Various Artists (Written By Mick Ryan)
Release Date: 11 January 2019
Label: Wild Goose
Packaging Type: Jewel Case
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 5016700119220
Genres: Folk Contemporary Folk
Description
'Here At The Fair' is Mick Ryan's sixth 'folk opera'. It is set at a country fair, in 1850. Travelling showmen and women arrive to set out their stalls and tell their stories against the political background of the times.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, Chartism was an English movement for political reform. It advocated, by marches and petitions, 'The People's Charter', demanding, amongst other things, universal male suffrage and secret ballot. Henry Hunt, address a political reform meeting at Saint Peter's Fields, Manchester. Yeomanry tried to seize 'revolutionary' banners carried by the crowd. Cavalry were sent in to the ensuing tussle. At least eleven people were killed, and four hundred or more injured. The event became known as 'The Peterloo Massacre'.
It is against the context of these events, together with the poverty brought about by the agricultural slump of 'the hungry forties', and the brutal 'relief' offered by the workhouse, that our characters make their livings, offering entertainment and escape.
We meet: 'Vincent Crummles' (Mick Ryan), a character from Dickens' 'Nicholas Nickleby'. He is an actor manager, who has now fallen on hard times; Crummles' daughter, 'Ninnetta (Alice Jones), who is known to her public as 'The Infant Phenomenon'; 'Steven Starling' (Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne), a reluctant clown, based on the character 'Sissy Jupe', from Dickens' 'Hard Times'; 'Professor Sleary' (Pete Morton), another character from 'Hard Times'. Once the owner of a horse circus, he now runs a flea circus; 'Madam Lavengro' (Heather Bradford), a fortune teller; 'Doctor Maldini' (Geoff Lakeman), a snake oil salesman; 'John Smith' (George Sansome), a ballad seller; and an itinerant fiddler (Lewis Wood.)
Tracklisting
Patakas
The Exmouth Shanty Men
The Old Swan Band
Becky Price and Friends
Pete Cooper & Richard Bolton
Belshazzar's Feast
Various Artists
Belshazzar's Feast
