Below is a guide for theatergoing during Christmas Week. Not every show worth seeing during the holidays is a “holiday show,” nor are they all “family friendly.” (See the Broadway schedule, for example.) But most shows offered just during the holiday season are indeed holiday shows.
Broadway Christmas Week Schedule
Holiday traditions (e.g. Nutcrackers)
New holiday traditions (or trying to be),
Family friendly shows
Adult friendly Shows
HOLIDAY TRADITIONS
Radio City Christmas Spectacular (Radio City Music Hall)
Now through January 1, 2018
This 90-minute show starring the Radio City Rockettes has been an annual tradition since 1933, helping to define the holiday season.
Buy discounted tickets from Goldstar
Nutcrackers
George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker (Lincoln Center’s Koch Theater)
through December 30, 2018
An annual tradition since 1954, New York City Ballet employs all of its 90 dancers, as well as 62 musicians, 32 stagehands and two casts of 50 young students each from the School of American Ballet to present this Tchaikovsky-scored ballet about a brave young girl who “turns the tide in a battle between toy soldiers and mischievous mice.” There’s also an onstage blizzard and a Christmas tree that grows to 40 feet.
This is the grande dame of Nutcrackers, but there are many younger (and less expensive) annual Nutcrackers.
The Hard Nut, Mark Morris Dance Group’s version, transposed to the 1970s, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, through December 23.
The Shell Shocked Nut. In the East Village, a child and a PTSD-stricken vet visit neighborhood landmarks and learn to heal. At La MaMa ETC through December 23.
Nut/Cracked. Choreographer David Parker of Bang Group finds beauty in the ridiculous, waltzing us through many incarnations of Tchaikovsky’s score, including versions by Duke Ellington and Glenn Miller, as well as the traditional orchestral suite, through December 22 at The Flea
In a Nutshell: A New York City Nutcracker at Theatre 80 in the East Village, for $17.50 via Goldstar.
“Replace the glittery backdrops and sugar-plum fairylands with beloved, fast-paced scenes of iconic New York spaces like the subway, Brooklyn Bridge and Wall Street…But Tchaikovsky’s beautiful score still sets the stage…”
New Jersey Ballets Nutcracker, celebrating its 48th consecutive year, at the Mayo Performing Arts Center, Morristown, NJ, for $22-$27 via Goldstar.
and, definitive NOT for children: Nutcracker Rouge. Austin McCormick and his erotic dance-theater group present the Burlesque version of the Nutcracker Suite, strictly for ages 18 and over. First performed in Greenwich Village in 2013, it continues its holiday tradition in a new theater in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
A Christmas Carols
There are if anything more Christmas Carols than Nutcrackers. (For better or for worse, many of the explicitly Christmas-themed shows run only until the week before Christmas.) Just two examples of A Christmas Carols that you can still see: a musical version at the Players Theater in the Village for the tenth year (through December 30). For the fifth year, the Merchant House Museum (through December 29) will re-create the time in 1867, when Charles Dickens traveled to New York to perform his story.
NEW HOLIDAY TRADITIONS (OR TRYING TO BE)
FAMILY FRIENDLY SHOWS
All is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914
A concert that tells the story of the truce between Allied Forces and German soldiers in No Man’s Land on Christmas, 1914. (My review)
Jack and the Beanstalk
A Panto comedy (a British form of slapstick) “Written by disabled actor/writerMat Fraser, directed by feminist artist Julie Atlas Muz and featuring an intergenerational, mixed-ability cast, Jack & the Beanstalk brings the Lower East Side together with a family-friendly holiday production that is inherently irreverent, lightly political, and has the message that eventually good triumphs over evil.” At Abrons Arts Center through December 30. (Recommended for ages 5 and over.)
Up Close Festival
NYC experimental theatre artists, musicians, physical comedians and clowns, for an afternoon of interactive, short-form stories that bring Greenwich Village history to life. Through December 31 at New Ohio Theater.
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ADULT FRIENDLY SHOWS
(In addition to the aforementioned Nutcracker Rouge)
The Imbible: Christmas Carol Cocktails — Drinks Served at Scrooge Sequel at the Producers Club, through December 29.
Christmas in Hell, York Theater
A Very Jewish Christmas, stand-up comedy, at Gotham Comedy Club, December 24
