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Ellen O'Connell Whittet w/ Melissa Seley, "Book of Hours"

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Ellen O'Connell Whittet w/ Melissa Seley, "Book of Hours"

Tomorrow · Oct 8 Free Book Soup, 8818 Sunset Boulevard, …

Anyone who trained seriously at something as a child and then had to stop knows the particular grief of a body that was built for one purpose and then released from it. Whittet was a ballet dancer until an injury ended it, and she has spent two books now writing about what the discipline does to a person - the obedience, the pain tolerance taught as virtue, the way beauty gets extracted from young women who are not asked. The new one takes the title from the illuminated devotional books, which is the right frame: the daily practice, the hours kept whether or not anyone is watching. Seley joins her. The audience for this at a West Hollywood bookstore is reliably interesting - dancers, former dancers, and people who did gymnastics or music or anything else that demanded everything at twelve years old. Free, Thursday at seven, thirty chairs between shelves. Sit near the front; she reads quietly and does not reach for the microphone.

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Tomorrow

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OB Oktoberfest — Ocean Beach

In 2 days · Oct 9 Free entry Ocean Beach, San Diego, CA 92107

The band on stage plays with the commitment of people who have been doing this since before craft beer made it cool, and the Pacific two blocks away makes the whole afternoon smell right - this is not everyone else's Oktoberfest. This is Newport Avenue, a community built around surf culture and the specific California stubborn-independence that makes Ocean Beach what it is. The steins are real. The schnitzel is real. The street closes, the vendors fill the block, and the neighborhood shows up - the beach crowd, the locals who have come for years, the people who drove down from North County because it is worth the parking situation. It is. This is the fall version of what a Southern California beach can be: outdoors until dark, a crowd that came specifically for this. Come early. Stay for the full pour. Leave when Newport Avenue decides the night is over, which will not be before you are ready. Ocean Beach, San Diego, September 26th. Free.

Cynthia Erivo: Let Me Sing To You — Hollywood Bowl

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7 days away

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Cynthia Erivo: Let Me Sing To You — Hollywood Bowl

In 8 days · Oct 15 varies Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N Highland Av…

A whole hillside forgetting to breathe at the same time makes a sound of its own, which is mostly the absence of one. That happens when a voice built for rooms this size stops performing and simply tells you something. One night, no opening act, no shared billing. A Tony winner, an Emmy nominee, an Oscar nominee, the voice behind Elphaba on film — alone on the largest outdoor stage in the country with nothing to hide behind and no visible interest in hiding. The set is built to prove that the Broadway voice, the pop voice, and the soul voice all live inside one person, and that she has never considered them separate things. A Thursday evening in October at the Bowl on North Highland, under the shell and the open sky. If you have ever watched a performance and forgotten your own body was in the room, this is the artist who does that to entire hillsides. Take somebody who has never had it happen.

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14 days away

Obscene

Oct 22 – Oct 23, 2026 Free The Slipper Clutch, 351 S Broadway…

Somewhere between twenty-two and now, most people packed the dark music away with the clothes that went with it. A few never did, and once a month they find each other on Broadway without having to explain a single thing to anybody. Obscene is a DTLA night for goth, industrial, EBM and darkwave, run by residents Industria Nova and Damascus Knives, who play the whole span of it rather than the four songs everyone knows. There are vendors, which tells you what kind of night it actually is — people come early, buy something, stay. It is free at the door and twenty-one and up, and free matters here: it means the room fills with people who came for the music rather than people protecting a fifty-dollar decision. The Slipper Clutch is small and low and red. You will be standing closer to the booth than you are used to. Thursday, October 22. Nine p.m. until two. 351 South Broadway. Ask anyone there when the next one is — they will know.

The Rock and Roll Playhouse Plays Music of Olivia Rodrigo + More for Kids

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17 days away

The Rock and Roll Playhouse Plays Music of Olivia Rodrigo + More for Kids

Oct 25, 2026 Lodge Room, 104 N Avenue 56, Los A…

You used to go to shows. Then you had a kid, and the math stopped working — the babysitter, the 9 PM doors, the guilt either way. That trade is the ache this fixes, and it fixes it by refusing the premise. A live band plays the songs at real volume through the real PA, and the floor stays empty of chairs on purpose so that the children can move however they want during it. Nobody shushes anybody. Parents end up dancing harder than the kids, which everyone pretends not to notice. The format has run for years in rooms like this one and the unwritten rule is that you arrive early enough to claim floor space near the stage, because the front two rows are where the four-year-olds organize themselves into something resembling a pit. The Highland Park hall has a balcony for anyone who needs to sit down and watch it happen. Music at 11:30 AM, all ages, upstairs at 104 N Avenue 56. It runs most months with a different songbook, so the families who come once tend to come back.

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18 days away

THE IMPROVISED SHAKESPEARE COMPANY

Oct 26, 2026 Largo at the Coronet, 366 N La Cie…

Monday is the night nothing happens, which is exactly when it is worth watching people work without a net. Somebody in the audience shouts a title for a play that has never existed, and the cast performs a full-length Shakespearean version of it on the spot — five acts, mistaken identities, a death scene, verse invented on the fly by people who have to rhyme their way out of corners they built ninety seconds earlier. The failures are the best part. An actor gets stranded mid-couplet, and you can watch the others silently decide whether to rescue him or let him hang there one beat longer because it is funnier. They almost always let him hang. Mark Flanagan asks you to leave your phone at home or in the car, and he means it, so no clip of the collapse exists. The play was never written down to begin with, which means the thing you sit through will never be performed again, by anyone, in any city. Doors at seven, curtain at eight, Monday the 26th of October. Largo at the Coronet, on La Cienega.

GRIM — La Jolla Playhouse World Premiere

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19 days away

GRIM — La Jolla Playhouse World Premiere

Every day · Next Oct 27 2910 La Jolla Village Dr, La Jolla…

After 300,000 years on the clock, the Grim Reaper is finally done. The question is what happens when his daughter Diana discovers she would rather fall in love with life than carry on the family business. GRIM is a world premiere musical running at La Jolla Playhouse from October 27 through November 29 on the Mandell Weiss Theatre stage. It is irreverent, heartbreaking, and funny in the way only a show about death can be — because the people who made it clearly love being alive. The creative team has built something that feels like it was written for the person who ugly-cries at Pixar movies and then pretends they didn't. First look previews run October 27 through November 1, with the official opening on November 8. Performances run Tuesday through Sunday — the theatre is dark on Mondays. La Jolla Playhouse is the only authorized ticket seller. Subscriber packs of three or more shows start at $167 and include free parking and free exchanges. The Playhouse has premiered more than 30 productions that went on to Broadway, including Jersey Boys and Come From Away. GRIM is the kind of show you see before it leaves San Diego — and then tell people you were there first.

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19 days away

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The Who's Tommy

Every day · Next Oct 27 $45+ Hollywood Pantages Theatre, 6233 H…

Before jukebox musicals were a thing, The Who blew the doors off with a full-blown rock opera about a deaf, dumb, and blind kid who becomes a pinball messiah, and the Broadway revival of Tommy reinvented it for the stage with jaw-dropping projections, strobe-lit spectacle, and that wall of guitar. Pinball Wizard hits differently when a live band is shaking the walls of the Hollywood Pantages. This is loud, strange, gorgeous theater for people who think they don't like musicals. The touring production plays the Pantages October 27 through November 15, 2026, in the heart of Hollywood off the Metro B Line. Come for the songs you already know by heart, stay for a story far weirder and more moving than the radio hits let on. Bring the classic-rock fan who swears they hate Broadway; watch them cave.

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20 days away

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The Cottage

Every day · Next Oct 28 $40+ North Coast Repertory Theatre, 987…

Sometimes you just want to laugh until your face hurts, and The Cottage delivers: a gleefully filthy, door-slamming British farce of tangled affairs, mistaken beds, and very proper people behaving very badly across one chaotic English country weekend. It was a Broadway hit for a reason, and in the intimate confines of North Coast Repertory Theatre in Solana Beach, every double-take and every secret-revealed lands like a firecracker. This is date-night theater, the kind you leave grinning and quoting. The Cottage runs October 28 through November 22, 2026, at North Coast Rep. Come for a fizzy, wicked, perfectly-timed comedy, bring your most fun-loving couple friends, and settle in for a night where the plot twists faster than anyone on stage can keep their story straight. Warning: you will want to see it twice.

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22 days away

Dear Evan Hansen

Every day · Next Oct 30 $40+ La Mirada Theatre for the Performi…

Waving Through a Window became an anthem for a whole generation of anxious, lonely kids, and the musical it comes from turned the ache of not being seen into one of the most emotionally devastating shows Broadway has produced this century. Dear Evan Hansen follows a boy whose small lie spirals into a connection he desperately needed and never earned, and it lands hardest on anyone who has ever felt invisible at their own lunch table. McCoy Rigby stages it at La Mirada Theatre October 30 through November 22, 2026. Bring tissues, bring the teenager in your life, bring the version of yourself that needed to hear these songs at seventeen. This is theater that wrecks you and mends you in the same breath, performed close enough to feel every note. You will not leave unchanged.

Daily

26 days away

The Outsiders

Every day · Next Nov 3 $45+ San Diego Civic Theatre, 1100 Thir…

Stay gold. S.E. Hinton's story of greasers and Socs and the ache of being sixteen and on the wrong side of town has moved generations, and the musical that won the 2024 Tony for Best Musical turns it into something startlingly physical: rain-soaked rumbles, live music, a cast that throws its whole body into Ponyboy's world. This is the rare Broadway hit that hits hardest for people who thought they were too cool to cry at theater. The touring production plays the San Diego Civic Theatre November 3 through 8, 2026. Reread the book on the drive downtown or come in cold; either way, bring the person who underlined half their copy in high school. It is a big, emotional, beautifully staged night of theater about loyalty, class, and the friends who feel like the only family you chose.

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27 days away

Passing Strange

Every Wednesday · Next Nov 4 Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S El Molino…

You left the neighborhood to find yourself and came back fluent in a language nobody at home speaks. That ache has a soundtrack now, and it has taken almost twenty years to reach the city it was written about. Stew's rock musical follows a kid from South Central who runs to Amsterdam and Berlin chasing the real, and discovers the thing he was running from was the only honest material he had. It won the Tony for its book and became the show people quote at each other in parking lots, and somehow Los Angeles never staged it until now. Zhailon Levingston directs a live band onstage rather than tucked in a pit, so the guitar is a character with opinions. Opening night falls on a Wednesday, November 4 at 7:30pm, which Pasadena Playhouse runs as Wine Wednesday with a pour before curtain. It plays El Molino Avenue through November 29. Bring the friend who also moved away.

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29 days away

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Fleet Week San Diego 2026

Nov 6 – Nov 9, 2026 Free admission Broadway Pier, 1000 North Harbor D…

Your chest hears them before your ears do. A sound comes in off the water, every conversation on the Embarcadero stops mid-sentence, and a few thousand heads tilt back at the same moment. This is the week the Blue Angels belong to San Diego Bay, flying low enough that the downtown skyline becomes their backdrop. What visitors miss is the quieter half. You can walk aboard Navy destroyers, submarines, and amphibious ships free of charge, up the gangway and into the passageways where somebody's kid stands on deployment. The Parade of Ships moves through the bay, the bands play, and the city says out loud that the Navy is its largest employer. This is not a show San Diego hosts. It is San Diego looking at itself. Free, family-friendly, on the Broadway Pier and Embarcadero in October, and the trolley beats parking on air show day. Bring the person who has never stood underneath one of those passes.

San Gabriel Día de los Muertos Celebration 2026 — Mission Playhouse

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29 days away

San Gabriel Día de los Muertos Celebration 2026 — Mission Playhouse

Nov 6, 2026 Mission Playhouse, 320 S Mission D…

An hour is enough. Not everyone wants a whole festival day, six blocks of altars and a crowd; sometimes what you want is to go somewhere for an evening, feel the thing properly, and be home by nine. San Gabriel runs the compact version, indoors and out around the Mission Playhouse — a 1927 auditorium built to look like a Spanish mission, which makes it a strange and fitting room for this. Two and a half hours on a Friday evening in early November, with altars, performance and the city's own programming, at a scale where you can actually see everything without a plan. The San Gabriel Valley has one of the deepest Mexican-American histories in the county and almost none of the tourist traffic that goes with it, which means the crowd here is overwhelmingly local. That changes the feeling. Nobody is performing the tradition for visitors; they are just doing it, and you happen to be there. Friday, November 6, 5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. Mission Playhouse, 320 S Mission Drive, San Gabriel.

Noche de Altares 2026 — Downtown Santa Ana

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30 days away

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Noche de Altares 2026 — Downtown Santa Ana

Nov 7, 2026 4th Street between Ross and Broadw…

Grief in this country is supposed to be handled indoors, quietly, and then put away. Somewhere around year two you realise nobody is going to ask about your person again, and that the silence is worse than the crying was. Calle Cuatro closes for this, and for one night 4th Street becomes something a closed street almost never is: hundreds of altars built on the asphalt by families, students, neighbourhood groups and strangers, running block after block. Now in its twenty-third year, organised by El Centro Cultural de México, it stays deliberately community-built rather than programmed — the altars are made by whoever shows up to make one, which is why they look nothing alike and why some of them will stop you where you stand. The part outsiders never expect is how ordinary the conversation is. You will stand in front of a stranger's altar and they will tell you about their brother the way you would tell someone about a cousin at a wedding. Nobody lowers their voice. That is the whole technology of the thing. Saturday, November 7, noon to 9 p.m., 4th Street between Ross and Broadway, Santa Ana. Free.

Diwali Mela 2026 — Artesia Little India Street Festival

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33 days away

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Diwali Mela 2026 — Artesia Little India Street Festival

Nov 10, 2026 Pioneer Blvd (183rd to 188th St), …

Pioneer Boulevard shuts down, and for one day the biggest Little India in Southern California becomes the biggest Diwali party west of the Mississippi. The Artesia Diwali Mela takes over seven blocks of Pioneer Boulevard — from 183rd Street to 188th Street — with a main stage of Indian music and dance performances, dozens of food vendors serving everything from chaat to biryani to fresh jalebi, cultural booths, merchants with jewelry and textiles, and a street-level energy that makes Diwali feel like exactly what it is: the festival of lights brought to life in a California parking lane. Sunday, November 10, 2026, 11 AM to 10 PM. Pioneer Boulevard, Artesia, CA. Free admission. If you know someone who grew up celebrating Diwali and hasn't been to this yet, send them this. If you didn't grow up celebrating Diwali and want to understand why a billion people do — come find out.

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33 days away

Water for Elephants

Every day · Next Nov 10 $45+ Segerstrom Center for the Arts, 60…

Grown adults come out of this one surprised to be wiping their eyes, which is not what anybody expects from a show with aerialists in it. A Depression-era circus, a runaway veterinary student, and a love story told under canvas that smells of sawdust and something more dangerous. Sara Gruen's novel had a long life in book clubs before Broadway got to it, and the staging is why people talk about the production rather than the plot: real circus arts, bodies in the air, puppetry conjuring an entire menagerie out of almost nothing while you watch it happen. It is a big old-fashioned romance done in a way theater has not quite managed before. The touring production plays Segerstrom Center in Costa Mesa, off the 405 near South Coast Plaza, in November. Bring somebody who still cries at the good ones and does not apologize for it.

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34 days away

Anaheim Ducks vs. Nashville Predators

Nov 11, 2026 Honda Center, 2695 E Katella Ave, …

Mid-November is when the novelty of a new season wears off and a weeknight game stops being an occasion and becomes a habit. That is the better version of being a fan, and it is almost impossible to explain to someone who has only been to a playoff game. Nashville is the opponent, and Predators supporters bring the loudest visiting tradition in the league with them — the catcalls, the chants aimed at the opposing goaltender, the whole apparatus imported from Broadway. A few hundred of them in a half-full Orange County building is more than enough to be heard, and the home crowd tends to rise to it rather than sulk. Wednesday nights also mean the concourse lines move and you can actually get a seat at the bar behind section 220. The Predators also play a heavy, grinding style that makes for an honest hockey game rather than a highlight reel, and honest is underrated in November. Faceoff is at seven on the eleventh, off Katella in Anaheim.

Weekly

34 days away

Purpose

Every Wednesday · Next Nov 11 Gil Cates Theater, Geffen Playhous…

Every family keeps two versions of itself: the one that sits down to dinner, and the one that surfaces the moment somebody finally says the unsayable thing out loud. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins built a whole play in the gap between them, and it won the Tony for it. A storied Black political dynasty gathers in a Chicago house where the legacy on the walls and the people under the roof no longer match, and the evening comes apart one sentence at a time. Phylicia Rashad directs, and the Broadway cast came west with it rather than recasting for the coast, so you are watching the people who built these performances in the room. The Gil Cates stage holds fewer than five hundred seats, which means the shouting lands about twenty feet from your face and the silences are worse. Previews begin Wednesday, November 11 at 7:30pm and the run continues through December 13 in Westwood. You will recognize somebody. That is the part nobody warns you about.

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44 days away

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Candide

Nov 21, 2026 $40+ Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N G…

Bring the person who insists opera is not for them. This is the one that wins the argument, and it wins inside twenty minutes, because nobody warned them it would be funny. Bernstein wrote something that refuses to sit still in any genre, part opera, part Broadway musical, part gleeful philosophical cartoon, and sent a wide-eyed hero racing across a world absolutely determined to prove this is not the best of all possible worlds. Then he dropped Glitter and Be Gay into the middle of it, a coloratura fireworks display that leaves audiences roaring and justifies the seat on its own. LA Opera stages it at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion downtown, in the run-up to the holidays. Come to laugh where you expected to be lectured, and spend the second act watching your skeptic's face instead of the stage.

Festival of Lights at the Mission Inn 2026 — Riverside

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45 days away

Festival of Lights at the Mission Inn 2026 — Riverside

Nov 22, 2026 The Mission Inn Hotel & Spa, 3649 …

The first time you see it, you stop walking. Ten million lights wrapped around a century-old hotel in downtown Riverside, and the building itself looks like it is breathing — towers and turrets and Spanish arches outlined in white and gold against a cold November sky. Your phone cannot capture it. Nothing can. The scale is absurd and the beauty is sincere and you stand there with strangers who are all doing the same thing you are doing, which is nothing at all except looking up. The Festival of Lights at the Mission Inn has run every holiday season since 1992. The Grand Switch-On Ceremony on November 22 draws tens of thousands to watch the building come alive for the first time — a concert, a dance performance, and then the moment when every bulb fires at once and the crowd makes a sound that is not quite a cheer and not quite a gasp. After opening night, the lights stay on through January 6, and the surrounding blocks of downtown Riverside fill with food vendors, carolers, horse-drawn carriages, and a walk-through experience that takes longer than you planned because you keep stopping. Riverside is an hour from San Diego, an hour from LA, and forty minutes from the IE core. This is not a drive you will regret. November 22, 2026 through January 6, 2027. Switch-On Ceremony at 5 PM on November 22. The Mission Inn Hotel & Spa, 3649 Mission Inn Ave, Riverside, CA 92501.

Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade 2026 -- New York, NY

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🌎 Nation's Best 49 days away

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Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade 2026 -- New York, NY

Nov 26, 2026 77th Street & Central Park West, N…

From 77th Street down to Herald Square on Thanksgiving morning, two and a half million people line the route. The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade has been doing this since 1924. The parade experience on the ground is unlike watching it on television. The balloons — some 16 giant character balloons representing beloved cultural icons from Snoopy to SpongeBob — tower five to six stories above the crowd and move with an unpredictable, living quality that cameras cannot capture. Broadway performers open each show segment. Marching bands from across the country perform along the 2.5-mile route. The floats are hand-built artworks. The energy of a crowd that lines up before dawn, wrapped in coats and coffee cups, for something they have seen every year since childhood — is genuinely moving in a way that resists irony. The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is worth attending if you have ever watched it on television and wondered what it would be like to be there. The answer: colder, louder, and more emotionally resonant than you expect. This is one of the rare public events that functions identically for a six-year-old and a sixty-year-old. If you are a New Yorker who has always meant to go and never has: this is the year. Viewing tips: The best spots are along Central Park West from 72nd to 77th Street — arrive before 7 AM to claim a spot against the barriers. The parade steps off at 8:30 AM and passes any given point by 10 AM. Bring hand warmers, thermos coffee, and folding chairs. Avoid Herald Square — it is the most crowded and worst vantage point despite being the broadcast location. Midtown hotel prices spike 300-500 percent the week of Thanksgiving. Book months in advance or stay in Brooklyn. The parade is free, public, and unreservable. The transaction is not logistical. It is the decision to show up and be present at something that will look the same and feel different every single time.

George Balanchine's The Nutcracker 2026 — New York City Ballet, Lincoln Center

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🌎 Nation's Best 50 days away

George Balanchine's The Nutcracker 2026 — New York City Ballet, Lincoln Center

Nov 27, 2026 David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Cen…

Some performances exist because they are scheduled. The Nutcracker at Lincoln Center exists because New York City needs it — the way a city needs its bridges or its park, something that holds the place together by being exactly where it always is when the temperature drops. George Balanchine choreographed this version of The Nutcracker in 1954, and New York City Ballet has performed it every holiday season since. It is not the only Nutcracker in the world, but it is the one that defined what the word means to most Americans — the growing Christmas tree that seems to rise past the ceiling, the snow scene that uses real-looking flakes falling in a way that makes the audience hold its breath, the second act's parade of dances from around the world, each one a tiny jewel of a thing that lasts just long enough to leave you wanting more. The 2026-2027 season runs from Friday, November 27, 2026 through Sunday, January 3, 2027 at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, West 63rd Street and Columbus Avenue. Tickets go on sale in September at nycballet.com or by phone at 212-496-0600. Prices range depending on seat location and performance date, but matinees tend to be slightly less expensive and equally magical. The production itself is massive — the sets were designed by Rouben Ter-Arutunian and have been meticulously maintained and restored over the decades. The Christmas tree grows from 12 feet to over 40 feet during the transformation scene, a piece of stagecraft that still draws gasps from audiences who know exactly when it is coming. The cast draws from NYCB's full company plus students from the School of American Ballet, meaning you are watching the next generation of American ballet share a stage with its current one. The final performance on January 3 at 1 PM is a special physical-friendly show with adjusted lighting and sound levels, relaxed house policies, designated break areas, and pre-visit materials — designed so that families who might not attend a traditional performance can experience the ballet in a setting that works for them. This is the kind of event where a first-time visitor cries during the snow scene and cannot explain why, and a season ticket holder who has seen it forty times watches the same scene and still leans forward. Lincoln Center at the holidays is its own kind of pilgrimage — the fountain lit up, the tree in the plaza, the crowd filing in. If you have never been, go. If you have been, go again. The Nutcracker does not change, but you do, and the performance meets you wherever you are.

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50 days away

Broadway Rave

Nov 27 – Nov 28, 2026 from $20 Teragram Ballroom, 1234 W 7th St, …

Picture a nightclub at ten on the Friday after Thanksgiving where the drop is the key change in Defying Gravity and six hundred people scream it at a ceiling. That is the whole product and it is not a joke - it is a real touring club night that sells out rooms across the country because it solved a problem nobody was addressing: theatre kids grew up, still want to go out, and do not want to hear house music. So the DJ plays Hamilton into Mamma Mia into Rent, the floor knows every lyric and every gesture, and strangers perform choreography at each other with total sincerity. Go with one friend who did drama and watch a version of them you have not met. Twenty-one and over, late start, and the crowd arrives already knowing what it is - which is what makes it work. Teragram Ballroom, downtown Los Angeles, the night after the holiday.

Elf the Musical — Hollywood Pantages Theatre, Los Angeles

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54 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.

Makers Arcade Holiday Fair 2026 — Broadway Pier, San Diego

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65 days away

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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.

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65 days away

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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.

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

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68 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.

Golden State Ballet: The Nutcracker 2026

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70 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.

Los Angeles Ballet: The Nutcracker — Dolby Theatre

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75 days away

Los Angeles Ballet: The Nutcracker — Dolby Theatre

Dec 22, 2026 Dolby Theatre, 6801 Hollywood Blvd…

By the third week of December the city has already spent a month trying to make you feel something. The lights went up in November. The ache that shows up anyway — the one that wants December to mean more than errands before it runs out — has a two o'clock matinee waiting for it. Los Angeles Ballet dances its Nutcracker downtown with a live orchestra in the pit rather than a recording, which is rarer in this city than it should be and is the whole difference in the snow scene. The thing worth knowing is that the Dolby run is the back half of a tour: the company opens the production at Royce Hall on the UCLA campus in mid-December, plays four performances there, then moves to Hollywood Boulevard for the holiday stretch. The dancers who walk onto the Dolby stage have already lived inside the piece for a weekend, and it shows in the second act — the party scene is looser, the Sugar Plum variation is steadier. Matinees at 2, evenings at 7:30, December 22 through 24.

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

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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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17 Gathering

82 days away

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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 84 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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Three Kings Day at Olvera Street 2027

Jan 6, 2027 ✨ New Free Olvera Street, 845 N Alameda St, L…

By January 6 everyone else has dragged the tree to the curb and gone back to pretending the year began without ceremony. Your grandmother would have told you the season was not over. Twelve days, she would say. The Kings are still walking. On Olvera Street they never stopped counting. A procession winds down the oldest block in Los Angeles behind Ballet Coo, a folklorico company older than most of the people watching, and then the rosca comes out: the ring of sweet bread with a tiny plastic baby baked somewhere inside it. Cut carefully. Whoever finds one gets a gift from the Kings that same evening, handed over in front of everybody, which is either an honor or a sentence depending on how you feel about attention. Nobody checks whether you grew up with this. The bread is free, and so is the standing around afterward. Olvera Street, 845 N Alameda St. Wednesday, January 6, 7pm.

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128 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.

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293 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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