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Everything at Balboa Theatre — including past events

Bassem Youssef: The Belly of the Beast Tour

Coming Soon

10 Gathering

Tomorrow

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Bassem Youssef: The Belly of the Beast Tour

In 2 days · Oct 9 $82+ Balboa Theatre, 868 Fourth Ave, Sa…

Making jokes about power is easy when the worst that happens is an angry tweet; Bassem Youssef did it in a country where it could cost him everything, and it did. The heart surgeon turned satirist became the Jon Stewart of the Arab world, drew tens of millions of viewers, and eventually had to flee Egypt for the crime of being funny about the wrong people. That history gives his stand-up a charge most comedy never touches — sharp, fearless material about identity, war, exile, and the absurdity of being a Middle Eastern man explaining the Middle East to the West. For the Arab diaspora especially, this is catharsis with a scalpel. Friday, October 9, 2026, 7:30pm, Balboa Theatre. Come laugh at the things that are usually too painful or too dangerous to say out loud, in a room full of people who have been waiting to hear someone finally say them. It is a rare night when a whole community gets to laugh at its own expense, on its own terms.

Rocky Horror Picture Show — Live with Patricia Quinn at Balboa Theatre, San Diego

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21 Gathering

3 days away

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Rocky Horror Picture Show — Live with Patricia Quinn at Balboa Theatre, San Diego

In 4 days · Oct 11 Balboa Theatre, 868 4th Ave, San D…

Thirty newspaper bags. Six water guns. A roll of toilet paper you will throw at the exact right moment. And Patricia Quinn — Magenta herself — standing on the Balboa Theatre stage in the flesh. The Rocky Horror Picture Show screening is one of those events that exists in its own category. It's not a movie. It's not a concert. It's a participatory ritual that's been running for half a century and shows no sign of slowing down, because every generation discovers it at exactly the right age and never fully recovers. The Balboa Theatre showing features the original cast member Patricia Quinn live and in person, making this more than a screening — it's a pilgrimage. Costumes are encouraged. Props are required. The callback lines are non-negotiable. If you don't know them yet, the person sitting next to you will teach you before the opening credits end. Sunday, October 11, 2026. 7:00 PM. Balboa Theatre, San Diego. Shadowcast troupes run this all over the county on nights nobody advertises, and once you know the callbacks you start looking for them.

Silent Movie Mondays: The Headless Horseman (1922) — Balboa Theatre San Diego

Weekly

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4 days away

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Silent Movie Mondays: The Headless Horseman (1922) — Balboa Theatre San Diego

Every Monday · Next Oct 12 Balboa Theatre, 868 Fourth Ave, Sa…

The rumble of 1,800 pipes waking up inside the walls is the first thing you hear. The Wonder Morton Theatre Organ at the Balboa Theatre is not a soundtrack. It is a living instrument the size of a room, hidden in a chamber above the stage, and when Ken Double sits down to play it the whole building becomes the speaker. The Headless Horseman is the 1922 silent film adaptation of Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” starring Will Rogers as Ichabod Crane — yes, that Will Rogers, before he became the most famous man in America. The film has not been widely screened in decades. You are watching it the way it was meant to be watched: in the dark, in a theater built in 1924, with a live organist scoring every gallop and every shadow in real time. This is the Season Three premiere of Silent Movie Mondays, a series that runs seven films through the fall. The crowd is a beautiful mix — film students, retirees who remember when every theater had an organ, couples on dates who wanted something that wasn’t a streaming algorithm. Monday, September 21, 2026 at 7:00 PM. Balboa Theatre, 868 Fourth Avenue, San Diego, CA 92101.

Coming Soon

5 days away

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Ilana Glazer Live!

In 6 days · Oct 13 $91+ Balboa Theatre, 868 Fourth Ave, Sa…

Some people need a best friend who is a little unhinged — the one who talks you into the bad idea, tells the truth too loudly, and makes you feel like the most normal thing in the world is to be a complete weirdo. For a lot of people, Ilana Glazer has been that friend from a distance ever since Broad City, and her live show is the closest thing to actually hanging out with her: raunchy, warm, wildly funny, and secretly a little wise about bodies and anxiety and growing up without growing boring. The Balboa Theatre's ornate old room makes it feel like a night out that matters. This is comedy as permission — to be gross, to be soft, to laugh at the stuff you were told to be embarrassed about. Tuesday, October 13, 2026, 7pm, downtown San Diego. Bring the friend who is your Ilana, and spend an evening feeling gloriously, hilariously understood.

Coming Soon

7 days away

Daniel Sloss: BITTER

In 8 days · Oct 15 $40+ Balboa Theatre, 868 Fourth Ave, Sa…

A single stand-up special reportedly ended eleven thousand relationships and triggered hundreds of divorces, and Daniel Sloss treats that number as a rave review. Beneath the filthy jokes and the withering Scottish delivery sits a genuinely dangerous idea: that you deserve better than the comfortable lie you have settled for. His new hour, BITTER, promises the same trick — savage, brilliant, uncomfortably honest comedy that feels like being roasted by the smartest, meanest friend you have, right up until it quietly rearranges something inside you. This is stand-up for people who want to be provoked, not soothed. Thursday, October 15, 2026, 7pm, Balboa Theatre. Come for the brutal wit and stay for the strange gift of a comedian who respects you enough to tell you the truth you have been avoiding — you may laugh the whole way through and still leave a different person than you walked in. Go with your partner if you dare; go alone if you are smart.

Lila Downs: Día de Muertos — Balboa Theatre, San Diego

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21 days away

Lila Downs: Día de Muertos — Balboa Theatre, San Diego

Oct 29, 2026 Balboa Theatre, 868 Fourth Ave, Sa…

Lila Downs walks onto a stage the way a prayer enters a room — not asking for silence, but creating it. The Grammy-winning Mexican-American singer has spent three decades turning rancheras, folk, and indigenous Oaxacan music into something that makes a theater full of strangers remember what their grandmothers sounded like humming in the kitchen, even when those grandmothers came from completely different kitchens. This Día de Muertos concert at the Balboa Theatre is not a Halloween show. It is the real thing — a performance timed to the thinning of the veil, where the songs are offerings and the audience is invited to come dressed in their own remembrance. Downs sings of love, loss, reconnection, and the joy that sits on the other side of grief when you stop running from it. The Balboa's architecture — all gilded ceiling and red velvet — turns into a cathedral for two hours. A pre-show prelude with a guest lecturer opens the evening. Then the lights go down and something older than the building takes over. Balboa Theatre, San Diego. Come in Día de Muertos attire.

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56 days away

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Mariachi Sol de Mexico

Dec 3, 2026 $40+ Balboa Theatre, 868 Fourth Ave, Sa…

The first time a full mariachi ensemble lands a chord in a room with plaster walls, something happens in your throat before you have decided how you feel about it. These are songs most people first heard at a wedding, or a funeral, or through a kitchen doorway on a Sunday. Hearing them played at this level changes the register entirely. José Hernández built an ensemble that reaches for the symphony without ever letting go of the folk tradition it came from — the most awarded and most ambitious group in the genre, having shared stages with Selena, Vicente Fernández, and Luis Miguel. What comes back out is concert art made from music your family already knows by heart. The gilded Balboa Theatre downtown is exactly the right room for it, all those horns ringing off the historic walls. Dress up a little. Bring three generations. Watch your grandmother mouth every word without once looking at the stage.

Dave Koz and Friends Christmas Tour 2026 — Balboa Theatre, San Diego

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70 days away

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Dave Koz and Friends Christmas Tour 2026 — Balboa Theatre, San Diego

Dec 17, 2026 Balboa Theatre, 868 4th Ave, San D…

December leaves gaps in people. You notice them in the car, or standing in a parking lot at night, and no amount of mall music fills them, because mall music was never trying to. This is the annual show that does. Smooth jazz and holiday arrangements played by a bandleader who brings friends every year, and the friends are always the kind of players who make you sit up straighter without knowing why you did. The room does work too — a theater from 1924, ornate plaster overhead, acoustics from an era when a hall had to carry sound on its own. The lobby fills with people dressed up for the first time since Thanksgiving. The Balboa Theatre downtown, doors at 6:30 PM, show at 7:30 PM. This is the show your parents take you to the first year you are old enough to appreciate it, and the show you take them to the first year you realize they need it. Do not wait for the second one.

Coming Soon

57 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.

Coming Soon

52 days away

The Carpenters Songbook: At Christmas

Nov 29, 2026 from $40 Balboa Theatre, 868 Fourth Ave, Sa…

Some voices are load-bearing. Karen Carpenter's is one - it holds up an entire idea of what December sounded like in a specific set of American houses, and people who were not alive for any of it still know every phrase, because it followed them through supermarkets and car radios until it became weather. The show does not pretend to be her. That matters, and it is the thing that makes or breaks a production like this: the arrangements are the originals, played by a live band, and the singing serves the songs rather than impersonating the person. What gets people is usually not the famous one. It is a deep cut somebody in the row behind you did not expect to hear, followed by a very particular silence. The audience skews older and sings along quietly, which is its own thing to witness. A Sunday night at the end of November, seven o'clock, at the smaller of downtown San Diego's two old theatres.

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

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79 days away

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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.

Coming Soon

73 days away

Love Actually Live In Concert

Dec 20, 2026 from $45 Balboa Theatre, 868 Fourth Ave, Sa…

You have argued about this film. Everyone has. Somebody at some point told you the Keira Knightley cue-card scene is indefensible and somebody else cried at the airport montage in front of you, and the argument is now an annual fixture of your December whether you want it or not. What a live orchestra does to it is strange and worth reporting: the score stops being wallpaper. Craig Armstrong wrote something genuinely sad under all that Christmas, and when forty musicians play it in a room instead of through a laptop, the scenes people mock get very quiet and the ones people love get almost unbearable. The film runs complete and uncut on the screen above the players. The crowd laughs in the right places, loudly, because a cinema full of people who chose this is a different animal to a sofa. Go with the person you have the argument with. Balboa Theatre, downtown San Diego, a Sunday evening five days before Christmas, seven o'clock.

Brincos Dieras — El Desmadre Continua Tour

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Brincos Dieras — El Desmadre Continua Tour

Sep 27, 2026 Balboa Theatre, 868 Fourth Ave, Sa…

Only in a culture that treats the luchador mask as sacred could a man build an entire comedy career without anyone ever seeing his face. He performs all of it in the mask — the act, the persona, the bows — and the room responds the way a room responds at a lucha card, not at a comedy club. It is loud. It is filthy in the best possible way. It is unmistakably ours: the humor of the barrio and the sobremesa, the jokes your primo tells at a carne asada that you absolutely cannot repeat at work. Most of the crowd has been laughing at him alone on their phones for years, and this is the night they finally get to do it together, at volume, in a historic theater downtown. The Balboa Theatre on Fourth Avenue in downtown San Diego. Send it to your cousin. You both already know exactly which bit you are waiting for.

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Adam Ray: Who Is Me Tour

Oct 3, 2026 $40+ Balboa Theatre, 868 Fourth Ave, Sa…

You have already watched the Dr. Phil bit. Everyone has. Somebody sent it to you with no caption, you watched it more times than you would admit to, and then you went looking for more — which is roughly how this entire audience got built. Live is a different animal. He is an improviser and an impressionist and a comic's comic, so the show is crowd work, characters, and riffing that goes somewhere nobody planned. That is the thing a special can never capture, because a special is edited and this is not. No two nights are the same, and the room knows it, so people turn up ready to be part of the machinery. The Balboa Theatre downtown is one of the more beautiful old rooms in the city. Get there early; the pre-show energy is half of it. Bring the friend who quotes bits for weeks afterward. You are about to lose a month of conversations to this.

This Happened

Chelsea Handler: The High and Mighty Tour — Balboa Theatre San Diego

Sep 19, 2026 Balboa Theatre, 868 4th Ave, San D…

Some nights you laugh until your stomach hurts and then drive home in complete silence thinking about everything she actually said. She has built an entire career out of engineering that exact gap. The touring hour is brand-new material, and the stage is where the filter comes off: no edits, no production team, no notes from a network with something to protect. Six bestselling books and a talk show later, the microphone is still the only place the whole thing works without a net. The room does its share too. A restored theater from the twenties in the middle of the Gaslamp, ornate enough that the ceiling alone is worth the ticket, and small enough that every punchline arrives at conversation distance instead of being broadcast at you. Go with the friend you send the unhinged texts to. You will both be quoting it in the car, and then you will both go quiet.

While you are looking Different scene, same night out.

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16 Gathering

17 days away

Assala Nasri at Pechanga

Oct 25, 2026 $65+ Pechanga Resort Casino, 45000 Pech…

If your family is from the Levant, you already know that voice -- Assala Nasri has been one of the towering singers of the Arab world for more than thirty years, the kind of artist whose songs score weddings, heartbreaks, and long homesick nights across an entire diaspora. A US date is a rare event, and when it happens the Arab-American community drives from three states over to be in the room. That she is playing Temecula, of all places, means Southern California's Levantine families have a genuine reason to converge on the valley for one October night. Expect an audience that knows every word in Arabic and will sing them back to her. This is one of those shows where the crowd is half the experience. If this is your music, do not let it pass; if it isn't yet, prepare to be leveled.

GWAR: Gor Gor Must Die — House of Blues Anaheim

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41 days away

GWAR: Gor Gor Must Die — House of Blues Anaheim

Nov 18, 2026 House of Blues Anaheim, 400 Disney…

You do not go to a GWAR show because you like live music. You go because something inside you craves the chaos that the rest of your week refuses to give you. The blood. The costumes. The alien warlords shredding guitar in a puddle of fake entrails while the crowd loses its collective mind. This is not a concert. This is a permission slip. The Gor Gor Must Die tour brings the intergalactic shock-metal overlords to House of Blues Anaheim on a Wednesday night — because GWAR has never once cared about your Thursday morning meeting. Openers Mac Sabbath (yes, McDonald's-themed Black Sabbath, and yes, it works) and Midnight set the stage for one of the most gloriously unhinged live acts still touring. If you have never seen GWAR live, understand: you will be sprayed with things. Your shirt will not survive. You will leave looking like you lost a fight with a paintball gun operated by a demon. You will be grinning. This is the show you text your one unhinged friend about. Not because it is cool. Because they need to know it exists. House of Blues Anaheim, 400 Disney Way #337, Anaheim, CA 92802. Wednesday, November 18, 2026. Doors at 6:00 PM. All ages. Wear a shirt you do not love.

Monday Evening Concerts: Canto Ostinato with Tacita Dean's FILM

Weekly

60 days away

Monday Evening Concerts: Canto Ostinato with Tacita Dean's FILM

Every Monday · Next Dec 7 Marciano Art Foundation, 4357 Wils…

Simeon ten Holt wrote a piece with no fixed length. The players decide in the room how many times to repeat each section and when to move on, so Canto Ostinato can run ninety minutes or five hours and no two performances share a shape, because the musicians are listening to the audience as closely as to each other. Four of them here, two pianos and two sets of mallets, inside a former Scottish Rite Masonic temple on Wilshire with Tacita Dean's FILM running through the space: a silent 35mm work made for a vertical screen, all grain and hand-worked frames, the opposite of a projection you can let slide past you. Repetition is the only thing either artist asks of you, and both of them mean it kindly. Tickets surface roughly a month ahead through the series and the museum. Marciano Art Foundation, 4357 Wilshire Blvd, on December 7 and again on the 14th.

Monthly

3074 Gathering

5 days away

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Los Angeles Pinball League — Monthly Tournament

Monthly · Next Oct 13 Various venues, Los Angeles, CA

Somewhere in this city tonight there is a back room where the pinball never stopped — machines everyone assumed died with the arcades, lined up, lit up, and played for blood by people who know each ruleset cold. You thought it was nostalgia. They kept it a sport. Once a month the league runs a real tournament: matchplay, a new opponent and a random machine every round, points stacking across the night. It is IFPA-sanctioned, but that is not why the regulars come. A good table is the most honest machine there is. It does not care who you are, only whether you can read the ball. Here is what outsiders never expect: this crowd wants you to get good. Show up knowing only how to keep a ball alive and someone ranked will lean over between rounds and show you where the safe nudge is, when to let it drain on purpose. Venues rotate. Check the league's Facebook group and the IFPA calendar for this month's location. All-ages at most stops, 21+ at the bars.

LoL Worlds 2026 — Play-In Stage (Los Angeles)

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1443 Gathering

7 days away

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LoL Worlds 2026 — Play-In Stage (Los Angeles)

In 8 days · Oct 15 – Oct 18 Riot Games Arena, 12181 Bluff Cree…

Every region sends its dark horses, and most of them go home in the first week. That is what makes the opening stage the most nervous, least predictable stretch of the whole tournament. The Play-In Stage is where teams that did not walk in with a guaranteed bracket spot have to earn one, on foreign soil, against opponents they have only ever studied on video. Nothing is safe and nobody is comfortable. Upsets that reshape the entire championship happen here, in front of a few hundred people, before the broadcast audience has fully tuned in. Riot Games Arena is the tightest, loudest room in North American esports — small enough that crowd noise reaches the stage, close enough to watch a player's posture change when a fight goes wrong. From inside that building it is a different sport. Riot Games Arena, 12181 Bluff Creek Dr, Playa Vista. October 15-18. Tickets through lolesports.com. If you have only ever watched it on stream, this is the one to go to.

Anime Expo 2027 — Los Angeles Convention Center

Coming Soon

810 Gathering

266 days away

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Anime Expo 2027 — Los Angeles Convention Center

Jul 1 – Jul 4, 2027 Los Angeles Convention Center, 120…

You will be tired in a way that feels earned. Four days, a hundred thousand people, and not one of them needs you to explain what you are talking about. The largest anime convention in North America takes the Los Angeles Convention Center over Fourth of July weekend and spills into the JW Marriott and the Ritz-Carlton beside it. Industry panels, screening rooms, autograph sessions with voice actors and composers, concerts that sell out weeks ahead. Studios from Japan use this as their main North American announcement stage — if a sequel or adaptation is being revealed, it often happens in a room you could be standing in. The exhibit hall carries imported merchandise and collaboration exclusives that surface nowhere else on the continent. Los Angeles Convention Center, 1201 S Figueroa St. Thursday through Sunday. Badges run from top-tier early-access down to single-day passes. Book the connected hotel corridor months out. Everyone who tells you that learned it the hard way.

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