Tea for Two and a DJ Among the Dinosaurs: Your Halloween-Weekend Arts Fix

Everybody else is handing out candy this weekend. The arts crowd, bless us, has other plans — and they are better than you think.

A real orchestra in Camden

Start with the one that genuinely delights me. Down at Rutgers-Camden’s Walter K. Gordon Theater, “No, No, Nanette” takes its final bow on Sunday, November 1 — and here is the part that makes it special: this is not a tinny recording and a handful of kids. This is a full production anchored by a thirty-one-piece Symphony in C orchestra, with professional actors sharing the stage with Rutgers students. Thirty-one musicians. Live. In a college theater in Camden, playing the kind of giddy, tap-happy 1920s score (“Tea for Two,” yes, that one) that most of us only ever hear through a tinny speaker in an old movie. I will never not be moved by a real orchestra in a room that size. You feel it in your sternum. If you have a free Sunday, spend it there.

What I love about a show like this is the quiet machinery behind it — the Symphony in C players who rehearse for weeks so a student actor’s big number has an orchestra underneath it, the kind of mentorship that does not announce itself. That is community arts at its best: the professionals and the kids in the same pit, the same spotlight, nobody too important to share the stage. Closing performances have a particular electricity, too. Everyone onstage knows it is the last time. Go feel that.

A night among the dinosaurs

Then, for the people who want their culture with a little more fog machine, there is “Fossils & Frights” at the Edelman Fossil Park & Museum in Mantua Township on Friday, October 30, from 7 to 11 p.m. Picture it: dinosaur exhibits after dark, a DJ, a costume contest, food, and — because why not — a tarot reader. It is eighteen-and-up, tickets run $40 (just $25 if you are a Rowan student), and it is exactly the kind of gloriously weird, only-in-South-Jersey evening I live to tell you about. Where else are you dancing next to a prehistoric sea creature on a Friday night? Nowhere. That is the answer. Nowhere.

Where else are you dancing next to a prehistoric sea creature on a Friday night?Jenna Joy

Here is my honest pitch, and I will make it every week until you are sick of me: the big-ticket stuff is fine, but the soul of this region’s arts scene is right here, within a short drive — a working orchestra in Camden, a museum in Mantua that throws a better party than most clubs, students and pros and oddballs all making something together. You do not have to cross a bridge or pay bridge prices to be moved by live art this weekend.

So let the kids have their candy. Grab a ticket to “Nanette” or pull your costume back out for one more night among the dinosaurs. The arts in South Jersey are alive, a little strange, and very much worth your Saturday — and your Sunday, and your Friday night too.

Go see something. Tell them the Gazette sent you.

Based on event listings from PhillyVoice, Rutgers-Camden / Symphony in C, and the Edelman Fossil Park & Museum. Confirm showtimes and ticket availability with the venue before you go.