best holiday shows

12 best Houston holiday stage shows making a 'bah humbug' year bright

As we move into the famed most wonderful time of this most Bah Humbug of a year, Houston’s performing artists and art organizations have decided the holiday show will go on.

Yes, A Christmas Carol, The Nutcracker, and all the usually holiday suspects might come wrapped in unusual packages this December, but our local artists have rallied to deliver our favorite shows and stories to us.

Some of these shows are free and others ticketed, but most of these organizations and theater companies have been offering free performances, art, and entertainment since having to close their theater doors back in March, so please remember to give back as they continue to give to Houston.

Whether live streaming, recorded, in-person, or outdoors, let's take a look at all of the traditional shows and new surprises arriving just when we all could use a bit of holiday joy and magic.

Holiday at the Hope’s: A Christmas Mixtape from Stages (Ticketed streaming, now through December 13)
In ancient times before podcasts people, told stories and performed music on this thing called a "radio." Now, Stages takes us back to holidays long ago with a radio play offering — but you won’t have to buy one of those fancy old-timey giant voice boxes to experience the magic. Married team Ben Hope and Katie Barton Hope, who starred in Ring of Fire and Hank Williams: Lost Highway at Stages, create an audio play based on their own journey buying a house for the first time. Expect lots of home-style holiday songs and stories about family celebrations.

A Christmas Carol from Alley Theatre (free streaming, now through December 27)
This adaption by Doris Baizley sets up a premise perfect for virtual performances, framing the Dickens classic with a story of a traveling theater company going through hard times and needing to do put on a barebones production of the haunting, yet heart-warming tale. Alley company actors get meta as actors putting together a Carol from scratch.

David Rainey reprises his Scrooge, but in this adaption also plays the company-within-a-company’s stage manager. Meanwhile, the next acting generation gets a spotlight as married resident acting company members Elizabeth Bunch and Chris Hutchison’s son, Mack Hutchison, plays both the prop boy and Tiny Tim.

Herzstück or My Heart Hit the Floor & Shattered into 10,000 Pieces from Catastrophic Theatre (free streaming, now through January 31)
Perhaps especially in 2020, absurdist and avant garde mainstay theater company Catastrophic stays with their own beloved tradition with this film from company regular, Greg Dean, actor, writer, director, and self-admitted “local theater weirdo.”

Herzstück was inspired by a 14-line theatrical fragment by the late East German playwright, Heiner Müller. For those looking to take a break from all the streaming and broadcast holiday movies, you probably can’t find much counter than a project Catastrophic describes a "deconstruction of old, B&W silent film comedies — think Laurel & Hardy meets David Cronenberg.”

Merry Christmas Darling: Heidi Kettenring Sings Karen Carpenter at A.D Players (live performance December 10-23)
The company turns their parking lot into an outdoor performance space to bring Houston one of the few in-person productions of the season. The acclaimed Kettenring and her band will perform a mix of Karen Carpenter standards plus holiday favorites, including "Merry Christmas Darling," "Close To You," "For All We Know," and "The Christmas Song.”

“With ongoing concerns about growing COVID-19 numbers and the need for safety, we decided rather than cancelling everything, we would move our holiday programming outside,” explains artist director, Kevin Dean. “We have been continually pursuing the highest level of safety in everything we have done this fall, and want to provide people an opportunity to safely experience some much needed holiday cheer.”

The Making of The Snowy Day: An Opera for All from Houston Grand Opera (Streaming beginning December 10)
This world premiere holiday opera was commissioned by HGO with the original plan to produce to it this month. Now delayed likely for next year, opera-lovers can get a fascinating behind the curtain peek at how a contemporary opera is composed. This documentary explores the creative process of composer Joel Thompson and librettist Andrea Davis Pinkney as they transform the beloved children’s book by Ezra Jack Keats into opera for the whole family. The Making of becomes just one more bit of unique programming HGO brings to Houston and opera lovers across the globe with their HGO Digital project.

Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley and The Wickhams: Christmas at Pemberley from Main Street Theater (free live streaming December 11-20)
The Pride and Prejudice sequel and sequel to the sequel both written by Lauren Gunderson and Margot Melcon have become the latest holiday tradition at Main Street. While MST crew can’t give us an in-person production this year, they’re bringing the Bennet sisters — Darcy and even that rogue Wickham — together via Zoom for weekend readings of the plays. MST has also been offering the monthly series “Main Street at the Mike” for a special on stage streaming show featuring some Main Street artists and local favorites. For December they’ve planned a special treat: 2020 Holidays: Passover through New Year’s. (December 17-20).

Very Merry POPS from Houston Symphony (live at Jones Hall and streaming, December 11-20)
Houston vocalist Chelsea Cymone joins former Principal POPS Conductor Michael Krajewski for this concert of traditional and contemporary holiday favorites. Cymone sings “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” and “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” while HS gets audiences in Jones and at home in the holiday mood with arrangements of the popular classic Christmas pop songs like “Feliz Navidad,” “O Holy Night,” and “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” Streaming performs are on Saturdays December 12 and 19.

Manual Cinema’s Christmas Carol presented by Society for the Performing Arts (streaming live December 12 and 19)
A different kind of Carol comes from Manual Cinema, the artists responsible for last year’s remarkable and innovative Frankenstein retelling that SPA presented last year. Manual Cinema will use music, paper puppets, miniatures, silhouettes, and vintage filmmaking techniques to create a tale told with color, light, and shadow. This world-premiere show will be performed live each night from their Chicago studio in a socially distant manner and streamed to SPA audiences live

Buttons' Sleeping Beauty: A One-Man Outrageous Unbelievable COVID Lockdown Panto from Stages (Ticketed streaming, December 15-27)
Not even a pandemic can keep Texas Panto down, as Stages artistic director Kenn McLaughlin wrote (book and lyrics) this special one-man version to both acknowledge and virtually escape these lockdown times. Stages Panto favorite Buttons (Ryan Schabach), the kind of everyman jester in previous original productions, uses puppetry and songs to spin different kind of Sleeping Beauty tale. Buttons receives across-the-pond help from very special guest and Panto regular, Genevieve Allenbury, who virtually brings some fairytale magic from London.

Nutcracker Sweets from Houston Ballet (Ticketed streaming, December 15-January 8, 2021)
Perhaps inspired by a gift box of holiday chocolates and candies, the Houston Ballet presents Houston with both an abbreviate version of artist director Stanton Welch’s The Nutcracker from 2018, as well as an offering of new solo dances featuring the HB company dancing to holiday favs like “Jingle Bells” by Barbra Streisand and “Santa Baby” by Eartha Kitt. The dancers were filmed one at a time in the Margaret Alkek Williams Dance Lab at the Houston Ballet Center for Dance under safety guidelines from Houston Methodist Hospital.

The Nutcracker: Larger Than Life at Houston Museum of Natural Science (on-screen, now through January 3, 2021)
For those who want a giant-sized version of Stanton Welch’s Nutcracker and are ready to head back into the HMNS’s newly-renovated Wortham Giant Screen Theatre, this will be the new way to keep holiday traditions alive. Clara, the Nutcracker Prince, Rat King, Sugar Plum Fairy, and all the international Sweet Kingdom ambassadors dance onto the huge HMNS theater screen.

Operating under strict COVID-19 protocols and cleaning procedures since the fall, the HMNS theatre gives audiences a 4K digital projection experience, producing nearly 8-stories high images, along with a six-track sound system, and new deluxe seating. These holiday dance visions have never reached greater heights.

Houston Ballet presents Nutcracker Sweets, a streaming program of new holiday dances and an abbreviated version of artist director Stanton Welch’s The Nutcracker.

Houston Ballet: Nutcracker Sweets, HB Corps de Ballet dancer Naazir Muhammad

Photo by Photo by Lawrence Elizabeth Knox

Houston Ballet presents Nutcracker Sweets, a streaming program of new holiday dances and an abbreviated version of artist director Stanton Welch’s The Nutcracker.

music dance theater

Best September Theater

12 best plays, musicals, and ballets opening on Houston stages this month

Photo by Jeremy Daniel

Broadway at the Hobby Center presents The Sound of Music

As this summer’s Odyssey demonstrates, audiences seem ready for new versions of the classics. Houston theater and performing arts companies are giving an ovation to this trend as they begin their daring and dramatic fall seasons. Major award winners, literary masterpieces, and contemporary classics will ignite Houston stages this month from Romeo and Juliet to The Sound of Music to Manon. Houstonians looking for something more recent and edgy will want to see 21st century Pulitzer and Tony winners, plus a cool comedy or two.

Photo by Jeremy Daniel

Broadway at the Hobby Center presents The Sound of Music

Collective Rage: A Play in 5 Betties from Mildred’s Umbrella (September 3-19)
Five women with little in common but their first name, Betty, meet in this contemporary mad comedy from Jen Silverman. And as the Houston theater that focuses on plays about and by women, no company is better to bring the five Betties to life than Mildred’s Umbrella.

From an affluent New York society woman to a would be actress to the owner of a boxing gym, these five Betties find connection and an outlet for their collective rage by forming a theater collective and staging “Pyramus and Thisbe,” the mini-farce within Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Yes, this is a play about the making of a play within a play, as Silverman creates comedy by shattering the roles women adhere to.

Pecos Bill from Houston Ballet (September 11-20)
Houston Ballet leaps into a new season with three works that illustrate the depth and breadth of the company’s skills. Have some down-home fun with Stanton Welch’s rollicking ballet depicting the adventures of the mythic cowboy, Pecos Bill. The company will also show off its classical expertise with George Balanchine’s elegant and dynamic Symphonie Concertante. For a debut treat, HB will perform celebrated choreographer Lar Lubovitch’s Meadow. While this will be the first time the company dances a Lubovitch piece, HB co-artistic director Julie Kent was in the original cast for its world premiere by the American Ballet.

Proof from 4th Wall Theatre (September 11-October 3)
The first of two Tony and Pulitzer double winners on this month's must-see list, Proof was a Broadway hit then film in the early 2000s and since has become a emotional showcase for regional actors around the country. Twenty-five years after its debut, this complex story of family, trust, grief, and genius still resonates. As the play unfolds, the audience meets Catherine, who has given up years of her life to take care of her brilliant mathematician father as he wrestles with mental illness. After his death, Catherine is adrift in the world. Can she find the courage to prove her mental stability to her doubtful sister and her own math genius to one of her father’s former students?

Cold War Choir Practice at Main Street Theater (September 12-October 11)
Perhaps this month's most undefinable show, this comedy, with choral music interludes, earned critical acclaim when it debuted off Broadway earlier this year. The play follows the adventures of 10-year-old Meeks, who is not exactly an average girl growing up in the late 80s. Her father is a former Black Panther who now owns a roller rink and her uncle a prominent security advisor in the Reagan administration, with a mysteriously ill, white wife who also might be a cult member.

With Christmas around the corner, Meeks keeps busy with choir practice and building a bomb shelter in her basement. But with her uncle’s unexpected visit, long-simmering tensions within the family begin to boil and national secrets are in jeopardy, as the world prepares for the disarmament summit between Reagan and Gorbachev.

The Music Man presented by Theatre Under the Stars (September 15-27)
Musical lovers just can’t say no to that conman with a heart of gold, Harold Hill, a.k.a the Music Man. Since it first debuted in the 1950s, the feel-good musical seems to get a Broadway revival or tour with regularity. Now, Theatre Under the Stars opens its 2026-27 season by presenting the latest national touring production of the comedy about charming Harold who gets conned himself by small town sincerity and the love of a good librarian. With big dance numbers and songs like "(Ya Got) Trouble,” "Seventy-Six Trombones,” and "Till There Was You,” the show remains one of the great American musicals.

Amadeus at Rec Room (September 17-October 10)
After a several months hiatus as it moves from a calendar year season to a fall/spring one, Rec Room is back and celebrating its 10th anniversary with a show that hasn't been performed locally in quite a while. The now classic 20th century play is about the (mostly one-sided) rivalry between composers Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; it explores themes of creation, jealousy, and the nature of genius.

As one of Houston’s most intimate spaces, Rec Room has managed to produce epic productions on its small stage thanks to the creative team’s ability to ignite its audiences’ imaginations. Anticipate the same kind of theatrical magic for Amadeus, which the company describes as a “theatrical séance where memory, ritual, and myth converge.”

Rhinoceros from Catastrophic Theatre (September 18-October 10)
The blasts from the past continue as Houston’s home for avant garde theater, Catastrophic, revives its hit production of Eugene Ionesco’s epic absurdest play, Rhinoceros. Several of the cast members and creative artists from its last staging in 2017 will return to this story about a small town whose citizens begin to transform one-by-one into destructive rhinoceros until almost no humans are left. Written in the late 1950s, Rhinoceros has some of the markings of a horror film of the time period. Using absurdist imagery, it warns how easily fascism and authoritarianism can rise when people feel the call of the herd. Yet the play still has moments of outrageous dark comedy.

Purpose at Ensemble Theatre (September 18-October 11)
The oldest and largest professional African American theatre in the Southwest celebrates its 50th season with one of the most award-winning plays of the last few years. Earning both the Best Play Tony and Pulitzer Prize, Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins’s drama depicts a political prominent family as it gathers together for something of a celebration, homecoming, and bitter going away dinner. The Jasper patriarch was a leader in the Civil Rights movement, but the two adult sons struggle to live up to their father’s legacy, while their mother attempts to keep the family together and family secrets hidden. Meanwhile, an uninvited guest gives the proceedings an outsider's perspective.

Come From Away at Stages (September 18-October 18)
The true story of a small town in Newfoundland that rallied together to host thousands of stranded international travelers when planes were grounded world wide on September 11, 2001 made for one of the most poignant and hopeful musicals in decades. It’s been a few years since Come From Away toured nationally, so Houstonians should be looking forward to seeing Stages begin its season with this homegrown production filled with some of the company's best actors.

While the show has been a hit all over the world that speaks to human connection and kindness even during the greatest of tragedies, it also has some deep Texas roots. Among the many stories the musical sings, one of otheur favorites is the glimpse into the extraordinary life of Texan Beverley Bass, the first female captain at American Airlines.

Manon from Houston Ballet (September 24-October 4)
For its second production of the month, Houston Ballet pirouettes from one act dances to Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s lush, romantic tragedy, Manon. With music by French composer Jules Massenethe, the ballet journeys from glamorous parties in Paris to the bayous of Louisiana to recount the doomed love story between the irresistibly beautiful femme fatale, Manon, and impoverished student, Des Grieux.

Romeo and Juliet at Alley Theatre (September 25-October 11)
There might not be a dry eye in the Theater District as the Alley also opens its fall season with a romantic tragedy that literally originated the term "star-crossed lovers." The entire Alley resident acting company will take roles in Shakespeare’s wrenching tale of young lovers crushed between their warring families.

The production also marks the debut of a new initiative between the Alley and the University of Houston that expands the existing MFA in Acting program at the University of Houston by placing third-year acting students in residence at the Alley, working directly with the full-time acting company. For Romeo and Juliet, several of those students will have roles in the ensemble and as understudies.

The Sound of Music presented by Broadway at the Hobby Center (September 29-October 4)
Houston's month of classics ends with arguably the most beloved musical of all time, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music. This new touring production that celebrates the musical’s 65th anniversary features new direction from three-time Tony Award winner Jack O’Brien (Hairspray).

Devout Music fans shouldn’t worry, because, while a new generation of actors take on the roles of Maria, Captain von Trapp, and that gaggle of singing von Trapp kids, the story of love, family, and bravery in the face of evil remains the same. Prepare to hum along (quietly) to classics such as “Climb Every Mountain,” “Do-Re-Mi,” “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” and, of course, “The Sound of Music.”