Wednesday evening at the Mid-America Center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, Trans-Siberian Orchestra will close out a month’s worth of rehearsals with the first show of its 2024 tour that will celebrate the 20th anniversary of its rock opera “The Last Christmas Eve.â€
Arguably the biggest ongoing holiday touring production of the past 25 years, TSO also will be celebrating two milestones with the tour that begins, as it does every year, in the Council Bluffs arena where the orchestra gathers and rehearses, starting in late October.
Those milestones: 20 million tickets sold and more than $20 million in donations to charity, numbers that would seem to be impossible for a show that tours for just two months of the year.
But TSO has a secret weapon (or two rather) it uses to pull that off.
“Most people don't realize we have two different touring groups,†said TSO music director and lead guitarist Al Pitrelli. “There's a West Coast and East Coast group. So when you look at that schedule, it’s literally impossible for one band to cover all that.
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“We've been doing this with two bands ever since the year 2000, but we play to roughly 1 million people a year between the two groups. Along with that, is the charity, the dollar per ticket.â€
The two groups rehearse in the Mid-America Center at the same time, one stage set at each end of the arena floor, as the cast and crew put together the lavish production that brings a rock show, complete with pyrotechnics, together with the music and story written by TSO’s late founder Paul O’Neill.
For Pitrelli, TSO grew up out of a single song the group recorded for its debut album, “Christmas Eve and Other Stories.â€
“It'll be 30 years ago this coming February or March, when I first started working with (drummer) Jeff (Plate), the guys in Sabotage and Paul,†Pitrelli said. “When Paul first put the faders up on “Christmas Eve/Sarajevo, 12/24†I knew that there was something ... artistically that he was going after than what would have been maybe the norm in that era. And I knew people would be drawn to it.â€
Plate had the same feeling during the sessions for “Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24.â€
“When we recorded this song, there was no denying when you heard it, it was fantastic,†he said. “You hadn't heard anything like it. Christmas music up to that point had been relatively safe. Even if a rock band was doing a Christmas song, they really sugared it up quite a bit. There wasn’t much of an edge to it. That song certainly had an edge.â€
“Christmas Eve and Other Stories†went platinum. So did 1998’s “The Christmas Attic,†setting the table for TSO’s groundbreaking tour.
“I've always thought when we started touring back in 1999, the curiosity of people that come to see the band was one thing,†Plate said. “But I think once they got in the room it’s the story, it’s the lyrics, it's the songs. I think Paul’s story is the star of the show.â€
The first couple of TSO tours were far from the massive undertakings that find about 40 semi-trucks and buses rolling out of Council Bluffs each November as the two bands hit the road.
“We started (in) ’99 Jeff and I,†Pitrelli said. It was one band back then. We had one box truck, a bus and a fog machine, and Paul had a saying: ‘Put everything back into the show, make it bigger, bigger, bigger, bigger.’ We always want to surprise the repeat offenders and the folks who are coming for the first time have no idea what to expect anyway. We absolutely want to keep them on their heels as well.â€
Now TSO with its stories and music, has become a holiday tradition for the thousands who come to the shows each year.
“It has become, like ‘It's a Wonderful Life’ or in my case, ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas,’ where I want that comfort of the familiarity of my holiday tradition to remind myself,†Pitrelli said. “But to be honest, becoming families’ holiday tradition was never on my radar.â€
That, he said, began to be clear before the COVID-19 pandemic. But in 2020 TSO learned just how much it meant to fans who wanted to keep their holiday traditions alive.
“When we had to cancel our tour and the only thing we had to do was livestreaming, we didn’t really know too much about what was going on with that,†Pitrelli said.
“We played one show that year, which was a gift for us, when we found that 250,000 homes purchased that livestream because they wanted to spend the holidays with their favorite band celebrating that story again, that’s when I said, ‘You know what, this is a lot bigger than I thought it was.’â€
Television screens are now full of retailers’ Christmas ad campaigns as the all-important ‘Golden Quarter’ gets into full swing.
5 of the best holiday travel movies
5 of the best holiday travel movies
Whether you're returning to the town you grew up in, visiting family across the country, or driving down the street to a friend's house, traveling tends to be a key part of the November and December holidays across the U.S.
In 2023, AAA estimated from home during Thanksgiving week, making it the third-highest forecast since the company began tracking holiday travel in 2000. While a vast majority of holiday travelers tend to drive (nearly 89%), about 8% take to the friendly skies, and some, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, .
The holiday travel experience is so universal that it tends to be a plot point of many beloved holiday movies, from Kris Kringle getting around via reindeer and sleigh in the 1970 stop-motion classic "Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town" to the McCallisters (sans Kevin) running through the airport to make their flight to Paris in 1990's "Home Alone."
To celebrate Hollywood's take on holiday travel, researched holiday travel films and curated a list of five of the best. To make the list, each film had to be set during the holiday season, involve significant plot points around traveling, and have at least a 6.5 user rating on .
In the hopes of encouraging some new viewing this holiday season, you'll notice this list doesn't include some classic Christmas travel scenes, like the aforementioned airport sprint in "Home Alone," the Griswolds' harrowing drive to chop down a tree in "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation," or Elizabeth's unforgettable trip to her fictitious farm in "Christmas in Connecticut." The movies included are a diverse list in genre, style, and popularity, from a classic John Hughes comedy to a star-studded '40s film, and a Nancy Meyers rom-com to an animated take on a beloved holiday book.
Read on to find a cinematic holiday travel tale that could inspire your next movie night.
Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987)
- Director: John Hughes
- IMDb user rating: 7.6
- Metascore: 72
- Runtime: 93 minutes
- Release date: Nov. 25, 1987
In the 1980s and early '90s, writer and director John Hughes was known for two things: helping to launch the careers of the Brat Pack (particularly Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Andrew McCarthy, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, and Ally Sheedy) via movies like "Sixteen Candles," "Pretty in Pink," and "The Breakfast Club"; and family-friendly holiday movies a la "Home Alone" and "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation." Of course, those two movies are already likely on your must-watch holiday movie list, but 1987's "Planes, Trains and Automobiles," a Thanksgiving travel tale, is heralded less often.
The comedy stars frequent Hughes collaborator John Candy as Del, a chatty shower curtain ring salesman who becomes an unexpected travel companion to high-strung advertising executive Neal (Steve Martin) after their flight from New York to Chicago gets rerouted to Wichita, Kansas, due to a blizzard. As the title suggests, their misadventures trying to make it home in time for Thanksgiving dinner involve almost every kind of mode of transportation: cabs, trains, rental cars, semitrucks, and even Chicago's L train.
If you want to feel better about your two-hour flight delay, stream "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" on Paramount+, DirecTV, and Pluto TV, or rent it on a wide range of platforms, from Google Play to Redbox. And don't forget to save some tissues for the ending!
While You Were Sleeping (1995)
- Director: Jon Turteltaub
- IMDb user rating: 6.8
- Metascore: 67
- Runtime: 103 minutes
- Release date: April 21, 1995
In between her breakthrough performance in 1994's action thriller "Speed" and the 1996 adaptation of John Grisham's "A Time to Kill," actor Sandra Bullock starred in an often-forgotten Christmas rom-com that centers a Chicago L train token collector named Lucy.
A hopeless romantic, Lucy finds herself pining over businessman Peter Callaghan (Peter Gallagher) whom she sees on his daily commute. On Christmas Day, he gets mugged on the platform and the assailant pushes him onto the tracks. To save him from an oncoming train, Lucy jumps down onto the tracks and pulls him to safety. But when she accompanies Peter to the hospital, where he's in a coma, she soon finds herself in quite the tangled web and tells his family that she's his fiancée.
The romantic comedy may not involve road trips or air travel for the holidays, but it does capture the unique feeling of being in a crowded city (or train car) during the so-called "most wonderful time of year" and still feeling very lonely. Spoiler alert though, there is a very happy train moment at the end of "While You Were Sleeping," which is available to stream on Disney+ and Paramount+.
The Polar Express (2004)
- Director: Robert Zemeckis
- IMDb user rating: 6.6
- Metascore: 61
- Runtime: 100 minutes
- Release date: Nov. 10, 2004
While "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" may depict the horrors of holiday travel, on the opposite end of the spectrum is "The Polar Express," an adventure fantasy movie that makes train travel seem magical. The film was groundbreaking in its sole use of performance capture technology, a combination of live action and motion capture computer animation.
"The Polar Express" begins on Christmas Eve sometime in the mid-20th century and centers on the titular train that takes children to the North Pole to see Santa himself, including those who may be skeptical about his existence. The movie, which is based on Chris Van Allsburg's 1985 children's book of the same name, features the voices of Tom Hanks, Daryl Sabara, Peter Scolari, and Nona Gaye, to name a few.
If you want to dream of a holiday train ride filled with dancing waiters serving hot chocolate, you can stream "The Polar Express" on Hulu and Max.
3 Godfathers (1948)
- Director: John Ford
- IMDb user rating: 7.0
- Metascore: 82
- Runtime: 106 minutes
- Release date: Dec. 1, 1948
Oscar-winning director John Ford directed this big-screen adaptation of Peter B. Kyne's 1913 similarly named short novel. The movie follows three men (played by John Wayne, Pedro Armendáriz, and Harry Carey Jr.) who rob an Arizona bank at Christmastime and unexpectedly become godfathers to a newborn baby while on the run. Though most of us don't travel like the three godfathers today—they make their way via horseback—it is how one would've gotten around during Christmas in the Old West.
"3 Godfathers" may not be your typical holiday movie, but many consider it to be an American Western retelling of the story of the Three Wise Men, a fixture of many Christmas nativity scenes and traditions. To catch the movie this season, you can rent it on many platforms, including AppleTV, YouTube, and Amazon Prime.
Data reporting by Luke Hicks. Story editing by Carren Jao. Copy editing by Tim Bruns. Photo selection by Clarese Moller.
This story originally appeared on Airalo and was produced and distributed in partnership with Stacker Studio.
The Holiday (2006)
- Director: Nancy Meyers
- IMDb user rating: 6.9
- Metascore: 52
- Runtime: 136 minutes
- Release date: Dec. 8, 2006
Nancy Meyers is undoubtedly romantic-comedy royalty and when you add the winter holidays into the mix, you get one of the coziest films of the 21st century. Her aptly-titled movie "The Holiday" is a quintessential Christmas rom-com, with some revolutionary travel mixed in.
After experiencing respective heartbreaks 6,000 miles away from one another, strangers Amanda Woods (a high-powered movie trailer producer in Los Angeles played by Cameron Diaz) and Iris Simpkins (a newspaper columnist in London played by Kate Winslet) find themselves searching for some new scenery. They wind up on a home exchange site, pre-Airbnb days, and decide to swap houses for the holidays.
In their new settings—a luxurious home in California for Iris and a quaint cottage in the English countryside for Amanda—they meet some new romantic interests: Amanda connects with Iris' brother, Graham (Jude Law) and Iris crosses paths with Amanda's frequent collaborator, composer Miles (Jack Black). To add to the charm of "The Holiday," Graham has two adorable daughters and Iris meets Amanda's neighbor, who's a Golden Age of Hollywood screenwriter played by real-life film icon Eli Wallach.
If you want to laugh, cry, and perhaps be inspired to travel and trade lives with a stranger this holiday season, check out "The Holiday," available to stream on Fubo, AMC+, Starz, and DirecTV.
Reach the writer at 402-473-7244 or kwolgamott@journalstar.com. On Twitter @KentWolgamott Â
L. Kent Wolgamott
Entertainment reporter/columnist
