Charlie McMillan has played the recorder since high school, and his wife, Janet, knows how to construct a boar's head, complete with a wreath of fruit, from papier-mache. So it's no wonder the Walnut Creek couple is taking part in the Christmas Revels production for the 20th time -- along with their daughters and two of their three greyhounds.

	The entire McMillan family -- from left, Charles, Katherine, Caroline and Janet (kneeling), as well as dogs Ashley and Juliet -- is taking part in this year's Christmas Revels performances.
Kristopher Skinner/Times

"I can hardly imagine what Christmas would be like without the Revels," one of their daughters commented as they prepared for another year of performances.

This year's production, which returns to the show's medieval roots, opens Friday and runs weekends through Dec. 18 at Oakland's Scottish Rite Theater.

The Revels, now performed in a dozen cities across the country, celebrates both Christmas and the winter solstice, the shortest day and the longest night of the year. This year's 20th annual Oakland performance, a pageant of music, dance, singing and sketches, imagines as its setting England's Haddon Hall in the 15th century.

As they have for many years, Charlie and Janet McMillan will be singing in the chorus, and Charlie will be playing the recorder, a mellow-sounding instrument invented in the Middle Ages. Their daughters, Katherine and Caroline, now 18 and 17 years old, have graduated from the children's to the adult's chorus.

"By the time the kids were 2 or 3, they were watching the shows," Charlie says, "and by 6 or 7, they were in them."

Their greyhounds, Ashley and Juliet, will be making their stage debut this year. (Romeo is avoiding the spotlight.) "They get a tiny little cameo," Janet says. Early in the show, the actor playing the hosting Lord of Misrule declares, "Beware what follows me!" Enter the hounds.

The McMillans caught the Revels bug more than two decades ago, when Charlie was a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Janet, a nurse, saw an ad for a Revels performance in Cambridge.

It was as much fun as they expected, and to see it again, they decided to usher at performances. When they moved to the East Bay -- Charlie is a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore Lab -- they were still on the mailing list when the Revels started planning for the first Oakland performance at Mills College in 1986.

"All my previous choral experience," Charlie says, "was standing onstage in a dark suit singing something like the Brahms Requiem. In the Revels, walking through the theater, there was a direct connection to the audience that I'd never experienced as a musician."

The planning process is year-round, with rehearsals beginning in September for the December shows. "The energy that it takes to do a show like this is incredible," Charlie says. "You say to yourself, 'How can I do this again?' After a couple of weeks, you say, 'How can I not do this?'"

This year's show will include guest artists from the Bay Area's Ensemble Alcatraz, who play harps and ancient stringed instruments such as the vielle and rebec.

The medieval theme, Charlie says, has been popular throughout the years, but he's also taken part in shows set in Scandinavia, Victorian England and the Spanish region of Galicia.

"About the time the Berlin Wall came down," he says, "we did a Russian-American Revels."

Janet began her "career" with the Oakland Revels making props, including that boar's head, an ox head and dragons -- one with eyes that lit up. The show was such fun that she couldn't resist getting more actively involved, so she auditioned for the chorus and joined the performances.

"There's a sense of community in the Revels that you don't get from a choral concert or 'Nutcracker,'" Janet says. "When friends come to a show, they tell me, 'I wanted to be up there performing with them.'"

The Revels may interrupt the McMillans' holiday planning, but they say it's the perfect prelude to Christmas. "It's the holiday spirit without the usual level of commercialism," Janet says. "There's a sense of community that you wish were there all year."

Dedicated Revels with a musical cause