes of some boys, over 20 voices at one time and we weren't that big a program. We had maybe 65-70 kids. So we lost somewhere in the neighborhood of a third of our group at one moment.

When we had to prepare a group for Margaret Hillis to select from for the Casals assignment, I had to literally choose several kids and, while I was at it, I decided let me screen the new Raymond group that had been active since February and take the best voice that I could find there and see where he placed in all of this. And the best voices in the Raymond group were boys at that point -- very colorful. Well, that's what we did. When it came down to the finals of this, the boy who got the solo assignment was a fourth grader, a very young boy, who had the voice, who had the poise -- he didn't have the experience -- but he had the teachability and the nerve and brightness of mind and spirit, and that was Tim Black, Jr. But the runners-up were an older boy from Hyde Park who didn't have the surety but had the voice, Kip Perkins, and the Raymond boy, Donald Hollins.

Now as a protection for the assignment being carried out come what may, Margaret Hillis wisely suggested that we continue the preparation of all three boys right through the moment of performance --that they all go to rehearsals and they all follow this whole thing -- and she made the further generous suggestion that the boys learn the soprano line of the chorus part for the section of the evening that the boy soloist would be on stage, and that the other two boys come on stage and be seated in the front row of the adult chorus as sort of honorary members of it and sing. The result was that when we went to Ravinia for that season opener, Tim Black was escorted on stage when the moment came by William Warfield to join the soloist up front with the conductor, and here were Donald Hollins and Kip Perkins in the front row of the chorus.

I don't think that the Hollins family had ever been to Orchestra Hall, let alone to Ravinia. I don't think they'd ever been to anything like this in their lives. Donald's whole clan was there in seats to the side in the Ravinia pavillon, and you'd have thought that somebody had handed them the world on a sterling silver platter. It was just so fascinating to see what happened and the fascination of this kid with the whole experience. And the flowering of his voice and spirit. This was the point at which, going back to the Choir Committee and discussing it, we decided that we would open the program out here not only to Donald, but to keep it a healthier situation, since the group back home couldn't really get the dividends of this if it were one kid because it would be impossible for the kid to sound his own horn in an unobnoxious way and be heard; therefore, the ticket was to get a group, and the group was limited by the size of my Volkswagen because I agreed to pitch in and drive the crew, with the permission of their parents, back and forth to rehearsals. I organized my schedule so that I could be at Raymond School at the end of the school day, pick up the kids, come out to rehearsal, we'd rehearse -- they'd hang around for a little while while we took care of some other things -- and then I'd get them back home again.

WTH: Now at that point, you were still leading the school chorus at Raymond School?

CM: We had the school chorus at Raymond School, and this commuter squad, as we called it, was the top voices that we could identify from that. And, of course, we did look at it top not just in an absolute sense, but a few top people with different kinds of voice color so that we would have sopranos and altos, we would have first sopranos and second altos -- we'd have a balanced group that could anchor whatever we wanted to do if we got to the point of dividing the Raymond Chorus into such sections. And so there were five or six kids in that first squad, and most of them were in it for years. I think only one of the first squad fell by the wayside due to battle peculiarities -- and that was a kid who was in touch with me years later when he landed up professionally in show work.