Mick Ryan & Various Artists - Here At The Fair

'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. 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.)