Peter, Paul and Mary

Press, 21 April 1986, Page 4

Peter, Paul and Mary

Peter, Paul and Mary, at the Theatre Royal. Reviewed by Stan Darling.

After all these years, Peter, Paul and Mary still seem to like being together up there on stage, exhorting everyone to get their heads straight, don’t give in, believe in the cause and sing, sing, sing to help get the message across.

They seem to like being with each other, trying to help their audiences to "weave the sunshine out of falling rain.”

No matter how bad things seem now, there is still a new tomorrow out there. What mattered in the 1960 s matters now. Nothing changes the need to struggle. Pop music comes and pop music goes, but folk music rambles on.

It will always have the power if we let it They sing with a power that seems to have strengthened (or are they just preachung to the converted?) as they get older.

They told the youngsters in last night’s audience, the first they had seen in Christchurch in 17 years, that they were all part of the family. They knew their old songs had become familiar, some of

tnem round the fires of summer camps.

The folk trio, with Mary Travers’ soaring sometimes raucous, voice always near the centre, mixed old and new in an effective show that had full audience participation from the start.

They even used a kazoo (Peter), slide whistle (Mary) and washboard (Paul, also known as Noel) to good effect when singing about their love affair with a big, blue frog.

After a song plumping the natural powers of the sun, waterfalls and the wind—and slamming "atomic poison power”— Mary said that millions around the world applauded the “courage and sanity” of New Zealand’s anti-nuclear stance. Even if it was well rehearsed during a career covering 25 years, the patter about folk music and family seemed genuine.

In a musical introduction to “Puff, the Magic Dragon," Peter Yarrow sang about the nonsense of "spurious interpretations” of a song that was meant to be about “nothing other than the sadness of the lost innocence of children.”

He was the principal writer of “Puff," and he said the audience could take that assurance “from the dragon’s father’s mouth.”

Peter, Paul, and Mary have always worn their Left-of-Centre political hearts on their sleeves. They insisted that justice would somehow prevail, and railed against American intervention in Central America in “El Salvador,” a more recent song. They weaved in the new material, some against apartheid, with such folk standards as “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?” and Phil Ochs’ “There But For Fortune.”

They were exerting the audience to hang in there when they sang “Take my hand my son, and all will be well when day is done” After an intermission, the pace changed, but the audience enthusiasm didn’t, with solo performances by each of the trio. Peter Yarrow sang about people fearful for the future, suspicious of the past, in a song about “my sweet survivor,” then set into a rousing rendition, with the audience’s help, of “Stewball,” which he said was much more than a song about a wino

racehorse.

We would be free only when we were willing to bet on what we truly believed in.

Paul Stookey, the group’s comedian, kept things rolling with sound effects, pointers from a basic book on how to play the guitar and a song about technology, "State of the Heart.”

Then Mary Travers came on for a long monologue about shopping, motherhood, grandmotherhood (her first grandchild is four months old) and mother-ln-lawhood.

Her older daughter married "a rising young corporate executive in a company that has’nt divested itself in South Africa yet,” she said. She had always had visions of the girl marrying a starving civil rights lawyer.

In view of the trio’s political activities, the relationship created interesting family problems. She sang a song about unfortunatr children, then a love song to her two companions at the end of their Australasian tour.

After "No Easy Walk To Freedom,” a new Yarrow song against apartheid, the trio rolled through a rousing rendition of oldies—“ Leaving On A Jet Plane,” "If I Had A Hammer,” "Blowing In The Wind” (“The answer is justice, equality and peace, and all of us working for these things, together, and God bless you,” said Mary), “This Land Is Your Land,” and "Goodnight Irene,” during which Mary tossed her shoes and Paul’s jacket off stage as many in the audience got to their feet, not for the first time.