If this keeps up, the world will know Norwich as much for the creative young entrepreneurs that it grows (or should we say entrepreneurial young creatives?) as for the Olympic athletes it cultivates. Most visibly these days, 22-year-old Jake Laser is building a big following on YouTube for his videos of the inventions he’s been churning out since early adolescence. “I always had the passion for building stuff,” says the 2015 graduate of Hanover High School. “This is what it’s manifested into so far. I don’t think this is the final step.”

Under the guidance of budding music producer and fellow college undergraduate Phin Choukas, Hans Williams is taking the first tentative steps toward a career in music, already reaching thousands of listeners on platforms like Spotify for the songs he’s writing and singing and recording. “I’m slowly learning how to promote myself,” Williams says. “There’s so much that I don’t know, that I still need to learn.”

And here comes 13-year-old Ezra McGinley-Smith, whom – depending, on the time of year, the day of the week, and the hour of the day – you might find shooting a TV ad or an award-winning movie, or crafting a website for an Upper Valley business, or diving for sunken treasure in Upper Valley waterways, or trapping skunks. “I like to stay busy,” says McGinley-Smith, an eighth-grader at Richmond Middle School in Hanover.

So do Laser, Williams, and Choukas… to the extent that the coronavirus allows these days.

Jake Laser

Before relocating to Los Angeles in September, Laser self-isolated over the spring and summer at home in Norwich. And after remotely finishing his undergraduate degree in physics from Saint Lawrence University, he retreated full-time into his workshop in the family basement to tinker with and test a parade of inventions, all the while documenting the processes for his JLaservideo pages on Instagram and YouTube (www.youtube.com/user/JLaservideo).

Near summer’s end, Laser flew an elaborate hoverboard – inspired in part by the craft on which the comic-strip movie villain Green Goblin avoids ground traffic – over Storrs Pond and Fullington Field in Hanover.

And thanks to that video and several that he released through the third week of November, his roster of YouTube subscribers grew to 1.3 million. “With the YouTube income,” Laser says, “I’ve been able to pay off all my college loans.”

In Los Angeles, he’s working on a range of projects with a business partner in a workshop and studio that so far appears to be a safe bubble of creativity. “It’s one of the rare industries that’s actually upticking a little right now,” Laser said. “It’s been decent.”

Hans Williams

Hans Williams figured he was maintaining a decent pace himself, until contracting Covid-19 almost as soon as he’d returned to New Orleans for his sophomore year at Tulane University. “I got it the first day of classes, while I was working on the video to go with the song Phin and I recorded over the summer,” says Williams who is majoring in marketing with a minor in music production. “I had to quarantine for a couple of weeks, which kind of set me back. “And I guess I’m going to have to quarantine when I come back to Norwich over the holidays, so Phin and I will have to wait before we can start working on our next project.”

Good thing, then, that the former ice-hockey teammates – “since Mites and Squirts up through high school,” Williams says – devoted an intense couple of weeks finetuning Williams’ latest song, Body on My Shoulders, in the Choukas family’s Dreaded Zig Zag, the studio on Kerwin Hill. “He showed me that song in late July or early August,” says Choukas. “We put it together pretty quickly. He took a while to find the right words. We had a really good time making it before we went our separate ways.”

In Choukas’ case, “separate” meant transporting his recording equipment to California, where he is self-isolating in a small bubble of friends. Between recording projects, he’s remotely continuing his undergraduate studies at Middlebury College where he’s a junior.

Choukas also is using this time to figure out what he wants to do for a living after college. While he’s caught the attention of the ever-evolving music industry for his production wizardry (www.norwichtimes.com/music-comes-home) for the likes of Strafford-native singer-songwriter Noah Kahan, he confesses “I still don’t know if it’s what I want to do professionally. “I’ve been so fortunate to work with really talented vocalists and musicians, but up until now it’s been more about doing it for friends. It’s kind of a therapeutic experience. A relief and an escape.”

Those rewards motivated Williams to ‘midwife’ and record Body on My Shoulders at least as much as any commercial ones that might or might not follow. Back in Norwich, after Tulane sent everyone home for the spring and summer to avoid the coronavirus, he started assembling the song in response to the suicide of a fellow Tulane freshman in a neighboring dormitory suite in 2019. “Being in virtual quarantine over the summer really helped me write it,” Williams says. “And having Phin there for every step, the way he was on my first record (Guardian, released the spring of his junior year at Hanover High) made such a difference. He’s the one who’s hearing all the takes, and has the best ear on all of it.”

According to the online music site Spotify, more than 2,000 people were following the songs that Williams and Choukas were sharing as of Thanksgiving, and more than 75,000 a month were listening. “I’m not too worried yet that some big label will sweep me off my feet,” Williams hastens to add. “I still have a lot to learn. There have been people who came and hit me with ideas for weird deals, things I don’t want to sign. I didn’t think too much about that coming from Norwich.”

Ezra McGinley-Smith

While – like his father, a dermatologist by trade – Ezra McGinley-Smith enjoyed still photography, he didn’t think too much about filmmaking until he attended the White River Indie Film Festival in White River Junction a few years ago. “I can’t remember exactly when, but I was still at Marion Cross School,” McGinley-Smith recalls. “I got really inspired by what I saw.”

That inspiration led first to testing his skills with sports-action films, particularly skiing, à la documentarian Warren Miller. Then, during the early weeks of the pandemic, with the free time gained after schools went to remote learning, he shot Willing Hands – a 7½-minute documentary about how the Norwich-based nonprofit, which collects surplus and donated food that otherwise would go to waste, focused on getting that food to Upper Valley residents who lost jobs and income during the Covid crisis. The film recently won the middle-school division’s social-justice award from the Freedom & Unity program, led by Norwich movie director Nora Jacobson. “When it won,” he remembers, “I was like, ‘Wow: there’s potential for this!’”

Indeed, the acclaim led to commissions to shoot commercials for products ranging from electric tea-kettles to Hershey’s chocolate and a Segway scooter. “Having the digital technology that’s available now has really helped,” McGinley-Smith says. “At least while I’m starting out, the modern way seems the most practical way to go, though at some point I want to try the old-fashioned way, to see what they were doing back then.”

One of those more old-fashioned ways he earns walking-around money, is trapping skunks for neighbors, friends, and acquaintances. And at some point, McGinley-Smith might start charging for his free dives into area lakes, ponds, and rivers to retrieve items lost by fishermen, golfers, and other outdoors persons.

“So far it’s been for fun, for the challenge,” he says. “It’s crazy what you find down there that you’re not even looking for: An old phone from a pay phone; a bicycle wheel; an iPhone; many, many, many pairs of sunglasses.”

Jake Laser sums up the same spirit all three of these creatives share. He expects to follow his curiosity and sense of adventure wherever they lead him, commercially viable/viral or no. “I’m always excited for what comes next,” he concludes. “I try to be on the edge, push myself whenever I can.”

You say you want a Revels solution for Christmas? In the middle of the coronavirus pandemic? This season, thanks to some creative scrambling on the part of the leaders and the rank-and-file performers of Revels North – many of them from Norwich – you’ll find it online or on your TV screen.

In place of what would have been the Upper Valley’s 45th consecutive live yuletide pageant celebrating the Winter Solstice in song and dance, Revels North last spring commissioned All Shall Be Well Again – a 17-minute animated film that Norwich resident and Revels executive director Brian Cook describes as “just lovely to behold … very, very true to the Revels spirit, with a respect for the traditional style.”

And while the organization will miss its main source of revenue for its programs – ticket sales to live shows at the Lebanon Opera House – Revels is offering the movie for free, with a particular nod to members of the Upper Valley community who might be struggling financially and otherwise during the pandemic, Cook adds. “It is a message of hope that dovetails with our message, our mission, of bringing light to the darkest time of the year,” he says. “People right now are experiencing the darkness in a very real way.”

As much in his role as a psychiatrist as in his mind-set as a member of the Revels North board and a regular performer in the pageant, Norwich resident John Severinghaus welcomes this solution. “I said at our meetings that whatever we do is going to be better than doing nothing,” says Severinghaus, who lent his voice to the animated character of Father Christmas. “Having Revels go completely dark for a whole year was just not an option. The whole point of Revels is that the sun is going to come back. “Let’s do what we can to help it along.”

The trick, he adds, was to make it “fun and creative and different.” And doing a hybrid digital version of the full, live extravaganza was not going to cut it. “20 to 25 people in Zoom, I’m not sure how you’d do it,” Severinghaus says. “To keep time and keep pitch, stitching it together was not practical. It could be done, but even that… Come on: that’s not going to be a real show.”

During the last “real” show, in December of 2019 at the opera house, Meriden, N.H. resident Sam Clifton was, well, reveling in the chance to play a lead role in his debut at the Christmas Revels.

And between his own moments in the spotlight, the 2015 graduate of Lebanon High School was paying close attention to the Mummer’s Dance – the number that every year interrupts the main storyline of Revels North’s long-running celebration of the solstice. “While I was standing by as a spectator, I got an idea of the basic plot, and the importance of Saint George,” Clifton recalls. “You get to slay the giant and the dragon. You’re the hero. What more could you ask?”

What he learned by watching – and by listening – Clifton wove into his vocal performance as George in All Shall Be Well Again, to which he was invited to lend his voice. “I haven’t been able to do a lot of voice-acting work so far,” Clifton recalls. “I thought this would be a way to get a solid role onto my résumé.”

For the leadership of Revels North, the film emerged, last spring and summer, as a way to bridge the seasonal gap, and to keep Revels – which had to cancel its schedule of live music in the name of singer and listener safety – on the Upper Valley’s radar screen. “It wasn’t long before we began to realize that there was no way we could plan on live performances,” Cook says. “There was so much that we couldn’t anticipate.”

Instead, Cook, artistic director Nils Fredland and members of the Revels North board of directors started brainstorming, and quickly eliminated the idea of trying to do a hybrid live through online technology.

With input from Revels creatives, they found consensus around the idea of a short film, mixing animation and footage from previous years’ Revels, that area audiences could stream on their computers, and watch on Community Access Television (CATV). “It got us excited like nothing else was going to,” Cook recalls. “It was going to be the costliest option, in a year where maybe fundraising would be harder than usual because of the pandemic. But it really energized everybody, and seemed the most likely to get the audience excited.”

The Revels board bought into the plan from the outset. “Suddenly there was a spark,” board president and Lebanon resident Kim Rheinlander says. “People really embraced it. It was something so different, and something positive.”

With money from a variety of sources – including an anonymous donation of $10,000, $7,500 from a Vital Communities crowdsourcing campaign, a COVID-relief grant of $7,500 from the New Hampshire Council on the Arts, $5,000 from regular underwriter Mascoma Bank, on top of earlier contributions from regular individual benefactors – Revels North enlisted a Keene, NH-based nonprofit, The SALT Project, to weave animation around a storyline invoking Revels traditions. “A big part of our thinking was to seek out local artists, who need the work right now,” Cook says. “When the pandemic hit and lingered on, their livelihoods went up in smoke. We really wanted to support them as much as possible.”

Toward that end, Revels hired the No Strings Marionette Company in Randolph, VT, which had crafted puppets for the 2015 show at Dartmouth College’s Hopkins Center for the Arts. The troupe crafted and brought to life a puppet host for the film, in the persona of Jack Langstaff, the founder of the original Christmas Revels pageant in New York City, and who had established a comparable program in Cambridge, MA, in 1971.

Langstaff, who would have turned 100 this year, was the father of Carol Langstaff, the Sharon resident who founded Revels North in 1974. “When we saw the puppet,” Severinghaus says, “any of us who had privilege to know Jack, that was great to see.”

It worked as well for Rheinlander, who was captivated by the original Revels growing up in Cambridge in the 1970s, and who, after moving to the Upper Valley in the mid-1980s, joined Revels North and crossed paths with Langstaff in a variety of capacities, from backstage technical support to singing and acting with the ensemble.

Even after joining the board of directors, Rheinlander stayed active with the productions until 2019, when Revels moved the solstice pageant from the Hopkins Center’s Spaulding Auditorium to the Opera House. While the latter seats 800 people, to Spaulding’s 900, the 2019 show, drew a combined 3,000 people to five performances. Many of them, Rheinlander found while conducting exit interviews, had never seen the show at Dartmouth. “The people I talked with were so enthusiastic,” she says, “and we were very excited about having a second show there this year.”

With All Shall Be Well Again, Rheinlander hopes that Revels will keep things going, keep people enthused, knowing we’re still around.”

Revels North was scheduled to start streaming All Shall Be Well Again on November 20. The local cable station CATV was scheduled to start showing the film on Thanksgiving Day (November 26 at 2pm), with subsequent screenings on Giving Tuesday (December 1), and on December 21 (the winter solstice), Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day. To learn more, visit revelsnorth.org.