(Long) weekend spotlight: Christmas shows and more

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas week, when the world and the community slow down and reflect. And enjoy.

The performing arts may be quiet, but they aren’t exactly sleeping. Here’s what’s going on, and looking for an audience, through Sunday.

The cross-country tour of Dolly Parton’s Smoky Mountain Christmas Carol – yes, it’s a musical – is onstage tonight (Tuesday, Dec. 23) at Ruth Eckered Hall. Find tickets here.

Performances tonight and Wednesday afternoon of A Christmas Carol in Concert at freeFall Theatre are sold out.

The Tampa Repertory Theatre’s A Christmas Carol – A Live Radio Play in onstage at the Straz Center Shimberg Playhouse at 3 and 7:30 p.m. today. Tickets.

Created in London more than three decades ago, Stomp was, and is, a non-linear theatrical production (meaning there’s no plot), richly choreographed, that features cast of “ordinary people” making all-percussion music with everyday household and industrial objects (matchboxes, brooms, garbage cans, Zippo lighters et cetera).

Broadway.com describes Stomp as “a journey through sound, a celebration of the everyday and a comic interplay of characters wordlessly communicating through dance and drum.”

Somehow, it connected with audiences – Stomp ran for 29 years and 11,475 performances in New York City alone, and has been on the road nearly that long.

The 2025 Stomp tour is in Ferguson Hall, in Tampa’s Straz Center for the Performing Arts, Dec. 26, 27 and 28. Find showtimes, and tickets, at this link.

The Tony-winnig musical “The Outsiders” opens Saturday at Morsani Hall, in Tampa’s Straz Center. Publicity photo.

In Morsani Hall, the Straz Center theater that’s a few hundred seats bigger than Ferguson, the Broadway Series ends with year with The Outsiders, the Tomy-Winning Best Musical of 2024, Dec. 27-Jan. 4.

The Outsiders is based on film director Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 drama about rival gangs in Tulsa, Oklahoma, itself an adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s 1960s novel. Come and see Ponyboy and his fellow Greasers contend with their affluent and stuck-up rivals, the Socs.

Find showtimes, and tickets, at this link.

Featuring dancers and artisans from the Ukraine and Russia, the show called NUTCRACKER! Magical Christmas Ballet began touring the world in the 1990s as The Great Russian Nutcracker.

Sometimes it seems as if it’s been coming to the Mahaffey Theater for that long, because it performs there every Christmas season. Whatever, there’s always something grand and gratifying about watching a fully professional company dance to the strains of Tchaikovsky’s timeless holiday music.

NUTCRACKER! Magical Christmas Ballet – there are three performances Sunday (Dec. 28) – features elaborate sets and costumes, all of the classical European design.

For all showtimes, details and tickets, visit this link.

Friday at the Mahaffey Theater, comedian Gary Owen performs. Named “Black America’s Favorite White Comic” by Ebony in 2011, Owens had his own eponymous sitcom on BET, and appeared in Daddy Day Care, Little Man, Think Like a Man and others, and on Tyler Perry’s House of Payne series.

Tickets for Owen’s 7 p.m. standup show are here.

Ventriloquist Terry Fator has a Sunday show at Ruth Eckerd Hall, along his regular coterie of fast-talking dummies – let’s use the word lightly – including Winston the Impersonating Turtle; country star Walter T. Airdale; Apollo Theater legend Julius; perpetual slacker and stoner Duggie; Vikki the Cougar and the world’s greatest Elvis impersonator, Maynard Tompkins.

The show, Pure Imagination: Once Upon a Voice, starts at 7 p.m. Find tickets here.

Your Weekend Spotlight appears every Thursday in the Catalyst’s CREATE section (this week, of course, is an exception). 

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