Arts & Events

THURSDAY, DEC. 17 -more-

Voci Women’s Vocal Ensemble, directed by Jude Navari, with guest organist Matthew Walsh, will perform The Greenest Branch: Medieval, Romantic and Twentieth-Century Music on a Marian Theme, the ninth annual show in their Voices in Peace series, at 4 p.m. Saturday at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley in Kensington. -more-

Rain, rain, it falls for nothing.” Empty shoes tap dance atop a red ladder (under the hand of puppeteer Tim Giugni) in the old gaming salon at the Berkeley City Club, which opens like a sideshow tent for Helen Pau’s The Stone Wife: A Burlesque in Nine Acts. -more-

Berkeley’s Wilde Irish is tying on a good one at 8 p.m. tonight through Saturday: A Joycean Christmas, at the Gaia Center, 2116 Allston Way. “It’ll be like the party from ‘The Dead,’” avers producer Breda Courtney—meaning, of course, the famous yuletide tale of an epiphany (which, many will recall, inspired John Huston’s final film) from James Joyce’s The Dubliners, from which the company will enact “Araby,” as well as the Christmas table scene from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. -more-

Every holiday season, there are the classics—like The Nutcracker, A Christmas Carol, the Messiah, A Child’s Christmas in Wales—and the alternatives, some of which are on their way to becoming classics. Here are a few: -more-

THURSDAY, DEC. 17 -more-