This space has already taken note of Lebanon Opera House’s 100th birthday, in part because it’s kind of a rolling celebration.

The dedication of the building took place on Oct. 29, 1924, so it seems fitting that the opera house’s fall season is perhaps its richest ever.

Other Upper Valley venues will be busy doing their thing, including the Hopkins Center for the Arts, which will present performances elsewhere while the center’s renovation and expansion continues, and the two professional theater companies in White River Junction, Northern Stage and Shaker Bridge Theatre.

But the opera house, fresh from a $4.2 million renovation, is asserting its place in the performing arts community with a big slate of big artists, starting next week.

On Tuesday, singer-songwriter Angel Olson makes her opera house debut, followed the next night by Neko Case, an alt-country and Americana vocal powerhouse. Next Friday’s Blues Traveler show is already sold out, and on Saturday, Sept. 28, the opera house is holding a $100-a-head, roaring 20s, jazz-age-themed 100th birthday gala with the Grace Wallace Trio.

“It’s a lot, but we’re really excited about it,” opera house Executive Director Joe Clifford said.

The party continues on Oct. 5, with a pair of free performances in Colburn Park. At 11 a.m., Mr. Aaron plays his brand of children’s folk-pop, and at 1 p.m., the Jacob Jolliff Band plays bluegrass. This event will include all kinds of activities for families — face painting, lawn games and a big birthday cake for the opera house.

“It really is about inviting everyone to the celebration,” Clifford said.

That night also features the U.S. premiere of a new show from Machine de Cirque, a Quebec City-based circus troupe, in the opera house.

As the season rolls along, it features artists who might ordinarily have found a home on the stage of the Hopkins Center’s giant Spaulding Auditorium: “This American Life” host Ira Glass on Oct. 12, Pink Martini on Oct. 20, and the Joshua Redman Group, which pairs the legendary jazz saxophonists ensemble with a vocalist, Gabrielle Cavassa, for the first time, on Nov. 7.

“I do think the timing’s fortuitous” for the opera house to be celebrating 100 years while the Hopkins Center is being renovated, Clifford said. When the Hop reopens next fall, “then they get that season to shine.”

For more information about Lebanon Opera House, go to lebanonoperahouse.org.

Hopkins Center for the Arts

The people who run the Hopkins Center are indeed looking forward to this time next year, when they expect to be roaming the halls of what I believe I can safely call Northern New England’s largest performing arts complex.

“I think the building is going to need a period of warmup,” Michael Bodel, the Hop’s director of external affairs, said in a recent interview. It will take time, next year, for the Hop to get back up to full-steam.

At the moment, its programming is taking place in venues around the campus, with the Telluride at Dartmouth films (and other film programs) screening in Loew Auditorium, in the neighboring Black Family Visual Arts Center, and the performing arts happening mainly in Rollins Chapel and in a theater space on Currier Street. Dartmouth’s Coast Jazz Ensemble is performing more frequently in a venue that seems more in keeping to the medium’s capacity for intimacy: Sawtooth Kitchen, on Allen Street. There’s a show Monday night.

The season includes a few of the expected glittering evenings. The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields will bring their sterling interpretations of classical chamber orchestral works to Rollins Chapel on Oct. 8.

The jazz vocalist and composer Somi Kakoma, the daughter of immigrants from Uganda and Rwanda, performs in Rollins Chapel on Oct. 16, and the Americana trio The Lone Bellow follows on Oct. 23.

For more information about the Hopkins Center’s season, go to hop.dartmouth.edu.

Theater in White River Junction

This season marks the second year White River Junction will be home to two professional theater companies, after Shaker Bridge moved last year from Enfield into the Briggs Opera House, the former home of Northern Stage, which now occupies a theater of its own a block away.

The first season in the Briggs was a tonic for Shaker Bridge, which saw its audience numbers increase by 92% over the previous year, company founder Bill Coons said in an interview.

The Briggs has more than double the capacity of the 78-seat Whitney Hall in Enfield, which Shaker Bridge had used since its founding in 2007.

This season, the company will produce only four plays, one fewer than previous seasons. The aim, Coons said, is to free up more space in the Briggs for other groups to use, including a nine-week-long block of time in the spring.

It will also move to assigned seating, to make it easier for patrons to enjoy live music in the lobby before the show, without having to scramble for a seat.

In addition, Coons returns as artistic director after Grant Neale opted to go back to New York. “He really wanted to be home,” Coons said.

The company added a managing director, Adrian Wattenmaker, last month, who will handle the business side of the company, Coons said.

For the second time in its history, Shaker Bridge has planned a season of plays written by women.

“I think it was six or seven years ago when I realized what was going on,” Coons said. At the time, only about 12% of the plays produced in the U.S. were written by women, and Shaker Bridge was at 25%, “which was still embarrassing,” Coons said.

There’s no shortage of great plays written by women, Coons said. The season starts Sept. 26 with “The Thanksgiving Play,” a send-up of the all-American holiday, by Larissa Fasthorse, the first known Native American playwright to have a show produced on Broadway.

Northern Stage opens on Oct. 2, with a production of “Sisters,” a play about AI that won the 2022 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award for Playwriting, a prize that honors new works in speculative fiction, what we used to call science fiction.

For the production, Dartmouth’s Digital Arts, Leadership and Innovation Lab is creating a chatbot using language from the play and other materials. Theater-goers will be able to talk with it in the lobby before the show.

“They’re building it right now,” Sarah Elizabeth Wansley, the company’s associate artistic director, said in an interview. The play follows two sisters, one of whom is a disembodied AI, from the age of 6 into their 90s.

Last season was the first in which Northern Stage didn’t produce a musical. This year, there will be three, starting the week before Thanksgiving with “Disney’s Beauty and the Beast,” and continuing with a production of “Waitress,” in March, and with the homegrown “Vermont Farm Project,” which Wansley and her actor/musician/composer husband Tommy Crawford are crafting with regular collaborator Jessica Kahkoska, in May.

“I’m really excited to have so much music on our stage,” Wansley said.

For more information about Shaker Bridge Theatre’s season, go to shakerbridgetheatre.org. For more information about Northern Stage’s season, go to northernstage.org.

This weekend

ArtisTree Community Arts Center in South Pomfret is holding a free open house on Saturday. The festivities, which include art projects, musical performances and interactive exhibits, starts at noon.

What’s more, ArtisTree opens a production of “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” on Thursday night. The production runs through Sept. 29.

For more information, go to, artistreevt.org.

Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.