Arts & Events

For thinking folks, the holidays can be conflicting and a downer. If you aren’t religious, and maybe a tad cynical like me, you might consider taking a flight to India or Peking to get away from all the “stuff” surrounding Christmas.  

I’ve got a cheaper way to lift your spirits and not offend your intellect. And if you’ve got kids, it’s a gift that will last in their memories.  

About a quarter century ago, a show came to town that to me is larger than Santa Claus or crepe paper crèches, more spiritual, and an awful lot more fun. THE CHRISTMAS REVELS at the SCOTTISH RITE THEATRE on LAKE MERRITT will chase your holiday blues and touch your heart. 

It’s about myth, tradition back beyond written memory, about the seasons dying and being reborn—and, I guess, about us doing that, too. I have to go to lots of performances, and, year after year, this is the best show in town. By the time the show is half over, the audience is singing and dancing in the aisles—literally! 

It’s about Christmas, too, since that is the Western Tradition, but the Revels tradition is to present the holidays as they are done in different cultures, different lands, and in different eras, as various as a medieval English court to an Appalachian homestead in Kentucky to a Russian village. A hundred talented volunteers labor for months to make this the best show around. Through the years, Geoff Hoyle, legendary local performer, has been a staple as the master of ceremonies. 

This year it’s CHRISTMAS AT THE COURT OF KING ARTHUR. Extolling the cycle of the seasons, and the rebirth of the hero, it sings about "Rex quondum, rexque futurum," the Once and Future King—which makes this year’s theme poignantly allegorical as well as extremely popular. 

Revels started in 1971 in Cambridge Mass by Jack Langstaff, music educator who came to fame reading books to children on early network TV in the 50’s. The Revels had its pre-premiere on Christmas night 1966, when Jack wrote and hosted "A Christmas Masque" for the Hallmark Hall of Fame where a young, relatively unknown actor named Dustin Hoffman played the dragon in the mummers' play St. George and the Dragon. It was one of the pioneer broadcasts in full color—and they erased the tape! Revels came to the Bay Area twenty six years ago through the efforts of Lisby Mayer.  

If you haven’t been to the Scottish Rite Theatre, it’s one of those hidden places that when you enter, your jaw drops a little. It’s a step into the past, when things were truly grand. When you enter the oval theatre with the vast ceilings and Masonic symbols emblazoned about the stage—a theatre that easily holds a thousand—you wonder how you could not have know about it before. The warm wood makes it inviting with none of the hard edges we’ve accustomed ourselves to in modern halls. Its stage is big enough to hold the 80 singers and the enormous sets with lots of fly space for dragons or whatever is necessary to put you in awe.  

I talked with David Parr, who has been at the artistic helm for 22 years. When I asked him how he got involved, he quipped, “I answered the phone at the wrong time.” When I asked him where he was from he said, “I was born in Chicago.” When I asked him why he came to the Bay Area, he said, “I was born in Chicago.” With this easy sense of humor, this self-confessed 1960’s hippie, who is a tenured professor in the Theatre Arts department of City College of San Francisco, has served up the right mixture of creative and temperamental leadership for this annual extravaganza. He met his wife Krista Keim when she was singing in the Revels chorus, and his sons Luke and William are running about at rehearsals, so Revels is integral to his family’s life. 

When I asked David what the Revels was about, he replied, “About two hours,” (I think I heard a rim-shot!). Then he waxed poetic, and you could feel the enthusiasm and spirit through the phone with a professorial tweak, “Arthur is an enduring story, whether it’s the 5^th C. hero of Britain, or the 14^th C. Arthur of Thomas Mallory, or T. W. White’s ‘Once and Future King,’ the Arthur chivalric romances are always popular. 

“It’s a celebration of the Solstice, which has been going on as long as there have been people around. Honoring the changing of the seasons, the great cycles, is rooted in the human psyche In our production, there are no plots or premises, except to revisit what it would be like if we were in King Arthur’s Court, what dances would have been danced, what stories told. 

“Finally, it’s about Death and Rebirth, and about the magic of the myth of King Arthur, that he has gone to Avalon, but will return when we need him most.” 

This is one not to be missed. Give yourself and those you love a holiday present regardless of how you feel about the Twelve Days of Yule. You’ll come out feeling better about it all. 

THE CHRISTMAS REVELS 

At the Scottish Rite Theatre, Oakland Scottish Rite Center on Lake Merritt, 1547 Lakeside Drive, Oakland, CA, December 9, 10, 11 & 16, 17, 18.,Fridays at 8:00pm, Saturdays & Sundays at 1:00pm & 5:00pm 

www.calrevels.org / (510) 452-8800 

(No ticket sales at the Scottish Rite Center except on days of performance.)