Lifestyle
Disneyland's holiday fest dazzles with Latin traditions and a candlelit 'Silent Night'
One of the Disneyland Resort’s new holiday offerings is a show featuring the young guitar-slinging character of Miguel from “Coco.” But it’s ultimately rooted in a culture and history that long predates the 2017 film.
Show director Tobi Longo pulled from her childhood, her family roots and a cultural heritage in working with her peers to bring the mariachi-focused performance to life. In turn, its primary influence was not the Disney/Pixar film, but Las Posadas. The latter — think a festive procession that travels among the community — are traditionally staged in Mexico between Dec. 16 and 24. In their purest form, Las Posadas depict the biblical story of Joseph and Mary and the search for shelter at the time of Jesus’ birth.
The Disney performance deviates from the religious overtunes. But some of the key touchstones — a mix of music and stories, a centering of children with candles — are present. The early evening weekday show, officially dubbed “A Musical Christmas with Mariachi Alegría de Disneyland & Miguel,” is part of this year’s expanded programming for Disney California Adventure’s Festival of Holidays, now a nearly decade-long tradition that focuses its events on the cultures that Disney films represent rather than the films themselves.
While the guitar-slinging character of Miguel from “Coco” makes an appearance in a new Disneyland Resort holiday show, the performance is simply inspired by the world of the film, rather than retelling its narrative.
(Joshua Sudock / Disneyland Resort)
In that sense, Festival of Holidays taps into the original mission of Disneyland, that is, presenting an aspirational view of society that looks as much as the world beyond its gates as it does the fantasies held inside them.
Longo, asked about the inspiration behind the show, spoke of her upbringing.
“My grandfather was going to become a priest at the San Gabriel Mission, and he met my grandma and didn’t go that route,” Longo says. “But my family participated in Las Posadas, and in San Gabriel there was a blue line painted on the ground and everyone would follow it, and it was a big tradition for the Mexican Catholic community. I always dressed up as an angel and had a little candle.
“I remember beautiful lanterns and candles and people processing and depicting different characters from the Christmas story,” Longo continues. “So when they talked about doing a sing-along and a processional, I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be beautiful if we took inspiration from that?’”
Dancers holding glistening, star-like lanterns lead a musical stroll to the main hub of Disney California Adventure. There, a narrator and singer welcomes and regales guests with tales of how different Latin countries present stories of Santa Claus, or, say, the joy of unwrapping a tamale.
Popular carols — “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town,” “Jingle Bells” — are presented bilingually, and while the performance is building to an appearance from Miguel, the climax instead is serene, a candlelit rendition of “Silent Night,” with audience participation. What a moment ago was festive theme park fare becomes something more reflective, all while slightly nodding to the holiday’s more spiritual underpinnings.
“Bringing children up and giving them a candle — I was thinking if that would be controllable?” Longo says. “But the kids get into it and are almost hypnotized by the candle. It turned out to be very sweet, but it’s fun and lively and kind of teaches people a little bit about the Mexican culture and their traditions around Christmastime.”
Such an approach has become a mission of Festival of Holidays.
(Christian Thompson / Disneyland Resort)
Disney, says Susana Tubert, creative director of the resort’s live entertainment, has significantly increased the amount of acts it features for the event, which runs through Jan. 6. Musical groups touch on jazz, klezmer, reggae, polka, gospel and more, as the festivities strive to reflect Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and other cultural traditions, this year delves deeper into Southern California’s Filipino and Aztec communities.
It’s a doubling down on diverse and inclusive programming, making Festival of Holidays feel timely, lively and even risk-taking, especially when Disneyland could simply lean on its popular films and fairy tales and avoid the sometimes politicized scrutiny that can come with multicultural programming.
It’s reflective of an approach that has been happening resort-wide. The Walt Disney Co. in recent years has been taking a broad view of its theme parks, looking at places to increase diversity or remove outdated stereotypes. See, for instance, the recent change from Splash Mountain to Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, or tweaks to such classics as the Jungle Cruise to bring the attraction up to modern sensibilities. Coming soon: An update to Disneyland’s Peter Pan’s Flight to remove caricatures of Native Americans.
“Representation — I think it’s so important,” says Disneyland’s Paul David Bryant, who helps orchestrate Festival of Holidays, focusing heavily on its musical performances.
“And I think that’s exactly what it is we here at the Disneyland Resort are going for,” he continues. “We want to make sure when I, or you or Tobi walks into the park, hopefully we can see someone who looks like us. We are a small world. It makes me feel good when I walk out there and see all these different cultures. When I walk out and see a Kwanzaa group singing R&B that sounds like gospel and is talking about a Disney tune, it takes me on a journey.”
A journey, adds Bryant, about expanding and opening guests’ views of the world. “You get to walk in, and walk out knowing more than you walked in knowing,” he says.
This year for Festival of Holidays, there are three signature shows. Joining the mariachi performance is a new weekday afternoon tale that uses the songs of “Encanto,” only reframing them into one about the frenzied festivities of getting ready for Christmas. It does so while alluding to the film’s Colombian influences.
The two new entertainment offerings join the long-running “¡Viva Navidad!” street parade featuring the Donald Duck-led Three Caballeros. “¡Viva Navidad!” runs on weekends and serves as a folksy event that from beginning to end is a boisterous celebration of Latin art and music, complete with folklórico dancers and mariachis as well as 12-foot-tall mojiganga puppets, that is, large-scale, papier-mâché sculptures.
The new daytime holiday show “Mirabel’s Gifts of the Season” builds up to a large Cumbia finale.
(Disneyland Resort)
“Mirabel’s Gifts of the Season” builds up to a large Cumbia finale, with an actor playing “Encanto” protagonist Mirabel trying to teach the audience some dance moves. Throughout, the show humorously captures the hectic nature of decorating and cooking for a Christmas gathering, with the characters sometimes having to make the most out of a little, such as a hastily constructed Christmas tree.
While using a number of songs from the film, the performance isn’t a retelling of it. The show even attempts to re-center the tunes, such as using “All of You” as a borderline ballad for lighting holiday candles.
“Colombia is one of the founding homes of magical realism of Latin America,” Tubert says. “So even the fact that Mirabel crafts this little tree out of sticks and sees it as her Christmas tree is part of that poetry of the everydayness that makes magical realism what it is. We go there. We take ourselves into Colombia and say, ‘What makes this authentic?’ Our dialect coach is giving us perfect accents for Colombia.”
“Mirabel’s Gifts of the Season” show director Linda Love Simmons says Tubert challenges the team to think beyond just creating a performance that serves as references to the film, even while acknowledging audiences would probably be happy to simply sing along to the songs that they know. Notes Tubert: “It would be the low-hanging fruit to do a sing-along, but that’s already on Disney+.”
“Early on, it was, ‘Let’s do a sing-along,” confesses Simmons. “Susana and I go, ‘We can do better.’
“Susana always says to me, ‘You’re a better storyteller than that.’ So it causes me to dig deep down. … We did a lot of digging and a lot of crafting. But the most important thing is we wanted to create a feeling — when people watch it, that they relate to the characters and feel something. That’s what we get to do intrinsically in musical theater. Normally everything in a theme park is like, ‘Fast!’ But three-quarters of the way through, we bring it all the way down and sing ‘All of You’ and pass a candle.”
The Festival of Holidays lasts just a few weeks, but it also is making an impact on Disneyland year-round. Tubert, for instance, says that the mariachi band that leads the “Coco” show — Mariachi Alegría de Disneyland — will be sticking around past the holiday season. Expect them to become part of the resort’s musical offerings, she teases.
“This is part of the tapestry of diversity that Disneyland represents,” Tubert says. “This is who we are.”
Azar Nafisi on the set of Eran Riklis’ Reading Lolita in Tehran
Marie Gioanni/Greenwich Entertainment
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A new film version of Azar Nafisi’s critically-praised, worldwide bestselling memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran, is now in theatres.
The film shows a group of women meeting clandestinely in Nafisi’s home in the mid-1990s, to read forbidden books. They read classics of the West, like Madame Bovary, The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, and Lolita.
Education had become dangerous and even deadly during the Islamic Revolution, and reading forbidden books was Nafisi’s way to fight back.
The film, directed by Eran Riklis, begins with Nafisi as a university professor and ends with her exiled from her homeland. Nafisi told Scott Simon about the experience of seeing herself and her story depicted on the big screen, “I feel towards it the way I feel towards my children.”
The film is directed by Eran Riklis and won the the Audience Award and a special jury prize at the 2024 Rome Film Festival.
It stars Iranian actors Goldshifteh Farahani, Zar Amir Ebrahimi, and Mina Kavani. Like the author, some of the actors are exiled from Iran.
Actor Golshifteh Farahani stars as Azar Nafisi in Eran Riklis’ Reading Lolita in Tehran.
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Greenwich Entertainment
“These girls were very different, one from the other,” Nafisi said of the students who studied with her in Tehran. Remembering them now, and seeing them depicted on the screen, Nafisi saw anew the power of great literature.
“Outside the classroom, they probably wouldn’t talk to one another. But in that class, they learned to communicate and to connect,” she said.
Through the stories in the books, Nafisi said each woman could find more and become more herself. “It reached a sort of magic,” she said.
The magic was brutally broken by a government that was desperate to quiet the voices of dissenters. Nafisi’s homeland changed quickly into a place she barely recognized
“This wasn’t my land,” she told Simon. “This was a country ruled by a regime that stoned people to death.”
When the religious hardliners in the government banned women from appearing in public without a headscarf, the film shows Nafisi, played by Goldshifteh Farahani, agonizing in front of a mirror with a black headscarf.
“The expression on her face is fear, because by and by, she disappears into this garment,” Nafisi said. For some, the headscarf was a symbol of the place of women in society, but for Nafisi the stakes were even higher.
“This is not a political fight. This is an existential one,” she said. “Our identity as human beings, as women, has been taken away from us.”
When fighting against covering her hair became too dangerous, Nafisi found small ways to rebel. “I never wore my scarf properly. I would always show a few strands out of the scarf to tell them, ‘You don’t own me.’”
Nafisi’s book about fighting the Iranian Revolution through the simple act of reading was an international bestseller, won numerous literary awards, and was named as one of the “100 Best Books of the Decade” by The Times (London).
Nafisi now lives in Washington, D.C., and continues to make a passionate case for the role of artists and writers in society.
She shared with Simon an illustrative story from the beginning of Islamic Revolution. The new leaders tore down the statues of the king and the royal family and changed the names of streets. But when they tried to bring down the statue of Persian poet Abul-Qâsem Ferdowsi, and erase his place of honor within the culture, the people opposed it.
“I thought how fantastic that they can bring down the statue of the Shah, but they can’t touch the poet,” she said.
Get ready to catch a whiff of stink. Not one, but two rare corpse flowers are set to bloom at the Huntington in the coming days, with one of them making its first-ever public bloom.
If both plants unfurl on the same day, it would be just the second time a double bloom has ever occurred at the Huntington.
For those unfamiliar with these funky flora, be warned. Corpse flowers bloom for just 24 to 48 hours, and once opened, they reek of gym socks, rotten eggs and decaying flesh … or, well, a corpse.
Brandon Tam, associate curator of orchids for the Huntington, speaks to reporters in front of two corpse flowers as they prepare to bloom.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
Couple that with their tropical native climate of Sumatra, Indonesia, and you’re in for a sweaty, stinky viewing experience.
The stench is important for pollination, said Brandon Tam, the Huntington’s associate curator of orchids. It attracts carrion beetles and flesh flies, which lay their eggs on rotting animal carcasses.
At the Huntington, pollinators aren’t the only thing it entices. Since the garden exhibited its first corpse flower in 1999, thousands of people flock to its conservatory every summer, just to smell these putrid plants.
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It smells like rotting flesh, but thousands of people will be lining up to catch a whiff.
“The kids that first came in 1999 are now bringing their kids — their own kids — to experience this over 20 years later,” Tam said. “It’s amazing, this plant, the impact that it has had over many generations.”
Glendale resident Trinity Shi, 42, witnessed three blooms at the Huntington in 2022 and 2023 and compared the smell to rotten fish: pungent, but not unbearable. She was excited to feature such an unusual specimen on her Instagram plant blog, @cubehousejungle, and hopes to make it to this year’s bloom too.
“It feels really prehistoric to look at this plant, because it is so giant,” Shi said of the corpse flower, which can grow over 12 feet tall. “It’s become kind of like a mascot for the Huntington.”
Thanks to cultivation techniques, the Huntington coaxes the plants to bloom every two to three years, not four to six like they do in their natural habitat, where they’re endangered.
Still, the blooms are notoriously unpredictable, Tam said. He guessed one of the plants will bloom in the coming days.
This upcoming bloom spotlights a plant nicknamed Odora, who last opened in 2024, and Odorysseus, a rookie public bloomer. Visitors offered name suggestions for Odorysseus on the Huntington’s Instagram page, where contenders included Stinkerbell, Gagatha and Count Flatula, among others.
It’s not unusual for the Huntington to have multiple soon-to-be bloomers on display. But only once, in 2018, did two plants actually unfurl on the same day.
A detailed view of a corpse flower as it prepares to bloom.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
For Odora and Odorysseus, siblings from a 2002 pollination, a double bloom is unlikely, Tam said. The plants are inclined to bloom out of sequence, “because they want to pollinate another plant that’s in the vicinity.” That can’t happen if they bloom simultaneously.
Though many refer to these plants as “flowers,” they are actually an “inflorescence,” a flowering structure containing hundreds of smaller blooms inside.
When it’s almost time for the plant to open, the spadix — a conic protrusion from inside the plant — emerges and accelerates in growth, climbing up to six inches per day. After a few days, its growth slows down.
“When it gets to about the one-inch range, we’ll know it’s about to bloom for us fairly soon,” Tam said.
When it does bloom, the spathe — leaflike structures encasing the plant — unfurl around 3 or 4 p.m., reaching maximum size in the early hours of the morning. The odor comes from the spadix, which heats up to about 98 degrees to strengthen the smell.
Brandon Tam, associate curator of orchids at the Huntington, walks past the corpse flowers as they prepare to bloom.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
From there, visitors have until about 3 to 5 p.m. to smell the plant before it closes back up and collapses, losing its odor. Eventually, the plant returns as a leaf or a flower, photosynthesizing energy in preparation for its next bloom.
Today, the Huntington houses 43 corpse flowers, making it one of the largest corpse flower collections in North America. The Huntington cultivates them on-site and has distributed many to botanic gardens and zoos across the country.
“It’s important when it comes to conservation that we make plants accessible,” Tam said. “If we’re able to share these plants with other organizations and other hobbyists, we’re able to decrease the amount of plant theft that occurs in the wild, where a lot of conservation work is much needed.”
Eager sniffers can visit the Huntington from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday to Monday. Be sure to stay hydrated, cool and patient, as it’s humid inside the conservatory and lines can be long. For those who want to track the blooms’ progress from afar, catch the Huntington’s online livestream.
Library, art museum, botanical garden
The Huntington
Address: 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino
Admission: $13-34; children 3 and under, free; “Museums for All” (SNAP EBT) program, $5.
Info: huntington.org
Entrepreneur David Huang tests out a VR headset while conducting demonstrations of the social dance lesson app Dance Guru at the Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, Calif., June 17, 2026.
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Chloe Veltman/NPR
Wedding season is in full swing, bringing with it a familiar sense of dread for anyone who fears the dance floor.
But relief may finally be at hand with the help of a new app, Dance Guru, and a virtual reality (VR) headset.
The social dance instruction app transports users to a spacious, digital dance studio. Waiting inside is a computer-generated coach: a handsome, male avatar wearing a shirt open to his navel. He speaks with a slightly gravelly English accent.
“Watch me now,” he instructs at the start of a waltz lesson — which NPR tried out at the Augmented World Expo in Long Beach, Calif., an annual conference showcasing the latest developments in virtual and augmented reality.
The avatar then demonstrates a basic box step.
From there, the lesson becomes interactive. The coach tells the user to hold his hand while an electric pinging sound tracks the student’s foot placement.
“One, two, three, four, five, six,” the virtual teacher counts down.
When the user stumbles, he remains remarkably patient. “Do not worry, foundations take time. Let’s try that again. Work on grounding your steps more intentionally.”
Solving the beginner’s dilemma
Dance Guru creator David Huang said he came up with the idea for the app a couple of years ago out of frustration.
“I always wanted to learn to dance and I was always terrible at it,” Huang said. “And I always ended up stopping midway through the lessons.”
He soon realized that many beginners hit the exact same roadblocks.
“Private lessons are too expensive, and you feel like you’re always forgetting the dance steps,” Huang said. “You cannot find a partner to dance with. So I figured maybe I can create something like this.”
The Dance Guru platform currently offers tutorials in salsa, bachata, waltz, and cha-cha, in both lead and follow modes. To make the digital instruction feel authentic, Huang used motion-capture technology to record the movements of real-life dance teachers — with their permission.
Building on the legacy of online tutorials and video games
Dance Guru belongs to a small but growing wave of apps using VR to demystify social dance. At a nearby booth, conference attendee Victor Chen is testing out a competing app called Trip the Light. It currently offers salsa lessons, as well as freestyle options, where a user can dance with a partner without having to learn specific steps.
Trip the Light’s booth at the Augmented World Expo included posters of the app’s virtual instructors. Real-life performers, who gave Trip the Light permission to motion capture their movements, were used as a basis for these avatars.
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“A lot of times when you’re trying to learn a choreography, it’s watching a YouTube video and you have to pause it, rewind, and play it,” Chen said. “If you were to have a virtual avatar dancing in front of you and correcting for any parts that you missed, it might be a lot easier.”
Interactive video games like Dance Dance Revolution and Just Dance, and YouTube tutorials have been helping people improve their skills in private for years. But those games are mostly aimed at solo players. Unlike the new generation of immersive VR apps, they cannot simulate the mechanics or confidence required for partner dancing on a live dance floor.
The reality check
But this kind of app won’t work for every dancer.
“Everyone learns a little bit differently. And so unless you have a game that has lots of different ways of teaching, you’re going to have things that work for some people and don’t work for others,” said Ariana Katana, a trained contemporary dancer and dance content creator who’s active on YouTube, Twitch and other platforms. “Also, it’s hard to dance with a headset on.”
And then there’s the issue of not being able to physically feel a virtual partner’s hand or shoulder while dancing with them. Patrick Ascolese, the creator of Trip the Light, said the experience could become more tactile in the future. “Haptic suits and wearables will be coming, but I think we’re a little away from that,” he said.
Ascolese said even with their limitations, immersive tools like Trip the Light have immense potential as judgment-free training grounds — giving reluctant dancers the baseline confidence they need to eventually step onto the dance floor with real partners in the real world, including at weddings.
“Just like anything else, practice makes perfect,” said Ascolese. “So the more time you spend in VR with a virtual partner, it works towards helping you get over that social hurdle. We are teaching you the moves that you have to do in order to go out and have fun.”
Jennifer Vanasco edited the broadcast and digital versions of this story. Chloee Weiner mixed the audio.
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