Enjoy a holiday twist on live music starting Thursday with performances from country rock band River Shook and cosmic country band Blue Cactus to celebrate the 21st annual tower lighting. On Friday, listen to country duo Fancy Gap and the Justin Edwards Trio. To keep it magical, the first 250 kids each night will receive fiber-optic light wands to make the crowd sparkle like a Christmas tree near the Lucky Strike Water Tower. Activities for children will also be available during the performances. Camp chairs are welcome, and beer and food will be available for purchase. The event is free. –Kennedy Thomason
It’s the holiday season. What could be more festive than going to see a play about political and artistic censorship? Playwright David Edgar’s new-ish play makes its debut in the United States with a Burning Coal Theatre production of the drama, which runs through Christmas week. Here in America takes viewers, per Burning Coal’s website, to a “crisp New England afternoon in 1952” where two friends, the playwright Arthur Miller and director Elias Kazan—the duo behind Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, among other classics—are meeting to catch up.
Except, no, they aren’t just catching up: Kazan is trying to figure out how to tell Miller, a leftist, that he had decided to name names to Senator Joseph McCartney amid the “Red Scare” of the 1950s. The specter of Marilyn Monroe, meanwhile, looms over the historic afternoon. This production is directed by Jerome Davis and stars Andrew Goins and Chip Carey as the artists battling politics and loyalties; tickets start at $20 and are $5 for students or those 18 and under. —Sarah Edwards
Embrace the holiday spirit—in all its forms—with some laughs at this comedy sketch spectacular. Join seven performers as they take you on a journey during a time of year filled with “awkward holiday parties, nosy Airbnb hosts, and impossible family photos,” per the Mettlesome website. Don’t forget the spiked eggnog (or your aunt who enjoys the eggnog a little too much). And bring your adult ear; as might be expected, this production contains adult language and may not be appropriate for children. There are nine opportunities to catch the show, starting Friday and ending December 21. Enjoy an hour and a half of the hilarious holiday sketch this season. Tickets are $18. –KT
This bold cross-cultural dance performance merges mythological storytelling with personal experience to illustrate the idea of samsara: the wheel of birth, existence, and rebirth. Samsara fuses styles from ballet and Chinese folk to kathak and contemporary to explore the steps taken backward and forward in search of our higher selves. Choreographed by UK/Indian Aakash Odedra and Chinese Hu Shenyuan, the performance draws on “thinking and imagery at the heart of Buddhist philosophy,” per the Carolina Performing Arts website. Aakash Odedra and Han-Taiwanese dancer Po-Nien Wang will take the stage to share the cultural dialogue of Samsara. Tickets are available starting at $29, but student tickets are $11. The performance will run for about an hour without intermission. Sand will be used as one of the performance’s main elements, and some parts will have loud music and strobe effects. –KT
Amidst a tougher-than-ever economic environment for live music and performances—at least, the kinds that won’t be found in DPAC or a hockey stadium—to lose any one of a city’s indie local venues is bad enough. To not even be afforded an opportunity to celebrate one on its way out feels like a different level of cultural robbery altogether. Such was the case in Durham last month when jazz club Missy Lane’s announced, in an abrupt, light-on-details social media post, that it was shuttering after two years as a consistently bold, thoughtfully curated outpost for broad-spectrum jazz (and R&B, soul, and hip-hop) on the east side of the city’s downtown core.
Theirs wasn’t the only post of its kind: a couple of weeks earlier and just a few blocks north, the semi-underground DIY space PS37 (est. 2019) had also informed fans and friends of their impending closure. A gut punch in its own right, the pain of PS’s departure was considerably dulled by its two-month-out, December 31st end date, and thus the prospect of it receiving the extended memorial that any beloved community space truly deserves. Over the next 28 days, opportunities abound for sending PS37 out in style, from a Raj Bunnag art exhibit and open studio from December 14th-19th to one last NO VISA-affiliated show on December 20th.
That applies to this weekend, too: it wouldn’t be a proper farewell without a final installment of the DJ Uymami- and Treee City-helmed party series, Moodboard, which has been a fixture of Durham nightlife since 2023. Headlined this time by D.C.-based producer/DJ Baronhawk Poitier and stacked with veterans of the Triangle electronic/dance scene, it’s a last hurrah that shouldn’t be passed up—especially given that often we aren’t offered one at all. —Ryan Cocca
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