A CELTIC CHRISTMAS to Return to Santa Cruz

This December, Tomáseen Foley's A Celtic Christmas will transfer to Northern California with its Irish musicians, dancers, and native Irish storyteller, Tomáseen Foley. Natalie Wagner returns this year, this time as Lead Dancer. A warm, welcoming, and rousing event, A Celtic Christmas performs Thursday, December 17 at the UCSC Music Recital Hall in Santa Cruz. 

A Celtic Christmas springs from the infinitely rich treasury of Ireland's cultural heritage: a re-creation of a night before Christmas in the West of Ireland in the 1940s, before the advent of the motorcar, the television, and the telephone. In this family-friendly recreation of age-old tradition, neighbors bring their fiddles, tin whistles, flutes, bodhráns, uilleann pipes, and their unshakeable sense of community for a night of traditional music, song, dance, and of course storytelling. A joyful and heartwarming annual event, A Celtic Christmas features award-winning performers, some very familiar to local audiences and some new faces.

Michelle Drown of The Santa Barbara Independent has said of the show, “With today's world of lightning‐fast communication, it was a privilege to spend time in a rural cottage in the west of Ireland, listening to 'old lore' and traditional music. A good storyteller can spin a captivating yarn from the most mundane topics. They can carry their audience to another time and place. It's an art—and a gift—and Tomáseen Foley has it in spades.”

“When I was a child, it was around the fireplaces of my neighbors' thatched cottages that I experienced the last remnants of the old communal way of life,” says Tomáseen. “The family was the center of the community then, and the community was the center of life itself, the shining axle around which the great wheel of the universe revolved. Stories, music, song and dance were the spokes of that slowly turning wheel.”

Storyteller/Director Tomáseen Foley grew up cradled in a culture unique to the old communal way of life, and continues to share the joy of that upbringing. In conjunction with the Omaha Symphony and other orchestras, he performs in Celtic Journey as well as occasional performances with Apollo's Fire, the Cleveland Baroque Orchestra. He has released two CDs: Parcel From America, and a live recording, The Priest and the Acrobat. Rego Irish Records said of Foley, “He is a master of the Irish narrative and a keeper of the flame for a priceless piece of Irish culture.”

This year the tour welcomes back Natalie Wagner, this time as lead dancer. Wagner was 12 years old when she learned that her sister — who'd been taking Irish dancing lessons — was about to perform in the St. Patrick's Day Parade in St. Louis, Missouri. Wagner remembers wishing she could be in the parade, too, and decided to take up lessons as well. Dancing for The Clark Academy, she soon found success competing at the regional, national, and world levels, placing 1st at Mid-America Oireachtas in 2022. She made her professional debut as a cast member in Tomáseen Foley's “A Celtic Christmas” in 2021 and has returned as a dancer several times. As this year's lead dancer, Wagner is still enjoying the combination of rhythm and athleticism that the art form requires.

The show's Music Director is Grammy Award-winning guitarist and Santa Cruz resident William Coulter, an internationally recognized master of the steel-string guitar. A graduate of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, he teaches classical guitar at UC Santa Cruz and elsewhere. He has several Gourd Music label recordings, including his most recent, The Rolling Waves, a collection of original arrangements of folk and original music. Coulter has performed with the Santa Cruz Baroque Festival, Grammy-award winning Apollo's Fire and many other ensembles. In March of 2016, he debuted Celtic Journey, a full-length pops concert with the Omaha Symphony orchestra.

Brian Bigley is an accomplished player and maker of uilleann pipes, and also plays Irish flute and whistles. He has toured North America and Europe extensively as both a musician and as a dancer, appearing in shows such as the Omaha Symphony's Celtic Journey and Grammy-winning Apollo's Fire production Christmas on Sugarloaf Mountain (the recording of which made it to number three on the Billboard Charts). Bigley competed with great distinction at the World Irish Dance Championships and has placed second in the senior uilleann piping competition at the All Ireland Fleadh Cheoil. He produces and tours his show An Irish Rambling House and has several recordings available on CD.