Straight No Chaser brings the Making Spirits Bright Tour to the Elsinore on Nov. 18

The a cappella group's holiday run stops at Salem's 1926 Tudor Gothic theatre on a Wednesday night, a week before Thanksgiving.

Every year there's a first night that makes the holidays feel close, and in Salem this year it might be a Wednesday in mid-November, with ten voices and no instruments under the Elsinore's Gothic ceiling.

Straight No Chaser plays the Elsinore Theatre on Wednesday, Nov. 18, at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are through eTix. The Elsinore holds 1,290.

The show is part of the Making Spirits Bright Tour, the group's 2026 holiday run. It opened Oct. 29 in Findlay, Ohio, and runs through Dec. 30 in Jacksonville, Florida, according to a DPAC announcement. Salem falls in the middle of a western swing that has already taken in a Nov. 8 stop at the Pikes Peak Center in Colorado Springs, with Harrah's Resort SoCal coming up on Nov. 14.

Straight No Chaser is an a cappella group, and the holidays have long been central to what they do. Their newest holiday album is Holiday Road, released in 2025, which tour materials describe as their first full-length collection of holiday songs since 2020's Social Christmasing. The seasonal catalog goes back to Holiday Spirits in 2008 and Christmas Cheers in 2009, with Stocking Stuffer in 2023, so there's no shortage of material for a two-hour night. They spent part of this summer on a separate beach-themed run, as BroadwayWorld reported, but this is the tour most fans wait for.

No shortage of material for a holiday night.

The room is half the reason to go. The Elsinore opened on May 28, 1926, built for owner George Guthrie by the Portland firm Lawrence and Holford in a Tudor Gothic style and named for the castle in Hamlet, according to the Oregon Encyclopedia. Its opening night was Cecil B. DeMille's The Volga Boatman, and it was built with a Wurlitzer organ.

It hasn't always been a sure thing. The theatre slid into second-run movies in the 1950s and was slated for demolition in 1980 before a restoration effort saved it. Community donations paid for a 2004 renovation that brought back its Tudor Gothic ornamentation, and the building has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1994, per Wikipedia. Today it's the main arts house in downtown Salem.

A cappella lives or dies on the room, and a 1926 theatre built for live sound before amplification was standard is about as good a setting as this kind of show gets. Five-part harmony bouncing off carved plaster on a cold November night is hard to beat.

It's a Wednesday, a week before Thanksgiving. Bring the family, get there in time to look up at the ceiling, and let the season start a little early this year.

Sources: Straight No Chaser comes to DPAC on December 23 — DPAC (dpacnc.com); Straight No Chaser — Pikes Peak Center (pikespeakcenter.com); Straight No Chaser: Making Spirits Bright Tour — Harrah's Resort SoCal (harrahssocal.com); Straight No Chaser: Making Spirits Bright Tour — Visit Jacksonville (visitjacksonville.com); Straight No Chaser Returns for “Holiday Road Tour” — The Clay Center (theclaycenter.org); A Cappella Group Straight No Chaser to Play Summer Tour — BroadwayWorld (broadwayworld.com); The History of the Elsinore — Elsinore Theatre (elsinoretheatre.com); Elsinore Theater — Oregon Encyclopedia (oregonencyclopedia.org); Elsinore Theatre — Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org); Straight No Chaser at Elsinore Theatre — eTix (etix.prf.hn)