The Wallis Announced Its Season Twice. Most of Beverly Hills Only Caught Half of It.

Why would a performing arts center release its own season lineup in two separate waves, ten weeks apart, with almost no overlap between them?

That is what happened at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts this year. In early June, the center unveiled its 2026-27 season with the kind of press rollout built for wide pickup: a jazz opener, a Tony winner, a returning drag icon, a musical adaptation of a Hemingway novella. Local coverage ran the story, ticket packages went on sale, and for most people who follow the Wallis casually, that was the season. Then, in mid-August, with the school year barely underway and Beverly Hills still mid-restaurant-wave on Cañon and Beverly Drive, the Wallis quietly expanded that same season with a slate that includes the biggest single booking of the year: a world premiere starring a member of New Kids on the Block.

If you read the June story and never saw the August one, you have half a season. If you caught only the August news because a friend mentioned the McIntyre play, you are missing Sasha Velour, Laura Benanti, and the LA Opera collaborations that anchor the fall. Neither press cycle gave you the whole picture on its own. Here is what both add up to.

The June Announcement: Jazz, a Tony Winner, and Two World Premieres With LA Opera

The season opens September 25 in the Bram Goldsmith Theater with the Joshua Redman Quartet performing Words Fall Short, a new instrumental program built around pianist Paul Cornish, bassist Philip Norris, and drummer Nazir Ebo, with trumpeter Skylar Tang joining as a guest. It is a deliberate choice for an opener: Redman built his reputation on vocal collaborations, and this is a step away from that into pure instrumental storytelling.

October brings the first of two solo-performer showcases that define the fall. Laura Benanti's Nobody Cares runs October 1-4, a one-woman comedy show that arrives at the Wallis after an acclaimed Edinburgh Fringe run and two sold-out Off-Broadway engagements, earning a New York Times Critic's Pick along the way. Three weeks later, Sasha Velour, the RuPaul's Drag Race Season 9 winner, returns with Travesty on October 29-30, a solo work that moves through a series of lip-sync personas, from a witch burned in a field to patrons of an underground gay bar, tracing queer history as a chain of survival stories rather than a single narrative.

The season's more ambitious swings land later. The Old Man and the Sea, a musical-theater adaptation of the Hemingway novella created in collaboration with LA Opera, runs May 20-23. And The Shot, a one-woman play starring Sharon Lawrence as Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, runs April 10-25, giving the Goldsmith stage a rare biographical drama alongside its usual mix of comedy and music.

Returning favorites round out the original announcement: Sandra Bernhard on December 5, composer Jason Robert Brown in a career-spanning evening on December 12 that draws from Parade, The Last Five Years, and Songs for a New World, pianist Hershey Felder in The Piano & Me from March 11-21, and designer-entertainer Isaac Mizrahi on April 17. Family programming includes Leonardo! A Wonderful Show About a Terrible Monster, based on the Mo Willems books, November 20-21, and Lightwire Theatre's The Adventures of Tortoise and Hare: The Next Generation on February 20.

Underneath all of it, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra returns to the Wallis under Music Director Jaime Martín starting September 27, with LA Opera recitals featuring Jamie Barton on November 15, Erin Morley and Lawrence Brownlee on April 22, and Sondra Radvanovsky on May 22. One LACO evening this season, led by conductor Ludovic Morlot, pairs Huang Ruo's Folksongs for Orchestra with two world premieres: Mason Bates' Pipa Concerto performed by virtuoso Wu Man, and Eímear Noone's autobiographical Flute Concerto performed by LACO Principal Flute Benjamin Smolen.

The August Expansion: The Season's Biggest Booking Almost Slipped Past

Then, roughly two weeks before this writing, the Wallis added a second batch of programming that includes its most consequential booking of the year. Radio Galaxy, a new play by Michèle Aldin Kushner directed by Kimberly Senior, will have its world premiere in the Lovelace Studio Theater across 18 performances from November 6 to 22. The cast is led by Joey McIntyre, alongside Lesli Margherita, Callan Farris, Meera Simhan, and Bernard White. The play follows Tino, a gifted 17-year-old from a working-class New Jersey town who dreams of becoming an astronomer, and whose life is upended when he learns he has a half-sister who needs a bone marrow transplant.

This is not a small addition. Eighteen performances is the longest run of any production in the season, and it is happening in the more intimate Lovelace Studio Theater rather than the 500-seat Goldsmith, which means fewer seats per night and a run that will likely sell through before the December bookings even open.

The rest of the August wave fills in genres the June announcement barely touched. Comedian Preacher Lawson, who first built a national audience on America's Got Talent, performs November 13. Rita Rudner brings her observational stand-up on January 8. The Los Angeles premiere of Passing the Crown: Celebrating the Queens of Hip-Hop, featuring MC Lyte, lands January 29. Noche in LA, a one-night celebration curated by Las Cafeteras featuring Los Chicos del Mambo, The McCharmlys, El Mariachi Manchester, and Carlos y Charlos, runs May 1. And Queerlarious, a comedy showcase with six queer comedians including Alec Mapa, Jeffrey Jay, and Sandra Valls, closes out Pride programming on June 11.

The August news also confirmed the return of National Theatre Live, screening three London productions on the Wallis's big screen: The Importance of Being Earnest on November 14, featuring Sharon D. Clarke and Ncuti Gatwa, The Audience on January 11, with Helen Mirren reprising her role as Queen Elizabeth II in the Peter Morgan play that later became the basis for The Crown, and Les Liaisons Dangereuses on April 29, starring Lesley Manville, Aidan Turner, and Monica Barbaro.

The Full Season, Month by Month

Lay the two theaters side by side and a pattern emerges. The Goldsmith carries almost the entire season, cycling through comedy, cabaret, film, and dance every few weeks. The Lovelace Studio Theater, by contrast, holds exactly one production this year, and it happens to be the longest run on the calendar. That is a deliberate use of a smaller room: an intimate three-week engagement for a new play, rather than a one-night booking, gets the space it needs to build an audience by word of mouth before it closes.

What This Means If You're Actually Planning a Fall

November is the month to watch. Radio Galaxy opens November 6 and runs through the 22nd. Preacher Lawson performs November 13. The National Theatre Live screening of The Importance of Being Earnest lands November 14. All three are happening inside the same building within an eight-day stretch, which means the Wallis's parking structure and lobby bar are going to see more traffic in one November week than most months combined.

The Wallis also keeps its free Family Fest calendar running alongside the ticketed season: Dia de los Muertos on November 1, Lunar New Year on January 23, Nowruz on March 20, and a Pride celebration on June 12. These are the same civic anchor points the center has used in past years, and they land within days of some of the season's ticketed marquee dates, which makes them worth checking before assuming a free weekend at the Wallis is actually free of a parking headache.

For a season built across two press cycles ten weeks apart, the two waves together tell a more interesting story than either one alone: a fall anchored by a genuine world premiere in the smaller room, a spring built around collaborations with LA Opera, and a Goldsmith Theater that rarely goes more than three weeks without a name most Beverly Hills residents will recognize.

If you're the kind of person who tracks a neighborhood this closely, whether that means knowing which theater hosts which run or knowing which block just got a new restaurant, you already understand what makes a place worth living in versus worth visiting. Kathy Marshall brings that same level of attention to the Beverly Hills real estate market, for residents who want an advisor who knows the neighborhood as well as they do.