Northfield musical on Boston Tea Party taking on new life across the country

Before “Hamilton” topped the Tony Awards and slid into streaming services, a group of 10 actors sang a different soundtrack for the American Revolution at Pioneer Valley Regional School in “Oh, That Dreadful Tea!”

“It’s all based on historic fact,” said Northfield resident Deb Potee, who wrote the musical in 2013 with friend Ruthanne Paulson. “You learn a tremendous amount by doing this play.”

Before a friendship formed, Paulson was a familiar face to Potee as her children’s theater teacher in Paulson’s theater company, Cardboard Box Theater Company, in Northfield. Paulson taught Potee how to tap and the pair joined book clubs and competed in trivia together “until that famous day I told her I needed her to make a play I had into a musical,” Potee said as the pair reflected over Zoom on the musical’s beginnings.

A lifelong history buff, Potee grew up traveling back in time. Her favorite stories explored the American Revolution, including “Rebecca’s War” by Ann Finlayson, “Witch of Blackbird Pond” by Elizabeth George Speare and “Mr. Revere and I” by Robert Lawson.

What drew her to that time period of changing tides?

“I think it was all the newness … people’s roles changing,” Potee said. “I know it was horrible and bloody, so it’s not the battles, it’s more about people saying, ‘This is not working for us, or at least for us white people, let’s see if we can make change.’ I just found it super inspiring.”

Decades and a history degree later, Potee wrote a 20-minute play based on “Mr. Revere and I,” which tells the story of the Boston Tea Party straight from the horse’s mouth, literally — readers experience the historic protest through the eyes of a British officer’s horse. Both the book and play invite readers into the pivotal moment of the United States’ past, but colonists like the Daughters of Liberty, members of Indigenous tribes and enslaved and freed Americans tell Potee’s play.

“The world is a wonderfully diverse place, and we should be celebrating that,” Potee said. “That narrative is often just told by the people who write history, and it’s often white men.”

When Potee finished writing the book into acts and scenes, she could not shake the feeling that the script was missing something.

“I just thought, ‘It really needs something more,’ so I asked [Paulson] one day, ‘Hey, can you put some songs together?'” Potee recalled.

Three days later, Paulson sent Potee three songs to spin the play into musical.

“I constantly have tunes in my head, or some other tune will inspire [me] to create songs,” said Paulson, who has composed 35 musicals for her students at Cardboard Box Theater Company. “I’m a rhymer also, so I started throwing in these little songs and it just got easier and easier. The more you do it, it’s a part of you.”

After Hamilton exploded onto stages in 2015, Potee asked Paulson to write one more addition: a rap to set the scene of taxes and tension.

“Sugar Act, Stamp Act, Townshend Act, tea! King George won’t stop, no he won’t, you’ll see! Tax our sugar, our coffee, our indigo, so we stop buying British goods, woah!” the young actors rap in the musical, shaking their mob caps and tricorne hats. “No taxation without representation! Did we receive an invitation? No sir!” The actors stomp their black boots on stage like an emphatic punctuation mark.

“The play is charming, but it also has the old language, so it’s smart too,” Paulson said with a laugh.

Potee said the rap and songs are more than plot devices.

“They’re earworms; you hear them and they just stay with you, they’re hard to get rid of,” Potee said. She remembered chaperoning a field trip when the sixth graders broke into an “Oh, That Dreadful Tea!” song one year after performing it.

“Childhood can be this brutal time, but it’s also a time where you just soak up everything, good and bad, and for good or for bad, it never leaves you,” said Potee, who works as an adjustment counselor at Greenfield High School.

A few years after the first production, Potee sent a video of the musical to the Boston Tea Party Museum and Old South Meeting House in Boston, eager to spread the word about her and Paulson’s take on American history, but no one bit.

A few years later, Potee sent the video of the play to Suffolk University history professor Robert Allison, spotting the name in a Boston Globe article looking back on the Boston Tea Party. Allison invited Potee and Paulson to chat on his podcast, “Revolution 250,” and the episode caught the attention of author Jean O’Connor, a Massachusetts transplant in Montana. O’Connor emailed Potee, offering to help her and Paulson self-publish the musical.

“She’s our fairy godmother,” Potee said of O’Connor.

In June, Potee and Paulson published “Oh, That Dreadful Tea!” selling it for $12.95 on Amazon and the rights to copy the script and music to download for $100 through Performing Arts Inspirations’ website.

Now, young actors 2,300 miles away are rehearsing “Oh, That Dreadful Tea!” at the Belt Performing Arts Center in Belt, Montana. Potee and Paulson hope to make the trek in June to watch their creation come to life across the country.

“We didn’t do this to make money, we’re doing it to promote history and theater and get people engaged in learning about American history,” Potee said.

When fourth, fifth and sixth graders act out lessons from their texbooks, they “learn by doing,” Paulson said. “They participate and become the whole thing.”

Potee and Paulson believe the story of the Boston Tea Party echoes with importance today, 252 years since the colonists threw the 342 chests of black tea into the Boston harbor.

“A lot of connections to the events that were leading up to the destruction of the tea you can see in today’s headlines and the No Kings protests,” Potee said.

“[With] the junk that is happening in our country right now, this needs to teach children what real fighting for democracy is,” Paulson added.