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By Benny Sato Ambush, with valuable contributions from Regie Gibson The 2021 edition of the much-beloved 51-year holiday tradition, The Christmas Revels embodies my favorite kind of stage storytelling: fusion theatre. Through an inventive artistic conceit imagined by playwright and Revels Artistic Director, Paddy Swanson, customs from 17th…

from Revels Artistic Director, Paddy Swanson “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” Dickens knew an inflection point in history when he saw it. For most of us dealing with the ravages of a long-drawn-out pandemic, it is harder to see the benefits…

Between the music, the costumes, the lights, and the actors, it takes a lot of coordination to run The Christmas Revels. Luckily, we have the incredibly talented Arkansas “Ark” Light, our resident Christmas Revels stage manager, to keep the wheels spinning and the curtain opening on time. We got to chat with…

This year’s Revels RiverSing will kick off with pre-show music from the Revolutionary Snake Ensemble, a costumed funk/street beat improvisational brass band performing a unique blend of original and traditional music based in New Orleans traditions. The Revolutionary Snake Ensemble is led by internationally acclaimed saxophonist, flautist, and composer Ken…

For the past 20 years I have been steadfastly saying that of all the performances/shows/gigs I do in a given year, the most meaningful one is the joint Revels production with The Perkins School for the Blind. It is a veritable feast of music, dance, and sheer joy…

In 1923, a small WWI airfield in the London suburb of Croydon became the first to institute regular flights across the English Channel to France. Subsequently the creation of Imperial Airlines (the great-grandfather of British Airways) extended those flights to Germany. As flights proliferated, communications in foreign languages…

     Saying “Thank you,” is one of the first lessons that a mother teaches her child; a simple formula that reinforces and responds to an act of kindness or an attention to the child’s needs. From such a modest beginning an entire structure of social interactions will be…

The summer solstice reminds us that this is the season of light, the longest day of the year, the furthest away from the winter solstice and the beginning of our long slow cycle back into the dark.  “Do you have to bring that up?” I hear you say. Yes, I…

As most schoolchildren can tell you, the calendar year is divided into four quarters or seasons – spring, summer, fall, and winter. The precise point at which the seasons change is marked by four special days – a winter and a summer solstice and a spring and a fall equinox. Equinox is…

From mid-September onward, The Christmas Revels’ Chorus meets once a week to make a joyful noise in the Watertown rehearsal hall. Throughout the fall, our primary identity is ‘chorus.’ But come early December, when everything moves to Sanders Theatre on the Harvard campus, we are reminded that we’re actually…