Nightingale Alley transforms bawdy 19th century poems into world premiere musical 200 years in the making

David Rhymer, Jamie Konchak, Allison Lynch, Denise Clark, Grace Fedorchuk and Jonathan Lewis are the cast and musicians presenting Nightingale Alley at the Big Secret Theatre in Calgary. (Photo courtesy Andy Curtis)

These days, musicals seem to come from old movies or the songbooks of pop stars whose fans can be counted on by producers to pony up cash to come hear them performed live.

For Calgary composer - and longtime collaborator with One Yellow Rabbit - David Rhymer, the inspiration behind Nightingale Alley, which has its world premiere Friday night, was an old book of lyrics written by British sex workers a long time ago.

"A number of years ago I stumbled across an extensive collection of 19th century (of what were then called) flash songs," Rhymer said, in an email reply to a question from CTV News. "These were humorous often bawdy lyrics set to whatever tunes were popular at the time and sung as bawdy entertainments in the taverns and ale houses of the day.

"While the music they were set to is now lost, (at least to me)," he added, "Some of the lyrics struck me as incredibly poignant."

So Rhymer went ahead and composed some, creating a song cycle he called Songs from Nightingale Alley, which has been workshopped a number of times over the years.

ADAPTED

Last year, longtime One Yellow Rabbit member Blake Brooker suggested to Rhymer that the song cycle could be adapted into a musical theatre piece.

"We set about exploring and expanding this material," Rhymer said. "I’ve written a few more tunes. Blake has added some great text which helps place it both theatrically and historically in Regency-era (1811-1820) London, a city experiencing radical social transformation as the Industrial Revolution revved up, displacing huge swaths of people and in particular women. 

"(One Yellow Rabbit) Denise Clark has staged some beautiful choreography. (In the new version), we've added a few new players (long time Rabbit Andy Curtis and newcomer Grace Fedorchuk) and generally deepened all the characters and the world they inhabited."

'THE FREEDOM OF THEIR WORDS'

One of the show's cast members is Allison Lynch, who juggles acting in shows such as Forgiveness at Theatre Calgary with a busy career as a musician.

Lynch was familiar with the songs of Nightingale Alley, but performing the role presents a few challenges.

"We don’t sing with accents, but we do speak with accents!," she said, in an email reply to a question. "It’s that interesting phenomenon where the Brits sound American while singing and British while speaking! It’s not my first British accent but it is my first shot at a cockney dialect."

She said the lyrics may have been written in the early 19th century, but they're surprisingly raunchy.

"At first I was taken aback by the bawdiness of them— that’s not as expected from women’s writing," she said.

"It surprised me in the best way— the freedom of their words— their confidence and joy and humour, and candidness in expressing both their struggles and their ability to embrace their own sexuality."

"This would have been looked down upon in their time, and today, 200 years later, we still feel uneasy or surprised at a female voice embracing sexuality in this way," she adds. "That tells me we still have a long way to go in achieving equality."

 

 

 

 

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STILL RELEVANT TODAY

The premiere of Nightingale Alley comes in the same week that a man gets charged for drugging and assaulting Calgary sex workers on a property east of Calgary.

Is there anything, Lynch is asked, that we can learn from the poetry of Regency-era sex workers, who lived in an age when single women had almost no social mobility and so little job opportunity that one in five ended up working in prostitution?

"The most important thing we learn from these women’s words," Lynch writes, "is that they each have come to be involved in this work, either by choice or by necessity, through different, very complex sets of circumstances.

"This should secure our compassion and empathy, and requires us to withhold our judgement of whether we believe them to be morally correct or not," she adds. "Historically the lives of people involved in this kind of work, especially Indigenous women and women of colour, have been valued lower than those who are not.

"This poetry," she says, "asks us to see these women as human beings, capable of all feeling love, rage, softness, humour and kindness, and to value and connect with their humanity alongside our own by withholding judgement and offering compassion and empathy in listening and trying to understand their stories."

Nightingale Alley runs at the Big Secret Theatre in Arts Commons through April 23. Ticket information available here.