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San Diego Civic Theatre 13 results for San Diego Civic Theatre

Everything at San Diego Civic Theatre — including past events

Coming Soon

15 days away

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Rigoletto

Oct 23, 2026 San Diego Civic Theatre, 1100 Thir…

A father would burn the world down to protect his daughter. In Verdi's hands that love becomes one of the most devastating things ever set to music, and it spares nobody in the room. The story follows a court jester whose bitter tongue and hidden, ferocious devotion set a curse in motion he cannot call back. It also contains melodies so famous you will recognize them the instant they rise, even if you have never sat through an opera in your life — which is the trapdoor, because by the time you place the tune you are already inside the tragedy. A baritone in the title role, the symphony live in the pit, the whole overwhelming machinery of grand opera aimed straight at your chest. Only three performances exist. If you have always meant to try opera, this is the one. Go with anyone who has ever loved someone enough to be frightened by it.

Daily

26 days away

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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.

Marisela: Eterna Tour 2026 — San Diego Civic Theatre

Coming Soon

11 Gathering

37 days away

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Marisela: Eterna Tour 2026 — San Diego Civic Theatre

Nov 14, 2026 San Diego Civic Theatre, 1100 Thir…

Some voices carry a whole history in a single note. Marisela's voice carries quinceañeras and kitchen radios and the moment your mom stopped what she was doing to turn up the volume because Sin El was playing and nothing else in the world mattered for three minutes. Marisela brings the Eterna Tour 2026 to the San Diego Civic Theatre on Saturday, November 14 at 8 PM. The Civic Theatre is a 2,967-seat venue in downtown San Diego that pairs the elegance of a performing arts center with the intimacy of a room where a ballad singer can make every seat feel like the front row. Marisela has been the voice of Mexican romantic balladry for over forty years — an artist whose catalog is not just listened to but lived in by the communities who grew up with it. The Civic Theatre is at 1100 Third Avenue, a short walk from the Gaslamp Quarter and the Convention Center trolley stop. Parking at the Civic Center garage. This is the show you bring the person who raised you on this music. They've been waiting for you to suggest it.

Daily

36 days away

Bluey's Big Play

Every day · Next Nov 13 $35+ San Diego Civic Theatre, 1100 Thir…

If there is a toddler in your life you already know the theme music, the accents, and precisely which episode makes you quietly lose it on the couch while claiming you have something in your eye. This is a brand-new story from the show's creator, staged with life-sized puppets of Bluey, Bingo, and Mum and Dad — which sounds like a novelty right up until the moment your kid works out that the dog is actually there, in the room, moving. Short, joyful, and scaled exactly right for small people: a real theater outing that respects how long a little one can sit still, full of the games and the heart that made the show what it is. Three days in November at the Civic Theatre downtown. Get the good seats. Let them wear the costume. Fair warning — you are the one who is going to get emotional, and everybody around you will notice.

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

Daily

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.

Golden State Ballet: The Nutcracker 2026

Daily

70 days away

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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.

Sonic Live in Concert — Civic Theatre, San Diego

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Sonic Live in Concert — Civic Theatre, San Diego

Sep 25, 2026 San Diego Civic Theatre, 1100 Thir…

Your pulse moves before you consciously remember what that drowning music was. That is the whole premise: the soundtrack that lived inside a CRT television while you pressed right and hoped, performed by an actual ensemble — rock musicians, vocalists, electronics — with visuals cut to every note on the screen behind them. It covers decades of the franchise, which means the argument starts on the drive home about which zone had the best track and never fully resolves. This is not a DJ set and not a remix record. It is a room full of adults who learned the same melodies at the same age, hearing them played loud by people who take them seriously. San Diego Civic Theatre, a Friday evening in September. If Green Hill Zone does nothing to you, skip it. If it does, you already know exactly who you are bringing.

Global Lucha Libre — San Diego Civic Theatre

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Global Lucha Libre — San Diego Civic Theatre

Aug 28, 2026 $20 San Diego Civic Theatre, 1100 Thir…

The masks don't hide anything. They reveal it. Under the lights of a lucha libre ring, the wrestler becomes the character — the tecnico, the rudo, the aerial acrobat who turns gravity into a suggestion. And you, sitting close enough to feel the canvas shake when someone lands, you become part of something older and louder than any sport Americans grew up watching. Global Lucha Libre brings a full card of professional lucha libre to the San Diego Civic Theatre. Adrian Quest, Gypsy Mac, Los Enigmas, Eclipse Jr., Los Suavesitos, and Javi Baja headline an evening of high-flying, rope-bouncing, crowd-roaring theater disguised as a wrestling show. Or maybe it is a wrestling show disguised as theater. The line was always blurry, and that is the point. This is not WWE. No billion-dollar budget, no scripted interviews beamed via satellite. There is a ring, there are masks, and there is an audience that knows when to stomp and when to go quiet because the next move might be impossible. The tradition started in Mexico City arenas in the 1930s and travelled north with the families who kept it alive. San Diego Civic Theatre. Doors 5 PM. GA $20.

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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.

This Happened

Killers of Kill Tony

Sep 18, 2026 San Diego Civic Theatre, 1100 Thir…

Loving something that only ever happens somewhere else has a specific ache to it. You watch the clips at your desk, you memorize the regulars, you laugh alone in an office, and the room itself stays permanently in Austin. For about a million people that thing is Kill Tony, the live podcast where unknowns get one minute on stage and the regulars roast whatever is left of them afterward. The road version does not bring the bucket. It brings the killers, the David Lucases and Hans Kims and William Montgomerys that diehards refer to by first name, unleashed and unscripted in a downtown theater you can physically sit inside. That distinction is the entire product: not the open mic, the personalities. If you already quote the show to friends who do not watch it, you know exactly where you are going to be that night. And if you know, you have been waiting a long time for it to come here.

This Happened

Water for Elephants

Aug 18, 2026 $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.

This Happened

Tori Amos: In Times of Dragons Tour

Aug 26, 2026 San Diego Civic Theatre, 1100 Thir…

There is a version of you that once sat in a dark room and let a piano tell you things nobody else could say out loud. Not lyrics — truths. The kind that land somewhere below the ribcage and stay there for years, surfacing only when the melody finds you again in a grocery store or a late-night drive. Tori Amos has spent three decades being that voice, the one that reaches into the quiet wreckage of growing up, of loving wrong, of surviving, and makes it sound like a cathedral collapsing in slow motion. In Times of Dragons is her newest chapter, and she is bringing it to the San Diego Civic Theatre on a Wednesday night in August. The Civic is the right room for this — intimate enough to feel the weight of the piano, grand enough to hold the scope of what she does. Tori has never been background music. She demands your full attention and repays it with something you cannot get anywhere else. If you are the person who wore out Boys for Pele or cried to Winter the first time you heard it, this is a homecoming. If you have never seen her live, know this: recording captures maybe forty percent of what happens in the room. The rest is between her and the piano and whatever she decides to excavate that night. Doors at 7:30 PM. Tickets through Ticketmaster.

This Happened

Disney's Beauty and the Beast — Broadway San Diego at Civic Theatre

Jul 7 – Jul 12, 2026 San Diego Civic Theatre, 1100 Thir…

Something happens in the first ten minutes of Beauty and the Beast that no amount of knowing the story prepares you for. The curtain rises, the orchestra swells from somewhere you cannot see, and a room full of grown adults who came because their children asked suddenly forget they are grown adults. Disney is bringing Beauty and the Beast back to San Diego for the first time in over 25 years, and this is not the movie you remember projected onto a stage. This is a full-scale Broadway touring production with sets that transform in front of you, costumes that make you forget there are people inside them, and an orchestra playing the Oscar-winning score live — "Be Our Guest," "Something There," "Beauty and the Beast" — every note earned in real time. The production runs July 7-12, 2026 at the San Diego Civic Theatre. Eight performances over six days. Matinee and evening shows available. What makes this production different from the dozens of Beauty and the Beast stagings over the years is that Disney waited. They waited until they had spectacular new sets, new costumes, new choreography — and they waited until a generation of children who grew up on the animated film now have children of their own. The parents in the audience are not revisiting something. They are watching their children discover it for the first time. Tickets start at 2 through Ticketmaster. The Civic Theatre seats 2,967 — this is not a small show in a small room. This is Broadway landing in San Diego for one week.

While you are looking Different scene, same night out.

Coming Soon

36 Gathering

20h away

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Insecure

Tomorrow · Oct 8 YouTube Theater, 1011 Stadium Dr, …

A show ends and the group chat it created does not. For a lot of people the Tuesday-night ritual of watching, then immediately arguing about whether Lawrence deserved anything, was the actual social event - the episode was just the excuse. Ten years on, the cast and creators are taking that to a stage, which means the thing being celebrated is not really the television. It is the audience it assembled: Black women who finally saw a version of Los Angeles that looked like the one they lived in, down to the specific streets. A live anniversary show is one of the few formats where the crowd is the point and everybody in the room understands that. Go with the person you used to text during the ad breaks. The series was shot largely on location around Inglewood, View Park and Leimert, which makes staging the anniversary a few miles from those blocks a slightly pointed choice. Curtain at eight on Thursday the 8th of October.

Coming Soon

9 days away

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Carmen

In 10 days · Oct 17 $40+ Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N G…

You already know the melodies, even if you have never set foot in an opera house, because Carmen's music has soaked into the culture so deeply that the Habanera plays in your head the moment you hear the name. Bizet's story of desire, freedom, jealousy, and fate remains the most thrilling entry point into opera there is, and LA Opera opens its 40th-anniversary season with it under new music director Domingo Hindoyan. Performances run October 17 through November 7, 2026, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles, with a special anniversary gala on opening night. Dress up, splurge on decent seats, and let a live orchestra and full chorus wash over you. If you have been telling yourself you will try opera someday, this passionate, accessible, gorgeous production is the someday. Come be swept away.

Coming Soon

15 days away

Bluey's Big Play — Hollywood Pantages

Oct 23, 2026 From $35 6233 Hollywood Blvd, Hollywood, CA…

The parents already know: the cartoon dog show that plays on loop in your living room is somehow making you cry over a game of keep-away, and now there is a version your kid can watch happen in front of them, in a room, with the lights down. Bluey's Big Play brings the animated series to the stage for the first time ever, using puppetry and live performance to extend the world of Bluey, Bingo, Bandit, and Chilli beyond the screen. It is built specifically for children ages 2 through 7, but anyone who watches the series regularly knows it rewards the grown-ups just as richly - and this production includes new material written just for the stage. Running time is about 55 minutes with no intermission, which is exactly right for the age group. Arrive early; the lobby experience is part of the fun. The Hollywood Pantages is a 1920s movie palace seating 2,700 on Hollywood Boulevard near Highland Avenue, accessible by Metro B Line (Red) at Hollywood and Highland Station. Parking is available in the adjacent Hollywood and Highland structure. The Pantages books family matinees all season, and the other parents in the lobby will tell you which ones hold up.

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)

Coming Soon

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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