On Wed 19th Feb 2014 our Literary Hour is devoted to poetry and songs about “distance, longing and loss”. No prose, but what songs! And what singers are to be found among the Hampstead Players! The six-strong cast includes Sarah Holland, who has been a professional singer all her life; you name it – Scottish folk songs, Irish ballads, military marching songs – she has sung it! And she loves opera, the more extravagant the better. Also Adrian Hughes, whose masterly baritone as Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof still resonates; Mary Clare, who has sung in Guys and Dolls, Carousel, and many Gilbert and Sullivan operettas; and Jenny Lupa, who will be remembered for her exquisite singing and guitar-playing in last year’s Literary Hour on Decline and Fall. Weep at the Scottish emigrants’ song “And I awoke in Canada, three thousand miles from home!” Laugh as Jenny and Adrian sing “Come back Paddy Reilly to Ballyjamesduff”, and wonder how many rhymes for Ballyjamesduff the songwriter can devise. And don’t miss the grand operatic finale “I dream of Jeanie with the light brown hair.” Oh and poems too by GK Chesterton, Rupert Brooke, Kipling et al.
A Literary Hour – Faraway Places
Stephen Clarke