Fri, Nov 6
BEAT: Belew/Vai/Levin/Bozzio Performing the Music of KING CRIMSON
8:00–11:00 PM
Boch Center – Wang Theatre · Boston
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Boston has 6 Nutcrackers this December, including one in French and one set in downtown Boston
The Nutcracker that Boston knows by heart owes its gentle story to France. As the French Library explains, E.T.A. Hoffmann's original tale was dark and complicated, and Alexandre Dumas, the author of The Three Musketeers, retold it in 1844 as the fairy tale that became Tchaikovsky's ballet in St. Petersburg in 1892. This December that story shows up all over Greater Boston in six very different versions. One is a full classical ballet with a live orchestra, one moves the party to present-day downtown Boston, one is narrated in French for kids, one swings to Duke Ellington, and one comes to town for a single night with acrobats and giant puppets. Here's when and where each one plays, what tickets cost where the venue lists a price, and which ones are made for kids. The big one runs Friday, Nov. 27 through Thursday, Dec. 31 at the Citizens Opera House. Mikko Nissinen's production premiered in 2012 with hand-painted sets and more than 350 costumes made in Massachusetts and designed by Robert Perdziola. The Boston Ballet Orchestra plays Tchaikovsky's score at every performance, and 83 students from Boston Ballet School dance alongside the company. Plan on about two hours with one intermission, and dress in layers, because the company keeps the theater warmer than usual for the dancers. Boston Ballet says it is the only official seller of tickets, so buy from its site. Groups of 10 or more can save up to 35%, and there is a sensory friendly performance designed for neurodiverse guests and anyone with sensory sensitivities. José Mateo Ballet Theatre brings its 38th annual Nutcracker to the Strand Theatre from Saturday, Dec. 5 through Sunday, Dec. 20. More than 100 kids ages 6 to 18 dance with professional guest artists every year, and Boston Magazine named it Best Family-Friendly Show in Best of Boston 2020. Mateo choreographed this version to Tchaikovsky's score in 1988, and the company bills it as affordable. Anthony Williams' Urban Nutcracker sets its winter scenes in present-day downtown Boston and blends Duke Ellington with Tchaikovsky. Classical ballet is the base, with tap, hip hop, flamenco and jazz mixed in. It plays the Boch Center's Shubert Theatre from Saturday, Dec. 12 through Sunday, Dec. 20, with 10 performances including weekend matinees, and tickets start at $29 at the box office. The touring Nutcracker! production is in town for exactly one show, Friday, Dec. 11 at 7 PM at the Boch Center's Wang Theatre. Now on its 33rd annual tour, it adds acrobatics and larger-than-life puppets to the ballet. Tickets start at $66 at the box office. On Wednesday, Dec. 9, the Arpeggione Ensemble plays a miniature Nutcracker at the French Library on Marlborough Street. Thomas Carroll's arrangement fits Tchaikovsky's full orchestral score into five musicians playing many more than five instruments, with narration in French from Dumas's version, English subtitles and projected illustrations, so kids can follow along even if they don't speak a word of French. Doors open at 5:30 PM for a holiday craft atelier for kids and families, the concert starts at 6 PM, and light refreshments follow. Tickets are $30, or $24 for members and French Library students, and kids under 14 get in at no charge with an adult. Berklee's Holiday Spectacular on Tuesday, Dec. 8 at 8 PM is a two-part night at the Berklee Performance Center on Massachusetts Avenue. The Gen-Next All-Stars open with arrangements of holiday songs, then the Diamond Cut Big Band plays Duke Ellington's Nutcracker Suite, his big band take on Tchaikovsky's music. The box office at 136 Massachusetts Ave. is open noon to 6 PM Tuesday through Friday, plus two hours before the show.
Where to find late-night food in Boston when dinner got away from you
The show is over, everyone is hungry and the restaurant you had in mind has stopped serving food. A bar’s closing time will not tell you whether you can still get dinner. Its kitchen hours will. These six options for late-night food in Boston include two places open around the clock, quick takeout and restaurants where you can sit down to a proper meal. The hours and menus were checked in September 2026. Pick the branch as carefully as the restaurant: the same name over the door does not mean the same closing time. South Street Diner is open around the clock, with breakfast dishes, burgers and sandwiches on its menu. Near South Station, it is a useful meeting point when one person wants pancakes and another still wants dinner. You can order omelets, French toast or a cheeseburger without first resolving what meal you are having. Choose it when sitting down matters as much as getting fed. Bova’s is a takeout stop; the diner gives you a place to spend a little longer together before heading home. Its location does not make the trains run all night, though. Check your own route home before turning a quick meal into another hour out. Bova’s Bakery keeps 24-hour service every day of the year on Salem Street in the North End. The family bakery sells Italian sweets and savory food, so dessert does not have to stand in for dinner. Pick up something to eat now and a pastry for later, assuming the pastry survives the trip home. This is a takeout bakery, not a sit-down restaurant. It accepts major credit and debit cards, which is useful to know before making an unnecessary ATM stop. If someone in the group has a food allergy, call first: Bova’s explicitly warns about cross-contact and does not describe its products as dairy-, gluten- or nut-free. Tasty Burger’s Fenway location serves until 2 a.m. every day. Go to 86 Van Ness Street; older listings still send people to its former Boylston Street address. For a burger after a night around Fenway, that combination of a clear closing time and the correct front door saves a fair amount of aimless walking. Check the branch before placing an order. The Back Bay shop closes at midnight Sunday through Thursday and stays open until 2 a.m. on Friday and Saturday. If you are leaving an event late on a weeknight, the difference matters. Choose the location you can actually reach before service ends, rather than assuming all Tasty Burgers keep Fenway’s hours. El Jefe’s Taqueria is useful when the evening has run well past dinner. The Boston Common branch at 80 Boylston Street closes at 2 a.m. The Kenmore, Boston University and Huntington Avenue locations list 3 a.m. closings, while Harvard Square serves until 4 a.m. Those are individual branch hours, not one closing time for the whole business. The Common location makes sense if you are already downtown. Fenway and campus-area branches give you later alternatives without automatically sending everyone across the river. Choose your location before the group separates, especially if someone is ordering ahead. Meeting at ‘El Jefe’s’ is less helpful than agreeing which one. jm Curley keeps its kitchen running until 1:30 a.m. seven nights a week. Its Temple Place location is useful after a downtown show when you want food and a seat rather than another takeaway bag. The late-night menu includes a griddled burger, fried pickles and chicken wings. Read the late-night section when deciding what to order. Supper and after-hours service have different menus, so a dish listed earlier on the website may not be available when you arrive. This is a good choice for a smaller meal or a few plates to share. Leave enough time to order before the kitchen closes; arriving at 1:29 a.m. makes dinner unnecessarily complicated. Franklin Cafe serves its full dinner menu until 1:30 a.m. every night. That gives the South End an option for the meal you meant to have several hours earlier. The menu includes hanger steak frites, turkey meatloaf with fig gravy, a burger and spicy lamb Bolognese. Choose the Franklin when you want dinner rather than just something to carry home. A late kitchen does not make every ordering method identical, so check the pickup window separately if you are ordering online. For a table, work backward from the food-service cutoff and give yourself time to get there, sit down and order without watching the clock through the whole meal. Choosing late-night food in Boston Start with where you are and whether you want a table or takeout. Then check that location’s kitchen hours before leaving. Holiday schedules, pickup windows and available dishes can change independently of the bar’s closing time. A nearby place that is still serving is more useful than a later closing time on the other side of town.
Get to know Boston
Boston was named after another Boston
Boston was named after Boston. The earlier one is in Lincolnshire, England, where a medieval church tower rises above a port and market town. English settlers carried the name across the Atlantic in 1630. Massachusetts made it rather more famous. The connection is well documented. Historic England describes both the borrowed name and the prominent residents who left the English town to help lead the new settlement. The longer story involves a saint, a minister who arrived after the naming, and a peninsula whose human history did not start when the English showed up. Boston was named after a port town Boston, Lincolnshire, was an important trading port long before the Massachusetts settlement existed. Its position connected the town with North Sea commerce, and its surviving warehouses, markets and church reflect that wealth. St Botolph’s Church is the building most likely to catch your eye. Its tower is known as the Boston Stump, a nickname that undersells a structure visible across the flat surrounding country. The church supplied a religious and civic focal point for the town that gave ours its name. The name Boston is generally traced to Botolph’s town. The Getty Research Institute’s place-name record includes “Botolph’s Town” among its historical names. By the time the name reached Massachusetts, the shorter form had already done the work. John Cotton came later John Cotton is an important part of the connection between the two Bostons. He served as vicar of St Botolph’s before settling in Massachusetts. But the dates matter: the American town was named in 1630, and Cotton arrived in 1633. Boston Borough Council’s account of the transatlantic connection explains how Cotton’s congregation and other local figures linked the English town to New England. It also separates that migration from the earlier story of the Pilgrims. The English Boston has a Pilgrim connection too. In 1607, separatists trying to leave for the Netherlands were betrayed and arrested there. That episode belongs to the history leading toward the Mayflower voyage, not to a single founding trip that created every English settlement in Massachusetts. Putting those events into one neat departure story loses the actual sequence. Plymouth’s 1620 settlement and Boston’s 1630 settlement were different undertakings. Cotton’s later arrival strengthened an existing connection rather than creating the name on his first day. Before Boston there was Shawmut The English name was new. The inhabited place was not. The City of Boston’s archaeological history of the Common describes thousands of years of Massachusett life in Shawmut and emphasizes that the Massachusett people are still here. Archaeologists have found stone tools, pottery and shell deposits near the Frog Pond and Parkman Bandstand. Those objects give a much longer account of life on the peninsula than a founding date printed on a city souvenir. William Blackstone, also spelled Blaxton, was already living on the peninsula when John Winthrop’s settlers arrived. In 1634, he sold land to the colonists that became the Common. The familiar park therefore holds several histories at once: Indigenous use, English settlement and the development of shared public land. A city name is only part of the map Boston’s name is comparatively straightforward once you find the English town. The names inside Boston can be less cooperative. Jamaica Plain’s name, for example, has competing explanations rather than one securely documented answer. For Boston itself, there is no need to invent a secret message or claim the Puritans were asking a saint to protect their new home. A familiar English place name traveled with a community of settlers. Understanding why that name felt familiar requires looking back across the Atlantic; understanding the place it was applied to requires looking much further back here. The next time you hear “the original Boston,” the speaker may mean a Lincolnshire market town with a very large church. Ours was the sequel.
The famous Boston accent and its obsession with the letter R
Say “car,” then say “car engine.” For someone with a traditional Boston accent, the R can disappear in the first version and return in the second. The next sound makes a difference. That detail gets lost in plenty of Boston impressions. Removing every R gets you only so far, and eventually gets you somewhere nobody here is from. The accent has patterns involving consonants, vowels, and the way words meet in a sentence. It also varies considerably among the people who use it. Which R’s does the Boston accent drop? Linguists call the traditional accent non-rhotic. In ordinary terms, speakers often leave out an R after a vowel when another consonant or a pause follows. Think of “park,” “card,” or “car” said on its own. The R at the beginning of “red” stays. So does the one in “bring.” A Boston speaker is not applying a blanket ban to the letter. An R can also return at the end of a word when the next word starts with a vowel sound. In “car engine,” the words connect through the R. This is called linking R, a pattern also found in other non-rhotic English accents. Try saying the phrases naturally rather than giving each word its own pause. The difference is easier to hear in a sentence than in a list of words written with “ah” at the end. And where do the extra R’s come from? Then there is intrusive R: an R sound between words where no R appears in the spelling. “The idea of it” can sound like “the idear of it.” The vowel at the beginning of “of” creates the setting for that extra sound. It does not mean every Boston speaker says “idear” whenever the word appears. The University of York’s explanation of linking and intrusive R describes how one pattern developed from the other. Speakers extended an existing way of joining vowel sounds to words that did not have a written R. The extra consonant helps two vowel sounds meet. It follows a pattern, rather than arriving wherever an actor decides to put it. The vowels matter, too Listen to “cot” and “caught.” For many traditional Boston speakers, those words sound alike. That shared vowel is another important part of the accent, although it receives considerably less attention than “pahk.” Some speakers also use a broad A in words such as “bath” or “half,” bringing the vowel closer to the one in “father.” These features are not a checklist every Bostonian completes. A person can have a recognizable local accent without using all of them. You can hear examples in WBUR’s recordings and explanation of Boston speech, which includes Dartmouth linguist James Stanford discussing the sounds. Listening is more useful than trying to reconstruct an accent from exaggerated spelling. How Boston came to sound this way Boston speech belongs to the broader Eastern New England dialect region. Its history includes the English spoken by early settlers and the region’s continuing connections with England. Boston University linguist Neil Myler points to settlers from East Anglia as an important influence on the region’s R-dropping speech. Stanford also emphasizes the close contact Boston maintained with southeastern England, where non-rhotic pronunciation gained social prestige. That history helps explain the connection, but the accent has continued changing here. The way someone speaks also reflects their family, community, education, and social surroundings. Four centuries of Boston life did not leave the original dialect untouched. “Wicked” and “frappe” are a different part of the story An accent concerns pronunciation. A dialect includes vocabulary and grammar as well. “Wicked,” used to mean very or extremely, is vocabulary. In “wicked cold,” it increases the force of “cold.” It does the same job in “wicked expensive,” with less pleasant financial implications. “Frappe” is another regional word, pronounced “frap” in the familiar local usage. Merriam-Webster records both that pronunciation and the thick-milkshake meaning. Someone can order a frappe, complain that it is wicked expensive, and pronounce every R. Knowing the words and having the accent are separate things. Not everyone raised here sounds the same Research has documented differences across age groups and communities. In a 2010 study of Boston and two New Hampshire towns, linguists Naomi Nagy and Patricia Irwin found that younger speakers pronounced more post-vocalic R’s than older speakers. Education and other social factors also mattered. Those results concern the people in the study, rather than every younger person in Boston. They also measure one feature: someone who pronounces more R’s can retain other local sounds. The accent does not disappear the moment one pronunciation changes. For some people, sounding local is a source of pride. Others have felt pressure to soften their pronunciation to avoid being judged. Both experiences help explain why a city can have such a recognizable accent without all its residents sharing it. Pronouncing the R in “Dorchester” does not cancel out having grown up there.