FUN
Museum open house
Rogers Historical Museum, 313 S. Second St., Rogers, holds its 23rd Holiday Open House, 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Saturday, featuring guided tours of the 1895 Hawkins House and a Christmas cottage decorated to illustrate one-time family life in Rogers. The event will also include holiday crafts and a letter-to-Santa writing station. Friends of the Rogers Historical Museum is providing Christmas refreshments. Santa Claus will be on hand, and will read Clement Moore's "A Visit From St. Nicholas" at 1 p.m. Admission is free. Call (479) 621-1154 or visit rogershistoricalmuseum.org.
THEATER
'Miracle' in Argenta
The Argenta Community Theater, 405 Main St., North Little Rock, stages "Miracle on 34th Street," adapted by the Mountain Community Theater from the novel by Valentine Davies and based upon the 1947 motion picture, opening at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday with shows at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday-Friday and 2 p.m. Sunday (with an additional 2 p.m. Dec. 16 matinee) through Dec. 17. The theater is basing the production on the book and film and set in 1940s traditional New York.
Rick Wilson plays Kris Kringle, apparently an old man in a retirement home, who agrees to fill in for an "inebriated imposter" in Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and subsequently on the department store's "throne," and who then turns New York on its ear by recommending Macy's patrons visit other stores to get their children toys Macy's doesn't have in stock.
Paige Reynolds plays Macy's executive Doris Walker, whose belief in Santa Claus is somewhere south of the North Pole; Mabel Miller plays her equally skeptical daughter, Susan. Jamie Stewart plays neighbor and lawyer Fred Gayley, whose task it becomes to represent Kris in the sanity hearing in a court that will determine whether he is, in fact, the one and only Santa.
Tickets are $10-$38 with VIP balcony seats available. Some shows have already sold out. Visit argentacommunitytheater.org.
'Black Nativity' redux
Actors Theatre of Little Rock reprises its production of "Black Nativity" by Langston Hughes, 7:30 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday and Dec. 13-16 and 6 p.m. Sunday and Dec. 17 at Quapaw Quarter United Methodist Church, 1601 Louisiana St., Little Rock. The show is a gospel retelling of the Nativity through music and dance, dialogue, narration, gospel songs and folk spirituals. Tickets are $25, $20 for students, senior citizens and military. Visit tinyurl.com/rewzj2nf.
The theater group first staged the show Dec. 13-18, 2022. The production is dedicated to the memory of Darius Nelson, a cast member and pastor of music and arts at Little Rock's St. Mark Baptist Church, who died Oct. 6.
ETC.
Library history lecture
Michael Heil, associate professor of history at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, will give a talk titled "The Birth, Life, and Death of an Early Medieval Library," 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at Historic Arkansas Museum, 200 E. Third St., Little Rock. Heil's talk, part of the university's Evenings with History series, highlights the creation and dissolution of the library at the Italian monastery of Bobbio, one of the largest libraries in Western Europe, founded by Irish Abbot Columbanus around the year 613. Refreshments will be served at 7 p.m. Admission is by subscription, but visitors and UALR students may attend individual talks for free. Email [email protected] or visit ualr.edu/history/history-institute.