As they prepare for the sixth Mutton and Mead festival, organizers of the annual event in Montague are busy with more than the details of lining up food vendors, arranging parking and orchestrating medieval jousting for the more than 8,000 people expected to pay up to $15 to file through the gates beginning Saturday.
They’re also fighting a civil war.
In recent months, conflicts between Mutton and Mead organizers and some volunteers have prompted the organizers to apologize for communication breakdowns, to cancel the annual “Robin Hood” show that involved a cast of about 40 volunteers and to pull the plug on a Facebook group that had become a forum for complaints.
The organizers have also faced a serious question from unhappy former cast members: Has Mutton and Mead been living up to its public pledge to donate a portion of the event’s proceeds to charities, including the Montague Common Hall and Western Massachusetts Food Bank?
Former volunteer cast members like Brian Tamulonis say that information has not been forthcoming from organizers, despite repeated requests.
“They have never given us any solid, hard numbers about how much food we donate, how much money we make,” said Tamulonis, who traveled to the festival from his home outside of Boston.
For last year’s festival, organizers sold about 8,000 tickets for between $10 and $15 each, they said in response to questions from The Recorder. Based on those figures, ticket sales could have generated more than $100,000 in revenue.
Much of the revenue goes to cover festival expenses. It costs at least $50,000 to put on the festival, event director and co-treasurer David Agro said in an interview. “If we get totally rained out, we still have to pay for the portajohns, the hay bales, the jousters. Some entertainers can be a little bit flexible, but the jousters come with horses that no matter what have to eat.”
But the festival has also advertised itself as a fundraiser for local charities, pledging to dedicate an unspecified portion of the money it collects to good causes. As of last week, however, Agro acknowledged that until The Recorder began raising questions about donations, Mutton and Mead had made only one modest donation from the pool of money generated by a system in which event-goers donate $1 tokens to a group of local charities.
That donation was $500 given to Cancer Connection, a Northampton-based charity that assists cancer patients. Anna-Beth Winograd, community relations director, confirmed that Cancer Connections received the money in March.
Agro said last week that he was conferring with an accountant about following through on making donations to other groups billed in last year’s event. This week co-treasurer Karen Webb said that the organization had donated $182 to the Dakin Humane Society, $125 to the Western Massachusetts Food Bank and $50 to the Friends of Montague Common Hall.
Nor, Agro said in interviews earlier this spring, had the organization filed the annual financial disclosure documents that state and federal officials require of organizations claiming charitable tax-exempt status since the festival began in 2011. Those documents were filed for the first time this week — after The Recorder made inquiries about them with event organizers and the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office.
“We have been in the process of trying to become a 501(c)(3), we have been in the process of trying to become a charity. There is a process that organizations go through in order to become a charity and we do not have our paperwork in order,” Agro said in an interview earlier this spring. “We might have tax liability but we don’t know what that’s going to be.”
Mutton and Mead organizers say, however, that none of that means Agro and other “core team” members are doing anything other than trying to do their best with a community event they piece together between their day jobs. While they may have fallen down on paperwork requirements and communication skills, they say they have handled the money and their dealings with volunteers and community groups honorably.
Organizers say the the event was never meant to be a money-generating endeavor. When asked if the festival ever made a profit, co-treasurer Webb said, “I have never seen a profit yet. I’m not a CPA. I don’t know what is considered a profit. I don’t have a business degree. I have an art degree, and I am just trying to do some good stuff.”
When asked about Mutton and Mead in April, the attorney general’s spokeswoman Emily Snyder said her office had not received the required financial disclosures. After The Recorder raised questions, Snyder said, the AG began working with event organizers to bring Mutton and Mead into compliance.
The organization registered last week as a public charity with the Attorney General’s Office. Also last week, the Attorney General’s Office received a 990 form from Mutton and Mead, under the name the Knighten Guild Company.
As of press time, the AG had not made the form — which details revenue and expenses — available to the public, saying that in coming weeks the organization’s financial documents would be available online. Mutton and Mead organizers declined to provide a breakdown of revenues and expenses — including any stipends received by organizers — and as of press time, has not provided a copy of the 990 from requested this week by The Recorder.
The AG’s Snyder said falling out of compliance with financial disclosure and registration requirements is a common problem among small community organizations. When their office is alerted to any missteps, she said, officials work with the individuals or organizations involved to file the proper paperwork.
To the dissenting volunteers, though, the failure goes well beyond meeting bureaucratic requirements.
Kaitlin Creed is a Montague Center resident who has played Mistress Goodale, the tavern keeper’s wife, in the theatrical performance of “Robin Hood” at the festival. She says the lack of financial disclosure and charitable donations is outrageous.
“I was shocked. I don’t even know if I can explain the deep-seated level of betrayal that I felt,” she said in an interview. “Not only for myself, but on behalf of all the people who gave up time with family and hours at work because they believed in a tradition that turned out to be all smoke and mirrors.”
Organizers counter that there is a “smear campaign” among a small group of volunteers who are attempting to hurt the festival.
“They think that their rumor mill is enough to bring down a festival that 8,000 people enjoyed going to,” said Pam Smith, an organizer who has also volunteered as an actor in the festival. She said that while she has no part in monitoring the finances, she doesn’t think that there has been any mismanagement of funds.
“For the most part I have been shocked that there has been a lot of complaining and grumbling. It’s been a sobering experience and hard,” said Smith, a performer for the last five years and part of the production team since 2013. “My worry is that Mutton and Mead will lose its current place as a cool local event if it becomes strongly associated in the public eye with deliberate financial wrongdoings (which there aren’t), or with a giant story about cast uprisings,” Smith said in an email to The Recorder. “A lot of people have a good time going! A lot of people, me included, feel a ton of local pride and enjoy the work involved in putting it on, and want it to flourish into a respected, stable local event. It bothers me greatly to think that mud flung by a few conspiracy theorists might stick to the whole festival, which itself is fun and a great experience and worthwhile.”
Mutton and Mead started with a 2010 conversation around a campfire with a group of friends on a cold Vermont winter night.
“We were just chatting about different meats that you could cook on a fire. Someone said ‘mutton.’ Someone else said ‘mutton and mead,’” said Mik Muller, one of the founders of the festival and owner of the website design company Montague Webworks.
That campfire banter eventually sparked a festival.
First, Muller, who had organized community events in the past, secured the web domain name “muttonandmead.org.” Then, in October 2010, a group of about seven people started having meetings to organize the festival. Slowly, more people trickled in. In his role as manager of the festival the first year, Muller interviewed Agro for the cast manager job in December of 2010.
“There was no contract, it was all very loose,” Muller said, explaining that they agreed on a stipend for Agro, which would be paid out when the festival was on stable financial footing. Neither Agro nor Muller would disclose the amount of the stipend.
In June 2011, the festival was born. About 2,000 people showed up.
“It was amazing. It was absolutely amazing. Holding your breath and then peaking over the gate to see how many people were in line to come in. It was packed. There was a lot of people there,” said Muller. “It was a tingling feeling to walk around and see what had been made out of nothing.”
Until this year’s performance was canceled, the event was staged to take visitors to the Shire of Nottingham with a long story arc of theatrical performances throughout the day that ends with Robin Hood kissing Maid Marian. In past years, cast members spent several weeknights and every Sunday for six months working on the performance.
“Most patrons don’t know this, but all of the characters have these very intense back stories,” said Tamulonis, a volunteer actor. “We are prepared to tell you the history of our lives. That is the kind of preparation that goes into this.”
Alcohol was served. Mutton was eaten. There were knights in shining armor jousting on horseback and faeries wandering in the forest. Guests and volunteers were encouraged to dress up and talk in an old English dialect. The festivities drew in people from across Franklin County — and beyond.
On the surface, the event is like any other renaissance festival, but behind the scenes, tensions have festered.
“The first year there were no conflicts, the second year it started to get muddy, the third year things really started to split apart,” said Muller, who left the organization three years ago. In February of 2013, organizers had their final argument about moving the location of the festival from the grounds of the Millers Fall Rod and Gun Club in Montague to a new spot that might cost less.
“I just got up and walked out,” Muller said. “There was a coup, essentially, and people that I thought were my friends were not and I thought: ‘Clearly I have no reason to be here anymore.’” He said that disagreements surfaced around the location of the festival, the process of making decisions, and personality conflicts between the organizers.
As the years went by, complaints from the cast of volunteers began to bubble up. As the organizers began planning the sixth festival season over the winter, volunteers started voicing their concerns among each other in private conversations, through email exchanges and on the 21st-century town square of Facebook.
The volunteers complained about issues including lastminute changes to scheduled auditions, disagreements about the development of the script, cast photographs, slow responses to emails and concerns about having no policy to address possible sexual harassment from patrons, according to interviews and emails between volunteers and organizers.
After the fifth year of faeries prancing through the enchanted forests and knights jousting in the fields, these tensions came to a head when Mutton and Mead organizers decided to abolish the scripted “Robin Hood” show in January.
The organizers said that due to a lack of resources and communication breakdowns with volunteers, they decided to give the theatrical performance this coming festival season time to “heal” and regroup, according to a letter sent to volunteers in January.
Organizers said that dissolving the theatrical performance was a hard decision. “It was really sad, but if there is already a fire you don’t invite more fuel into it,” said Agro. The core organizers crafted a letter and emailed it to the volunteer cast in January.
“The core production team members were, and still are, shocked by the depth of anger and resentment running through some of the cast, creating an ‘us vs. them’ mentality playing out in very unhealthy ways both between the production team and the cast community, as well as among the cast themselves,” the letter said. “Mending this fracture is important.”
The letter was signed by Smith, Webb and Agro, the core production team who oversaw and managed the volunteer actors.
Some volunteers say that canceling the theatrical performance was retribution for the cast members raising questions about the festival’s finances.
“It seems like maybe the cast was fired because they started asking questions,” said Tamulonis, a volunteer.
Organizers insist that while this year’s theatrical performance is canceled, the cast was not fired and all volunteers are welcome to return to help with the festival in different capacities.
“We invited people, everybody back,” said Smith, explaining that organizers emailed volunteers to ask for help with the upcoming season. “We contacted everybody who contacted us. There were a whole bunch of people who said we fired them, which is not accurate.
“You can’t fire people if they aren’t employees.”
Mutton and Mead has billed itself in promotional material not only as a fun event but also as a benefit for local charities.
Over the last year, members of the volunteer cast grew skeptical of those charitable claims and asked that organizers produce a record of donations from the last several years. The requests, they say, fell on deaf ears and instead bred hostility and the cancellation of the annual “Robin Hood” show.
According to advertisements run in The Recorder and Mutton and Mead’s website, the organization serves as a fundraiser for the Western Massachusetts Food Bank and Montague Common Hall, formerly known as the Montague Grange.
But questions linger about how much the event actually gave.
After collecting canned food from patrons, Mutton and Mead donated between 2,500 to 4,999 pounds of food to the Western Massachusetts Food Bank in 2013, according to the food bank’s annual financial report. The food bank report listed no cash donations from Mutton and Mead in that year.
Food bank reports from 2014 and 2015 show no donations of food or money from Mutton and Mead or core organizers. In an interview in April, Agro said that Mutton and Mead hasn’t donated money to the food bank, only food.
It’s also unclear whether Mutton and Mead has donated to the Montague Common Hall.
Mutton and Mead has paid between $3,000 and $5,000 each year to rent the space several times a week in the months leading up to the two-day festival every year, said Mary Melonis, treasurer of the Friends of the Montague Common Hall. Melonis considers the money “a donation to rent the hall.”
In April, Agro said that organization had donated $1,500 to the Common Hall this year and $5,000 in 2015.
Organizers of the festival say that is a charitable contribution. When asked about whether the money was a donation, Webb said “We don’t have a rental agreement. We use the space. In return we do what we can.” She said the group has given back with chores like lawn work. “They are happy that we are there and we use the hall.”
So which was it, a rental payment or a charitable contribution?
According to a spokesperson from the IRS who declined to give his name because of agency policy, government regulations don’t allow an individual or organization to classify a payment as a donation if the payer got something of equal value in return. Examples of benefits include merchandise, meals, tickets to an event or other goods and services, according to the IRS’s website.
If the organizers had rented the Common Hall for the approximately 100 hours they spent rehearsing for the theatrical performance every season, they could have run up a bill of about $3,500 at typical rental prices listed on the hall’s website at up to $35 per hour.
For the 2015 season, the core production team introduced a new system to allow event-goers to donate to charities.
After paying the admission fee for the festival, event-goers each got back a $1 festival token for each can of food they brought (up to three cans) for the food bank, according to Smith.
The guests could use these tokens to buy items from vendors or could donate them to charities. There were a few boxes representing a handful of charities, including the Dakin Humane Society, the Jimmy Fund, the Common Hall and the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts, where residents could donate their tokens with the promise that their donations would be passed along to the charities.
The Dakin Humane Society requests that people notify their events manager when planning a benefit for the shelter. “We never got a request from this event. The Mutton and Mead never contacted us,” said Lee Chambers, marketing and communications manager. Due to the animal shelter’s policy, he could not confirm or deny if Mutton and Mead or any of the core organizers donated to Dakin.
The Jimmy Fund, which supports the fight against cancer in children and adults at Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, received a donation from Mutton and Mead just this month, said Molly McHale, associate director of media relations. She could not disclose the amount because of the organization’s donor privacy policy, but Webb said that the donation was $20.
Volunteers said they were discouraged to learn that the event had not been passing along donations to the handful of charities that were listed on the donation boxes at the festival.
“I would like to think that I was donating hundreds and hundreds of hours of my time to a charity organization,” said Tamulonis, who also volunteered as an actor for the past four years in the festival’s theatrical performance, mostly playing Will Scarlet, one of Robin Hood’s Merry Men. Tamulonis’ image also appeared in the group’s promotional material. “Despite emails asking, we have received no information from the production team.”
Former actor Stefan Topolski showed The Recorder an email in February in which he asked the organizers for their annual financial report.
“To try and get my mojo and enthusiasm back for this community project, I would like to ask how much we made and contributed to each of our charities in our last and biggest year yet,” said Topolski, also a professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
He said there was no reply.
Tax exempt organizations that fail to file the 990 form potentially face a penalty of $20 per day, with a total not to exceed $10,000 or 5 percent of the organization’s gross receipts for the year, according to the IRS. The 990 form contains a disclosure of salaries, a breakdown of expenditures and major donations — information that is available to the public for all charities.
Last year organizers said that 8,000 tickets were sold at $15 each and $10 for seniors over 60 and children between the ages of 7 and 12. Every patron who brought canned food for the food bank received up to $3 off the ticket price or $1 per can.
The festival also took in profits from the vendors, each paying for spaces to sell crafts and goods, like leather whips, chainmail, and swords. At least another nine vendors supplied food, including hamburgers, hot dogs and mutton and mead.
Food vendors typically pay $200 to sell food at the two-day festival, said Beth Greeney, co-owner of Hattapon’s Thai Kitchen. The price for vendors ranges from $100 to $300, according to Webb. Another source of revenue for the event is advertisements for the pamphlets providing a schedule of the festival shows and a map of the grounds.
Expenses for the event include horseback jousters for $5,000, rented port-a potties for about $2,000, as well as paid musical acts, off-duty police officers and EMTs, organizers said.
Despite repeated requests from The Recorder over several weeks for financial reports from the last three years, Agro and other organizers did not disclose a breakdown of the costs or gross revenue from the festival.
“Everything takes energy and, unfortunately, money,” said Webb.
Agro declined to comment on whether he receives a stipend or salary for his work on the event. Smith said she does not, but other members of the core team receive stipends. Webb, a core team member and a costume designer, said she receives a stipend, but would not disclose the amount.
“Stipends are a normal community theater tradition. I can’t think of any local theatrical productions that expect skilled people to put in hundreds of hours of background prep and direction for free,” said Smith, declining to give specific amounts. “The amounts that I saw briefly, but can’t officially comment on, looked average to low to me.”
As the festival approaches its sixth season, organizers hope the tensions melt away so the festivities can begin. “It’s true that we didn’t do everything perfectly and we are really sorry,” said Smith. “We did the best we could and it wasn’t good enough, but we did the best we could. We would like to move on with the festival.”