Gael force The Christmas Revels goes to Scotland BY JEFFREY GANTZ
	The Christmas Revels Directed by Patrick Swanson. Musical direction by George Emlen. With the Auld Reekie Singers, the Laird’s Consort, the Revels Bairns, the Pinewoods Morris Men, Highland Dance Boston, the Great Highlands Pipes and Drums, and the Cambridge Symphonic Brass Ensemble. At Sanders Theatre through December 30.

Over its 33 years, The Christmas Revels has walked a typically Cantabrigian tightrope between genuine joy-to-the-world celebration and politically correct multicultural tourism. This year’s edition takes us to a country not noted for Father Christmas, plum pudding, or Tiny Tim. But if it’s short on what passes in America for holiday tradition, Scotland does have a multitude of song and dance big enough to fill Santa’s sack, from bagpipe-and-drum music to waulking songs (in English, Broad Scots, and Gaelic) to hilt-to-point and broadsword dances.

The set seems, on first acquaintance, a little dour: a hearth with crossed swords and a shield overhead, a stag’s head and a candelabra flanking each side, and a red plaid backdrop. There are stools scattered about, a spinning wheel turns up, and an artificial fire blazes in the hearth. But it’s the performers who light up the audience. Dressed in full kilts and matching tams, the Cambridge Symphonic Brass Ensemble occupies its usual position stage right, with the mostly string players of the Laird’s Consort stage left. George Emlen’s Overture draws on "Auld Lang Syne" (which the audience later sings, after being reminded that "Syne" — Broad Scots for "since" — is pronounced with an "s" sound, not a "z"). A piper appears and is joined by violinists in the air "Over the Hills and Far Away," with Jayne Tankersley on stage and David Coffin answering from the Sanders balcony. The Auld Reekie Dancers ("Auld Reekie" — "Old Smokey" — was a nickname for Edinburgh) then take the stage for "Strip the Willow," a country dance done to a 9/8 slip jig, with all the movement in the feet, as it should be, and not a single shoulder bobbing out of place. For "Winter," Stephen Campbell reads a fragment of a poem by Robert Burns (with an added verse by George Emlen); then the audience sings "Deck the Hall," which the program reminds us is based on a Welsh song.

That’s the Revels way, song and dance and spoken word and audience sing-along, with everything explained in the most intelligently written and designed programs you’re likely to see (though this year James I somehow got moved up to the 18th century). There’s always some kind of unifying story; this time ’round it’s Plough Monday, the first Monday of the new year, when "agricultural laborers would appear in disguise to negotiate their annual wages." The single ox the laird appears to favor is a skull out of Georgia O’Keeffe attached to a pole and carried by an actor; it collapses the moment it’s hitched to the plough and is replaced by six sturdy (and undoubtedly more expensive) beasts that resemble long-horned Highland cattle and kneel in homage to the laird. The Revels Bairns use a Scottish children’s rhyme, "At the Back of Burnie’s Hill," to diddle a traveling vendor out of his Coulter’s candy; an audience member is chosen as the Abbot of Unreason and compelled to eat what purports to be haggis. The "Abbots Bromley Horn Dance," which usually starts off the second half of the program in owl light, is this year done during intermission in the vestibule of Memorial Hall, with a set of replica antlers the Pinewoods Morris Men recently acquired; it’s no less spooky for being performed in bright light. The men sing a "Duan Nollaig" ("Christmas chant") while ritually igniting the new Yule fire; the women waulk the tweed with both hands and feet while singing "Hé Mandu" and, for Bonnie Prince Charlie, "An Fhídeag Airgid" ("The Silver Whistle").

As always, there’s a mummers’ play; the Scottish version is called "Galoshins," and the Revels rendition is a stitch, with Stephen Campbell dressed in matching argyle vest and socks and matching plaid plus fours and tam and waving a golf club around, and the Black Knight seemingly overmatched against Galoshins with his plaid camouflage fatigues and long sword. The Bairns’ "The Four Tradesmen" starts out as a standard children’s game song, but it ends in dizzying pyrotechnics of mouth music (some of it silent) and choreography. The Pinewoods Morris Men master the long and intricate Papa Stour Sword Dance; on opening night the quartet from Highland Dance Boston who performed "The Argyll Broadswords" didn’t touch a single sword. The usual Revels suspects — "Lord of the Dance" and "Dona nobis pacem" — are less out of place than they can be, and a dab or two of inauthenticity is of no matter in a production that offers a generous helping of Gaelic in "Mo Rùn Geal Dìleas" and the two waulking songs and searing, shape-note-like harmonies on the likes of Robert Burns’s "Ca’ the Yowes." Tapaidh leibh.