Reveling in the Season with the Santa Barbara Revels

The annual Christmas Revels at the Lobero Theatre is a festive opportunity each year to experience at least the celebration of Christmas/Solstice/Yule from the perspective of another culture, another place. Victorian England, Bavaria, Spain, Appalachia, a ship full of Irish immigrants… all have been the settings of Revels shows over the years.

Santa Barbara Revels, founded in 2007 by Susan Keller, follows in the footsteps of the other eight Revels companies across North America, putting on this annual celebration of the winter holidays with music, dance, and song appropriate to the place and time. Scripts rotate through the various companies every year, and costumes and props are even shared to lessen the financial burden on each company.

Our local company even wrote an original early California Revels show, presented first in 2017, when some performances were canceled due to the Thomas Fire, and then again in 2021.