Arts & Culture in Union City

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City Lights is an innovative, intimate (100 seats), nonprofit theater company that produces six main-stage plays per year. Each play runs for a five-week period with four shows per week. Coming up in the current season is a production of Billy Aronson's First Day of School, a farcical look at the behavior of suburbanites in autumn (September 23–October 24); an irreverent, interactive, and totally historically accurate play titled Abraham Lincoln's Big, Gay Dance Party (November 24–December 19); and the horseplay of the drama Equus (March 17–April 17), the winner of the 1975 Tony for Best Play and a favorite of horse whisperers and hoarse whisperers everywhere.

When The Retro Dome first opened its doors three years ago, it was with the knowledge that its life would be brief and yet explosive. From the start, the owners of the building planned to demolish it at some point in the future. Yet that didn’t stop the staff from making use of the former Century 25 Theater’s stadium-style seating, refurbished chairs, and massive dome. They decked out the interior with vintage, retro-modern décor, complete with a candy counter slinging Pop Rocks and JujuBees. The foreseeable, yet fuzzy ending has recently come into sharp focus, though. The Retro Dome will go dark on January 31, 2013, bringing to an end nearly four years of live music and sing-along cinema.

Redeem your Groupon at will-call the night of your chosen performance. Seats will be in the main floor/orchestra section (the goldenrod section of this chart) and are distributed on a first-come, first-served basis. Be sure to arrive 15–20 fashionably early minutes prior to showtime.

Humor, song, and drama all unfold at the ACT's historic theater—originally opened in 1910—which blends austere neoclassicism with the occasional baroque flourish. The theater was built during the reconstruction after the 1906 earthquake, only to be struck by 1989's Loma Prieta earthquake, surviving significant damage and undergoing an extensive renovation and seismic stabilization that have enabled it to continue staging fine drama and overcome its reoccurring earthquake nightmares.

Peninsula Symphony, founded in 1949 with the goal of enriching communities with affordable musical productions, grew from a grassroots ensemble to a 90-plus-member orchestra of well-trained local musicians. Music Director Mitchell Sardou Klein leads the ensemble with a steady baton, a sharp ear, and the stamina to carry on through the inevitable triple encore.