San Diego Civic Theatre Events

San Diego Civic Theatre, 1100 Third Ave, San Diego, CA 92101

Here is what is coming up at San Diego Civic Theatre, and what has already happened there. Concerts, games, festivals and the smaller nights that never surface in a generic search — no account needed.

Coming up 6 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Previously at San Diego Civic Theatre 7

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.

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

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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.

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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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.

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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.

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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.

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