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San Diego Symphony — Summer Pops at The Rady Shell 2026

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San Diego Symphony — Summer Pops at The Rady Shell 2026

Jun 5 – Sep 19, 2026 The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park, 222…

The San Diego Symphony's Summer Pops season at The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park brings world-class orchestral music to the San Diego waterfront for a series of outdoor concerts running June through September 2026. The Rady Shell — an acoustically engineered open-air performance venue on the waterfront at Jacobs Park — provides a stunning setting for the Symphony's summer season with San Diego Bay visible beyond the audience. The Summer Pops programming spans the full range from classical masterworks to pops concerts featuring Broadway music, film scores, jazz, and popular artists performing with orchestral accompaniment. The variety makes the summer season accessible to audiences who aren't regular classical concertgoers while delivering the full orchestral experience that the Symphony's musician quality supports. The Rady Shell's outdoor format is distinctly family-friendly — picnic blankets, lawn chairs, and the relaxed atmosphere of the waterfront park contrast with the formality of indoor concert halls. The adjacent Jacobs Park lawn allows families to spread out while the children remain within range of the music. Food and wine are available from vendors on-site. The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park is located at 222 Park Blvd in downtown San Diego, walkable from the Embarcadero and accessible via MTS Trolley (Convention Center station). Parking in the downtown convention center structures. Individual concert tickets and season subscriptions available through the San Diego Symphony website.

San Diego Swing Dance Club — Sunday Afternoons

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Tomorrow

San Diego Swing Dance Club — Sunday Afternoons

Every Sunday · Next Aug 16 Free 5035 Shawline St, San Diego, CA 92…

Nobody ever builds the good version of this for people who want their evening back. Everything worth dancing to starts at nine and ends when you have to be at work in six hours. So a roomful of dancers quietly moved the whole thing to Sunday afternoon and never looked back. West Coast and East Coast both welcome, four hours long, the early stretch leaving room for instruction and the rest given over to social dancing across a spread of tempos. The regulars have been at it for years, which sounds intimidating and is actually the entire point — the floor level is high enough that a newcomer learns more standing at the edge watching than in any beginner class. That gradient is how the club has sustained itself. No partner required. Lessons if you want them. And the building is air-conditioned, which in July is reason enough on its own. Come alone. You will not stay that way for long.

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3 days away

Water for Elephants

In 3 days · Aug 18 $45+ San Diego Civic Theatre, 1100 Thir…

Everyone has had the fantasy at least once — to walk away from the life that is crushing you, hop the next train, and vanish into something stranger and more alive. Water for Elephants is that fantasy made into a Broadway musical: a young man with nothing left loses himself to a Depression-era circus, its beautiful danger, its found family of outcasts, and a love that could get them both killed. The stage production is a marvel of real circus craft — acrobats, aerialists, an entire vanished world conjured out of trunks and rope and longing. It aches with the particular romance of the open road and the people who live outside the ordinary. The Civic Theatre gives it room to soar. August 18 through 23, 2026, downtown San Diego. Come for the spectacle, and stay for the old, sweet, dangerous idea that it is never quite too late to run away and start over.

Griffith Park Free Shakespeare Festival 2026 — Independent Shakespeare Co.

Weekly

13 Gathering

4 days away

Griffith Park Free Shakespeare Festival 2026 — Independent Shakespeare Co.

Every Wednesday · Next Aug 19 Old Zoo at Griffith Park, 4730 Cry…

Around the twenty-minute mark the children stop squirming and go completely still, because someone standing on a stage built out of nothing is saying something that somehow lands. That is the moment people come back for. Eight hundred people spread blankets in the ruins of the old zoo, open the wine, and watch Shakespeare under open sky for nothing at all. Independent Shakespeare Co. has been doing it for over two decades. No tickets, no assigned seats, no walls — just actors and language and the specific magic of a story written four hundred years ago making strangers in a Los Angeles park laugh at the same instant. The season runs two productions, a taut political thriller and a music-filled comedy of mistaken identity, Wednesday through Sunday evenings. Registration is requested at IndieShakes.org to manage the crowd; admission is always free. Bring low chairs, a picnic, and someone who is certain they do not like Shakespeare. Watch what happens.

Weekly

314 Gathering

5 days away

314

Firehouse Swing Dance — Weekly Thursdays, San Diego

Every Thursday · Next Aug 20 Free 4255 Ruffin Rd Ste 200, San Diego,…

Most scenes depend on somebody deciding it is worth running this month. This one just shows up, every Thursday, and has since 1998. That reliability is the whole engineering trick. Because the floor is dependable, the good dancers keep coming; because the good dancers are there, the first-timers learn from people who are genuinely excellent; because first-timers keep arriving, the floor never calcifies into a closed club. Twenty-five years of that loop has made it the largest weekly swing dance in San Diego. Classes run 7 to 8 PM — beginner Lindy Hop, included with entry. Social dancing 8 to 11. Live bands when the calendar allows. The venue is a dedicated dance space, not a bar that shoves its tables aside at nine. On any given Thursday the room holds people in their first lesson and people who have been coming since the 1990s, and they dance with each other. 4255 Ruffin Rd Ste 200, San Diego. No partner required. No experience required. Dress code: whatever you can move in.

Weekly

226 Gathering

6 days away

226

Chinatown Summer Nights LA 2026

Every Friday · Next Aug 21 Free 727 N Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90…

The marine layer rolls in over North Broadway around dusk and does something unfair to the lanterns — makes them glow softer than they have any right to, turns a block that was quiet all week into somewhere you want to stand still. This is Chinatown running its own summer evenings, and the people who grew up on these streets are the audience, not the backdrop. Food stalls set up in the plaza, music comes from more than one corner at once, and the cooking leans toward Southern and Southeast Asia — the traditions that actually shaped these blocks — alongside regional Chinese dishes that rarely surface outside the community. Free, outdoors, Friday and Saturday evenings through the summer, 7–10 PM at 727 N Broadway. Bring the friend who insists this city has no street life after dark. Let them stand under the lanterns and try to keep saying it.

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191 Gathering

7 days away

191

Jabbawockeez at Pechanga

In 7 days · Aug 22 Pechanga Resort Casino, 45000 Pech…

They kept the same masks for twenty years because the masks aren't a gimmick — they're the philosophy. When you can't see their faces, you stop watching the person and start watching the movement. The Jabbawockeez made that trade in the early 2000s, and no group has matched the visual language they built since. America's Got Talent champions who turned that moment into a Las Vegas residency. The white-masked crew who invented a genre of hip-hop choreography that every group since has had to reckon with. Two hours of precision, storytelling, and ensemble work that does not have a B-team. The show works for people who don't think of themselves as dance fans — because it's not really a dance show. It's closer to theater. The masks make it universal. The choreography makes it extraordinary. Pechanga Theater, Saturday August 22. Two shows: 3:30 PM and 7:30 PM. Both sell; the earlier one moves faster.

Rozz Williams: Romeo’s Distress — Documentary Screening + Live Performance

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14 days away

Rozz Williams: Romeo’s Distress — Documentary Screening + Live Performance

In 14 days · Aug 29 Fox Theater Pomona, 301 South Gare…

Some artists leave songs behind. He left a wound that never closed, and this scene has been carrying it for more than two decades. The documentary screens first — Nico B's film on Rozz Williams, taking its Southern California premiere. Then comes the part that is hard to explain to anyone outside it: Rikk Agnew, James McGearty, and David Glass, the original Christian Death lineup, playing material from Only Theatre of Pain, Catastrophe Ballet, and Ashes, with Eva O, Gitane Demone, Patrik Mata, William Faith, and Kenton Holmes taking vocals. This is not a tribute band. These are the people who were in the room when the music was made. The Fox Theater in Pomona, all art deco grandeur, is the right building for something this heavy. Tickets through AXS. If you know someone who wore out their copy of Only Theatre of Pain, they need to hear about this tonight.

Coming Soon

18 days away

The Phantom of the Opera

Sep 2, 2026 $45+ San Diego Civic Theatre, 1100 Thir…

The first time the organ crashes in and the chandelier begins its slow, terrible rise, something happens in the body that no amount of knowing-better can talk you out of. Phantom has been seducing audiences for four decades because it is unashamed of the things theater is supposedly too sophisticated for now — grand romance, real spectacle, a melody that lodges in you for a week. This touring production brings the full machinery to the Civic Theatre: the boat on the misty lake, the falling chandelier, that voice pleading from behind the mirror. It is opera for people who think they do not like opera, gothic melodrama played completely straight and all the more overwhelming for it. Dress up a little; it is that kind of night. September 2 through 13, 2026, downtown San Diego. Come surrender to the swell of it, and remember why a room full of strangers still gasps at the same moment, together, in the dark.

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21 Gathering

20 days away

Orange International Street Fair 2026

Sep 4 – Sep 6, 2026 Old Towne Orange Plaza, Chapman Av…

Fourteen countries set up kitchens on the same four blocks, and for three days the whole town smells like something your grandmother would have made if your grandmother had been from everywhere at once. It runs on a principle most food festivals abandoned decades ago: no entrance fee, no VIP section, and no sponsor telling you which direction to walk. You show up. You eat Brazilian food beside a stage playing Irish music beside a booth selling Greek pastries. The line for the gyros touches the line for the lumpia touches the line for the schnitzel. You lose a child in the kids' street and find them covered in face paint holding a stick of something fried. Old Towne Orange, the historic plaza at the center of it, eight stages running continuously, crafts booths down every street. Bring cash — plenty of vendors take nothing else. Come hungry, and bring the person who claims they have already tried everything. Watch that hold up for about ten minutes.

Water for Elephants — Broadway in Hollywood

Coming Soon

24 days away

Water for Elephants — Broadway in Hollywood

Sep 8, 2026 Hollywood Pantages Theatre, 6233 H…

We keep telling stories about running away with the circus because some part of us never entirely stopped wanting to. This one takes that ache and puts real acrobats in the air above it. A young man loses everything, jumps a moving train in the dark, and lands inside a Depression-era traveling show full of danger and wonder and one impossible love. The touring production folds genuine aerialists and hand-balancers into the storytelling, so the spectacle is not a metaphor for anything — it is physically happening over the actors' heads while they sing. Seven Tony nominations, adapted from the novel everybody's mother read the same year. Under the gilded ceiling on Hollywood Boulevard, one night in September, and fine for kids around eight and up. The people who still look twice at a passing train will feel every minute of it. Take the one you know does that.

Coming Soon

25 days away

& Juliet

Sep 9, 2026 $45+ Segerstrom Center for the Arts, 60…

What if Juliet didn't die for Romeo? & Juliet takes that gleeful what-if and runs it straight through a jukebox of Max Martin's biggest pop hits (Britney, Backstreet Boys, Katy Perry, Pink), turning Shakespeare's tragedy into a joyous, glitter-cannon night about a young woman writing her own ending. It is one of the most purely fun musicals touring right now, the kind that has the whole house on its feet screaming lyrics they didn't know they had memorized. & Juliet plays Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa September 9 through 21, 2026, an easy stop off the 405 near South Coast Plaza. Come for the pop bangers, stay for a surprisingly big-hearted story about second chances and choosing yourself. Bring the friends who still know every word to every 2000s radio hit. This one is a party.

Coming Soon

32 days away

Goodnight, Oscar

Sep 16, 2026 $40+ North Coast Repertory Theatre, 987…

Oscar Levant was the funniest, most tortured man in mid-century America: a concert pianist, a bottomless wit, a fixture of late-night TV who turned his own breakdowns into the sharpest comedy on air. The Broadway play that won Sean Hayes a Tony brings one impossible night of Levant's life to the stage, and North Coast Repertory Theatre's intimate house in Solana Beach is the perfect room to feel every laugh and every crack in the mask up close. This is theater for people who love a brilliant, wounded mind and a joke that costs something. Goodnight, Oscar runs September 16 through October 11, 2026, at North Coast Rep. Come for a portrait of genius on the edge, stay for one of the best-written plays of the last few years, performed close enough to see the sweat. Bring the friend who quotes old talk shows.

Coming Soon

34 days away

Begin Again, A New Musical

Sep 18, 2026 The Old Globe, 1363 Old Globe Way,…

The belief that a song can still save you does not show up when things are going well. It arrives after everything else has already fallen apart, which is the whole heart of this one. Adapted from the John Carney film, with an original score by Pat Monahan, it follows two people who meet at the bottom and rebuild themselves one recording at a time. The Old Globe cast part of the onstage band with actual San Diego musicians who answered an open call, which means some of the sound coming off that stage belongs to this city specifically. Watching a pre-Broadway world premiere is watching a show decide what it will become, in the room, before critics and cast albums fix it in place forever. Bring the person who still has an unfinished song sitting on their phone. Do not say anything about it afterward.

Coming Soon

34 days away

Little Shop of Horrors

Sep 18, 2026 $40+ La Mirada Theatre for the Performi…

A man-eating plant from outer space, a doo-wop trio narrating doom, and a lovesick flower-shop clerk named Seymour who will do anything for the girl and the fame: Little Shop of Horrors is the perfect cult musical, equal parts campy horror, sweet romance, and Alan Menken earworms you cannot shake. Feed me, Seymour has been rattling around America's brain for forty years, and McCoy Rigby's productions at La Mirada Theatre are famous for doing this stuff with real Broadway polish. It runs September 18 through October 11, 2026, at La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts. Come for the giant singing plant and the belly laughs, stay for a surprisingly poignant little fable about ambition and the price of getting what you want. Bring the friend who loves a good scare with their showtunes. This one is pure, gleeful fun.

Coming Soon

35 days away

Capital of Craft Beer Fest

Sep 19, 2026 Broadway Pier, 1000 N Harbor Dr, S…

Nobody stumbled into making this one of the great beer cities on earth. A whole generation of brewers argued and experimented and out-hopped each other into it, and the people who drink here wear that history like a hometown jersey. This is that scene's yearly reunion. Sixty-plus beers poured on the pier with the bay sitting right there, unlimited tasters, a commemorative cup, and local bands instead of a hired DJ. It is the kind of afternoon where you fall into conversation with the brewer who actually made the thing in your glass, because in this town they show up and pour it themselves. The early VIP hour is the insider move, before the general crowd floods in. 21+. Broadway Pier, 1000 N Harbor Dr. September 19. The faithful here treat Capital of Craft as a point of civic pride. This is the day they get to prove it.

Coming Soon

38 days away

Disney's Beauty and the Beast

Sep 22, 2026 $45+ Segerstrom Center for the Arts, 60…

A whole generation learned what a musical could be from a dancing teapot and a candelabra, and most of them never fully recovered. Put it on a real stage with a full orchestra swelling underneath Be Our Guest, and watch those same people — grown now, frequently with kids of their own — turn into puddles in the dark. This is grand, gold-drenched, family-first Broadway with no apology for any of it: the ballroom, the enchanted castle, the yellow gown lit so it reads from the back row of the hall. The touring production has the scale to actually deliver that ballroom, which is the moment everything hinges on and the one cheap productions always get wrong. Segerstrom in Costa Mesa is an easy stop off the freeway near the mall. Make it a first big theater night for a small person, or go entirely for yourself. Some stories really are worth telling as a tale as old as time.

Coming Soon

42 days away

Mariachi USA Festival

Sep 26, 2026 $35+ The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park, 222…

The moment a full mariachi hits that first blast of trumpet and violin, something in the chest goes tight and warm at once. Mariachi USA is the longest-running and most revered mariachi event in the world, and its San Diego edition brings four nonstop hours of puro mariachi, ballet folklorico, and a fireworks finale to the Rady Shell on the downtown waterfront. This is culture as celebration, generations of families together on a warm September night, the bay glittering behind the stage. Saturday, September 26, 2026, the Rady Shell at Jacobs Park, San Diego. Bring your parents, bring your kids, wear something that lets you dance in your seat, and come feel the goosebumps only live mariachi can raise. Whether it is in your blood or brand new to you, this one moves you.

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