The 10th Anniversary Revels

Santa Barbara Revels founder and fifth-generation Californian Susan Keller moved to Canada with her new husband after graduating from Stanford but returned to California, sans husband, some years later. She is not only a lifelong stage and TV performer but has also earned a law degree from UCLA. 

She moved to Montecito in 1994 with her husband, Dr. Myron Shapero, who continues to practice medicine in the Los Angeles area. They have a son, Matthew, who attended MUS, SBJH, and then Cate and now works for the UCLA Agricultural Extension in Ventura as a Range and Livestock adviser. Susan was “room mother, soccer mom, and in the PTA” when Matthew attended MUS – she enjoys being busy, in case you haven’t noticed – and has been heavily involved in Montecito ever since moving here.

“[Matthew] is getting back tonight from a cattlemen’s convention in Reno,” Susan says, bemused, during a Sunday morning conversation on the patio at Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf on Coast Village Road. “It boggles my mind,” she adds, laughing, “because that’s not what I expected. But his great, great, great grandparents were ranchers in northern California, so the DNA is there.”

Not only were his forebears ranchers, but Matthew, who was making a living sheep ranching just before earning his two-year master’s degree at Berkeley in range management, was living in a property that had a contiguous border with the 8,000-acre property that had been in his mother’s family for a hundred years, from 1850 until nearly 1950.

A Nutcracker Alternative

Revels, celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, came about when Ms Keller was serving as a board member at the Lobero. She (and others) were searching for a “Christmas or holiday show” that would be an alternative to the Nutcracker, “another family kind of entertainment.” Susan had produced a couple shows at the Lobero: Always Patsy Cline, and Clarence Darrow, which starred Leslie Nielson, who she knew from her days in Canada.

She had a friend in Oakland who had heard that Susan was looking for a project for the Lobero and suggested that what she was doing could be “something that might be right for Santa Barbara.”

Susan went to Oakland, saw the Revels production there in 2005, and discovered that Oakland was one of only nine companies around the United States that perform the show every holiday season (the founding company is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and produced its first Revels show in 1972).

She was duly impressed, and the “audience participation” aspect of the show appealed to her, so she contacted the company in Cambridge and made a deal to produce a Santa Barbara Revels. Although her first show (held at the Marjorie Luke) was placed in the Medieval era, much has changed. In the proceeding 10 years, they’ve done everything from a Scottish setting in the early 1800s, southern Spain in the late 1400s, to an Appalachian motif set in the 1920s. 

Collaborating with Erin Graffy

This year’s production is an original show with an original script that Susan has collaborated on with Erin Graffy (author of Old Spanish Days). “It’s about a page of Santa Barbara history,” Keller says, “when Richard Henry Dana was sailing up and down the coast collecting hides and tallow. Dana was invited to the wedding of Anita De La Guerra (he describes this in his book, Two Years Before The Mast), whose father was Commandante of the Presidio. She married Alfred Robinson, the local representative of Boston-based Hide & Tallow Company, and the wedding took place in January 1836. “And so,” Susan says, “we’re setting this in December of 1835.”

The show will feature sea shanties, mission music, Christmas music, lots of “audience participation,” and Revels “touchstones.” 

“We have characters who were onboard Dana’s ship represented, we have the De La Guerra family represented, and we try to be as authentic with the material as we can,” she says, “but we do include these Revels elements that may be anachronistic. And, there’s one thing about Revels,” Susan says, “and that is it does embrace anachronisms.” She has contacted an elder of the Barbareno band of Chumash, a story teller, who’ll also be a part of the show. 

The first show begins at 7:30 pm on Friday, December 15, again at 2:30 and 7:30 pm on Saturday, December 16, and once more at 2:30 on Sunday, December 17. Tickets are available at the Lobero box office, and prices range from free for children under four (who can sit on a lap). Tickets for children from 4 to 12 are $13; students $15, and the least-expensive adult tickets are $20 “and up from there.” There are also group and family discounts available. “We really try to make it affordable,” Susan says.

“We’ve brought back the twelve days of Christmas, which everybody loves,” she says, adding, “that will bring many audience members up on the stage to participate. Nobody is required to [sing or dance], but we hope people will feel comfortable doing it because that’s a special part of Revels.”

Cast and crew notables include Paula Lopez, who plays mother of the bride; Frank Artusio as father of the bride; new music director Erin McKibben and her husband, Nick Jurkowski (he’s a recent Ph.D. from UCSB) did all the arrangements. Erin Graffy’s husband, Jim Garcia, contributed a lot of his music and he’ll be playing in the orchestra pit. Luis Moreno plays El Tecolero. 

The main set is a representation of a location most attendees will probably be familiar with: the courtyard at Casa De La Guerra, designed and built by the crew from the Ensemble Theatre. Costumes arranged by Jane Hatfield are early California, not Flamenco, and Diana Remplogle Purinten, leader of the Viale de California, is doing the choreography.

Counting cast members, singers, and dancers, some 70 performers will be involved. Accompanying musical instruments include strings and wind instruments in the pit and percussion in the wings, along with a concertina, guitars, flutes, violins, and a harp. 

Revels is financed by a combination of grant money, private donations, and ticket sales. If you’d like to donate, log on to santabarbararevels.org and go to the “donate” page. Other ways Susan says you could support Santa Barbara Revels is by buying a patrons seat, or even raffle tickets before the show. You could also call Susan at (805) 565-9357. Donors include the Hutton Parker Foundation, the Santa Barbara Community Events & Festivals Committee, Montecito’s Jackson Family, and Anne Towbes‘s Poomer Fund.