Laguna Beach Isn't Winding Down. Its Arts Calendar Is Just Getting Started.
September 24, 2026
September 24, 2026
Ask anyone who has never lived here what September in Laguna Beach looks like, and they will describe an exhale. The Pageant of the Masters closes, the Festival of Arts packs up its easels, the Coast Highway traffic thins, and the town supposedly settles into a quieter, more local rhythm before the holidays.
That is not quite what is happening this year. Between September 9 and October 4, three of the town's arts institutions are doing some of the most ambitious work they have done all year, and none of it is aimed at the visitors who just left. Laguna Playhouse is staging a brand-new musical that has never been performed anywhere before. Laguna Beach Live! is marking a 25th anniversary with two concerts built for people who already know the difference between Heisler Park in May and the Rivian South Coast Theater in September. And LOCA Arts Education is throwing its members-only fall brunch in a canyon clearing most visitors never find. If the summer calendar is built for people passing through, the fall calendar is built for people who stayed.
Laguna Playhouse has been producing shows since before most of the buildings on Coast Highway existed in their current form. This fall, instead of opening its new season with a familiar touring title, the Playhouse is premiering something that has never had a stage anywhere until now. Wild Child, a musical with book and lyrics by Dan Marshall and a score by Julianne Wick Davis, began previews on September 9 and opens its full run through October 4, directed by John Simpkins. The story follows two teenagers who meet as avatars in a virtual world and are then forced into a wilderness therapy program in Northern Utah, a premise built around the specific kind of disconnection a lot of people in this town are trying to work out for their own kids.
Managing Director Adele Adkins described the decision to lead with an original work rather than a safer, proven title plainly:
"At Laguna Playhouse, producing new work is central to our mission. Wild Child is exactly the kind of bold, original work we are proud to champion."
Tickets for the run are priced between $86 and $131, including the service charge, which is not unusual for a world premiere at a company with the Playhouse's track record. What is unusual is the timing. A theater with more than a century of history does not typically spend its biggest artistic risk on the weeks right after the summer crowds disperse. This one did.
If the Playhouse's fall move is a big swing, Laguna Beach Live! is doing something closer to a victory lap, and pricing it accordingly. The nonprofit turns 25 this year, and rather than one large gala, it built two smaller concerts that show off the range it has spent a quarter century developing.
The first, on September 24 at the Rivian South Coast Theater, pairs the Zelter String Quartet with musician and composer Steve Wood and Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Greg MacGillivray for an evening called Music in Motion, mixing live chamber music with curated clips from MacGillivray's archive. The second and third, on October 3 and October 4, bring in songwriting duo Jeff Silbar and Jodi Siegel and then the Webern Quartet. Both concerts are priced at $25, a number the organization chose deliberately to mark the anniversary and to keep the door open to the same neighbors who have been showing up since the series started.
Set that $25 next to the $86 to $131 it costs to see Wild Child at the Playhouse, and the fall calendar starts to look less like one kind of event repeated three times and more like a town covering the entire range of what a night out can mean here. One is a major theatrical investment in a story that has never been told before. The other is a low-cost, high-trust night with a chamber quartet that has played this town for a quarter century. Both are aimed at the same audience: the one that is still here after Labor Day.
The least visible event on this fall calendar is also the most telling. LOCA Arts Education, which has run visual arts programs in Laguna Beach for 33 years, holds its annual ArtsGiving brunch each fall at Laguna College of Art + Design, with the gathering itself tucked into Nina's Park at the rear of the campus. There is no ticket booth on Coast Highway advertising this one. It is a members' event, open to guests for $30, built around a homemade brunch buffet, live guitar from Dave Murdy, an artist presentation, and a silent auction that has included dining and kayaking experiences in past years.
LOCA vice president Rich Fair described the point of the gathering simply: it is the board's way of thanking the members who keep the organization's classes and outreach programs running for the roughly 1,800 people it reaches each year, from schoolchildren to seniors at the Susi Q Center. There is no pretense of drawing a crowd from outside town. It is a thank-you note, held in a canyon, for people who already showed up all year.
None of these three organizations coordinated with each other on timing. Laguna Playhouse builds its season around a theatrical calendar. Laguna Beach Live! plans its anniversary programming around its own 25-year arc. LOCA holds ArtsGiving every fall because that is when its membership year turns over. But the fact that all three landed their most local, least tourist-facing programming in the same four-week stretch says something about what this town's cultural institutions understand about their own audience. Summer is for the Pageant and the Festival of Arts, built for the crowds that fill the hotels along Coast Highway. Fall is for the residents who are still here once those crowds go home, and the programming reflects it.
If you already live in Laguna Beach, here is the practical shape of the next few weeks:
The version of Laguna Beach that shows up in postcards ends around Labor Day. The version that actually lives here has just gotten its most interesting month of the year.
Laura Faye Cutrona has spent more than a decade helping people move through this coastline, and long before that, a career in luxury hospitality taught her that the character of a place is usually found in the details nobody advertises. If you are thinking about your own next chapter on this coast, whether that means buying, selling, or simply understanding a neighborhood before you commit to it, Contact Laura.
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