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Elf the Musical — Hollywood Pantages Theatre, Los Angeles

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59 days away

Elf the Musical — Hollywood Pantages Theatre, Los Angeles

Every day · Next Dec 1 6233 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles, …

December in Los Angeles has a strange quality—the palm trees refuse to cooperate with the season, the weather stays warm enough for shorts, and the holidays have to work harder to feel real. Elf the Musical at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre is how they succeed. This touring Broadway production turns the film into a live spectacle of practical comedy and earnest joy, following Buddy from the North Pole to New York City in a story that somehow cracks open every adult in the room while the kids just see the fun. The Pantages itself is part of the magic—Art Deco grandeur on Hollywood Boulevard, a theater where the ceiling alone is worth the price of admission, and where the acoustics carry every laugh and every gasp into the balcony. The show runs December 1 through 13 with evening performances at 7:30 PM and weekend matinees, giving every schedule a way in. For families who build traditions, for couples looking for the night that actually feels like Christmas, for the person who still cries at the 'Santa I Know Him' scene and isn't ashamed of it. Pantages Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard—bring someone who needs to believe in something simple for a couple of hours.

Coming Soon

62 days away

The Hip Hop Nutcracker

Dec 4, 2026 from $40 Balboa Theatre, 868 Fourth Ave, Sa…

Tchaikovsky wrote a party scene, a fight, and a long sequence where everyone shows off in turn, and if that structure sounds familiar it is because a cypher works the same way. Somebody noticed. The score is intact - a violinist plays it live, on stage, not from a pit - and over it a dozen dancers take the Land of Sweets apart and rebuild it as a block party in nineteen-eighties New York. The turn that gets people is the Arabian variation, normally the slow bit you tolerate, reworked into something so controlled the room forgets to breathe. Two audiences show up: parents who have been dragged to a traditional production every December since their kid could sit still, and dancers who came for the choreography and could not care less about the story. They convert each other by the second act. A digital MC opens the show. Balboa Theatre, downtown, the first weekend of December.

Makers Arcade Holiday Fair 2026 — Broadway Pier, San Diego

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13 Gathering

70 days away

Makers Arcade Holiday Fair 2026 — Broadway Pier, San Diego

Every day · Next Dec 12 1000 N Harbor Dr, San Diego, CA 92…

You know the gift problem. Somebody matters, and everything you scroll past looks like it was designed by an algorithm for a person who does not exist. This solves it the old way. A hundred and twenty local makers set up on the pier and sell things they made with their hands: ceramics, jewelry, candles that smell like an actual memory instead of a marketing brief, prints by artists whose studios are ten miles from your house. There is a free make-and-take wreath station where a kid builds something and then refuses to ever put it down. And all of it happens with the bay right behind you, because December here is sun and shirtsleeves while the rest of the country is indoors. A weekend on the Broadway Pier, small admission at the door, kids free. Bring the person you have no idea what to get. Let them pick it out in front of you.

Coming Soon

14 Gathering

70 days away

Elf - The Musical

Dec 12, 2026 $40+ Hollywood Pantages Theatre, 6233 H…

Buddy the Elf, in all his maple-syrup-on-spaghetti, smiling-is-my-favorite glory, gets the full Broadway treatment, and for a certain kind of family the Will Ferrell movie has become as load-bearing a Christmas tradition as the tree itself. Elf - The Musical brings that manic, sweet, deeply quotable holiday joy to the stage of the Hollywood Pantages, with big song-and-dance numbers and a heart as gooey as a candy-cane forest. It is pure, uncynical December fun, scaled for kids but written so the parents laugh too. Elf - The Musical plays the Pantages on Saturday, December 12, 2026, in Hollywood off the Metro B Line. Wear the ugly sweater, make it the kickoff to your holiday season, and come remember that the best way to spread Christmas cheer is singing loud for all to hear.

Daily

70 days away

A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong

Every day · Next Dec 12 $40+ Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N Grand Ave,…

If you have ever watched a live show teeter on the edge of total catastrophe and laughed until it hurt, this is your holiday tradition: from Mischief, the company behind The Play That Goes Wrong, comes a Dickens Christmas where the scenery collapses, the actors forget their lines, the ghosts arrive late, and somehow Scrooge still finds his heart by the final bow. It is precision-engineered slapstick, the kind of theater that has grandparents and eight-year-olds gasping at the same pratfall. A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong plays the Ahmanson Theatre at the Music Center in downtown LA December 12, 2026 through January 10, 2027. Bring the family, bring the friend who thinks they hate theater, and come start a new December tradition built entirely on beautiful disaster. Warning: you will laugh so hard you miss half the jokes.

NUTCRACKER! Magical Christmas Ballet — Jacobs Music Center, San Diego

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73 days away

NUTCRACKER! Magical Christmas Ballet — Jacobs Music Center, San Diego

Dec 15, 2026 1245 7th Ave, San Diego, CA 92101

You felt it the first time as a child — the moment the overture swells and the stage dissolves into a world where tin soldiers march and snowflakes dance in formation. That feeling never left. It just went dormant, waiting for a December evening dark enough to wake it up. NUTCRACKER! Magical Christmas Ballet brings America's largest touring Nutcracker production to Jacobs Music Center on December 15. This isn't a local ballet company doing their annual recital. This is an international cast of dancers, acrobats, and puppeteers transforming Tchaikovsky's score into something that moves between classical ballet and spectacle — larger-than-life puppetry, costumes that seem to generate their own light, and aerial work that belongs in a Cirque show. The production has been touring for over a decade and has become a December institution in every city it touches. Jacobs Music Center sits at 1245 7th Ave in downtown San Diego, the same hall where the San Diego Symphony plays. The acoustics are built for orchestral music, which means Tchaikovsky's score fills the room the way it was written to. Doors open at 6 PM, showtime 7 PM. All ages. This is a Tuesday night in mid-December. The work week is winding down, the holidays are close enough to feel, and San Diego's evening air carries just enough chill to make a velvet seat in a warm concert hall feel like exactly where you're supposed to be.

Daily

12 Gathering

75 days away

The Lion King — Hollywood Pantages

Every day · Next Dec 17 From $79 6233 Hollywood Blvd, Hollywood, CA…

The lights go down, one voice starts, and then the animals come up the aisle right past your seat — close enough that somebody behind you gasps out loud and does not apologize for it. That opening has undone a hundred and ten million people and it has not gotten old once. Julie Taymor's puppetry, masks, and costume work are the reason. There is genuinely nothing else in touring theater that looks like this, and no amount of the film prepares you for what a person operating a giraffe at full height does to a room. The songs everybody already knows are all here, alongside material written for the stage by Elton John, Tim Rice, and Hans Zimmer. A long winter engagement on Hollywood Boulevard, performances most days with matinees, and the Metro stops right outside. For a lot of families this is the holiday tradition. For a lot of kids it is the first live theater they will ever see. Be the person who takes one of them.

Golden State Ballet: The Nutcracker 2026

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75 days away

Golden State Ballet: The Nutcracker 2026

Every day · Next Dec 17 San Diego Civic Theatre, 1100 Thir…

Some traditions survive only because a grandmother refused to let them lapse — the same seats every year, the same held breath when the tree grows and grows and the whole stage tilts toward wonder. That is what waits inside the San Diego Civic Theatre this December, when Golden State Ballet gives the city its Nutcracker. Tchaikovsky's score is a piece of collective memory by now; you know the Waltz of the Flowers before the first note lands, and still it catches you. Live orchestra, a corps that trained all year for these nine performances, the Sugar Plum Fairy suspended for one impossible second at the top of a lift. For a child, it is the first time the theater feels like magic instead of a place adults go. For everyone else, it is a way back to that first time. The show runs December 17 through 23, evenings at 7:30pm and weekend matinees, at the Civic Theatre downtown. Bring the kids you have, or the kid you were.

World Ballet Company: The Nutcracker — Balboa Theatre, San Diego

Coming Soon

84 days away

World Ballet Company: The Nutcracker — Balboa Theatre, San Diego

Dec 26, 2026 Balboa Theatre, 868 Fourth Ave, Sa…

The tree has been opened. The presents have been sorted. The relatives have gone quiet. And now it is the evening of December 26 and you are looking for the thing that extends the feeling one more day — the warm, orchestral, velvet-curtain feeling that December gives you when it's working. World Ballet Company brings The Nutcracker to San Diego's Balboa Theatre with 40 dancers, over 150 hand-sewn costumes, and the kind of hand-crafted sets that make you forget you're in a theater and not inside a music box. This is the post-Christmas Nutcracker — the one for the people who didn't get tickets to the earlier run, or who want to see a different company's interpretation, or who simply believe that one Nutcracker per season is not enough. The Land of Sweets scene alone justifies the evening. One show only: Saturday, December 26, 2026 at 7:00 PM. Balboa Theatre, 868 Fourth Ave, San Diego. Tickets through AXS and the Balboa Theatre box office.

Elf the Musical — Broadway San Diego at the Civic Theatre (Holiday Season 2026)

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14 Gathering

87 days away

Elf the Musical — Broadway San Diego at the Civic Theatre (Holiday Season 2026)

Every day · Next Dec 29 San Diego Civic Theatre, 1100 3rd …

The movie became a meme became a cultural institution became a Broadway musical became the thing every family does between Christmas and New Year's because nothing else captures that specific week-between-holidays energy quite like Buddy the Elf trying to hug a stranger. Elf the Musical at the San Diego Civic Theatre is the holiday show that works for the four-year-old and the forty-year-old in the same row — and both of them will be singing 'Santa's Coming to Town' on the drive home. The touring production brings the full Broadway staging: the sets are enormous, the costumes are absurd, and the cast treats the material with exactly the right amount of seriousness, which is none at all. Broadway San Diego closes the 2026 calendar with this one, and the timing is perfect — the week between Christmas and New Year's when nobody has anywhere to be and everyone needs somewhere to go. December 29, 2026 through January 3, 2027. San Diego Civic Theatre, downtown.

First Night Boston 2027 — New Year's Eve Arts Festival

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🌎 Nation's Best 89 days away

First Night Boston 2027 — New Year's Eve Arts Festival

Dec 31, 2026 Copley Square, 560 Boylston St, Bo…

The country's oldest and largest New Year's Eve arts festival does not require a ticket, a reservation, or knowing somebody. First Night Boston turns the city into an open stage on December 31 — live music spilling out of churches and concert halls, dance performances in hotel lobbies, figure skating on the Common, ice sculptures catching the last light of the year, and fireworks over the harbor that turn the waterfront into something a painter would have to apologize for inventing. All of it is free. There is something particular about a city that decided decades ago that the best way to close the year is to give everyone the same night, regardless of what they can afford, and then actually followed through on it for forty consecutive years. The celebration runs across multiple venues from the Back Bay to the Waterfront, building through the afternoon and evening until midnight, when Boston Harbor lights up and everyone who was a stranger an hour ago is suddenly cheering for the same uncertain future. Copley Square and the harbor are the anchors, but the real event is the walk between them — every block holds something you did not expect, a string quartet in a doorway or a stilt walker handing out sparklers or a choir that makes you stop and forget where you were going. The afternoon programming is built for families — puppet shows, face painting, music workshops, a parade of illuminated lanterns through the Back Bay. The evening shifts to concerts and DJ sets and the ice sculptures start glowing from inside. By 10 PM the harbor fills with people staking out spots for the midnight fireworks, and the air carries that specific electricity of a million people deciding at the same time that next year will be different. First Night has been copied by over 200 cities worldwide, but the original still runs in the city where it started, and that matters more than it should. Copley Square, 560 Boylston St, Boston, MA. December 31, 2026. Free.

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110 Gathering

133 days away

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LA Chinatown Lunar New Year Parade 2027

Feb 13, 2027 Chinatown Central Plaza, 970 N Bro…

Firecrackers go off in long strings and the sound comes back off the buildings on Broadway, doubled, so that for a few seconds you cannot tell where the street ends. Then the lions come. Troupes out of kung fu schools all over the region, some of them kids, weaving through a crowd that has stood on this sidewalk for generations: grandparents who watched this parade as children now holding grandchildren who will do the same. Marching bands, community floats, dragon dances, and a festival that spills off Broadway into the plazas with food, lanterns, and calligraphers working in the open where you can stand and watch the brush move. Chinatown, free to stand and watch, and take Metro, because the parking disappears hours ahead of you. This one runs on the Year of the Goat. Bring whoever in your family has been meaning to take you to something like this and never quite got around to it.

Coming Soon

178 days away

Operation Mincemeat — Pantages 2027

Mar 30 – Apr 18, 2027 From $75 6233 Hollywood Blvd, Hollywood, CA…

A musical about a corpse should not work. Dress a dead body in a uniform, plant fake invasion plans on it, float it ashore where the Nazis will find it — and somehow that becomes one of the funniest, most moving shows anybody has made in years. It ran and ran in the West End on word of mouth, won the Olivier for Best New Musical, and built a devoted international following before it ever crossed the Atlantic. Now it makes its US debut at the Pantages. SpitLip wrote it and first performed it themselves, structured as a troupe putting on a show inside the show — closest in sensibility to Monty Python attempting a genuine spy thriller, and far more affecting than that description can carry. The Pantages is one of the grand rooms on this coast, and the B Line puts you at the door. Take the friend who says they do not like musicals. Watch that position collapse.

Coming Soon

298 days away

Hamilton — Hollywood Pantages 2027

Jul 28 – Aug 29, 2027 From $89 6233 Hollywood Blvd, Hollywood, CA…

Some people can name the exact seat they were in the first time they heard a stage rap the American Revolution, and they have been waiting for a reason to sit in one again. The show that rewired what a Broadway musical could be - blending hip-hop, R&B, jazz, and classic musical theater into the story of Alexander Hamilton - comes back within reach for a full month. It won 11 Tony Awards including Best Musical, and the original cast recording remains one of the best-selling cast albums ever made, but none of that is why the tickets vanish weeks out. It is the rush of watching a founding father's life told at a tempo no history class ever managed. This extended engagement gives Southern California a rare window at a show that routinely sells out fast. The run plays Tuesday through Sunday with matinee and evening performances throughout. Accessible seating is available in the main orchestra. Take the Metro B Line to Hollywood and Highland, one block away; parking in the Hollywood and Highland structure is validated for ticket holders. Hamilton, Hollywood Pantages Theatre, July 28 through August 29, 2027. A historic 2,700-seat house on Hollywood Boulevard.

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