Tomáseen Foley’s A Celtic Christmas at Rio Theater

Now in its 27th season, Tomáseen Foley’s A Celtic Christmas brings traditional Irish musicians and dancers to enthralled audiences across the country. At its center is native Irish storyteller, Tomáseen Foley. 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 motorcar, the television, and the telephone. In this recreation of age-old tradition, neighbors bring their fiddles, tin whistles, flutes, bodhráns, uilleann pipes; and, perhaps most important of all, their unshakeable sense of community, for a night of traditional music, song, dance, and of course storytelling. 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.