Mondo Cozmo comes back to the Peninsula with a December night at The Guild Theatre

Josh Ostrander's project hasn't played the area since a July 2022 show at The Ritz; the return is Wednesday, Dec. 9, in Menlo Park's restored 500-seat room.

The last time Mondo Cozmo played around here was July 22, 2022, at The Ritz in San Jose. More than four years later, the return lands somewhere very different: a 100-year-old former movie house on El Camino Real.

Mondo Cozmo plays The Guild Theatre in Menlo Park on Wednesday, December 9, at 8 p.m. The show was announced October 13, and tickets are on sale through OpenDate. The Guild holds about 500 people.

Mondo Cozmo is the project of Josh Ostrander, who previously fronted Eastern Conference Champions and started recording under the new name after that band split. The breakthrough came fast. "Shine," the lead single from the 2017 album *Plastic Soul*, went to No. 1 on the Triple A charts, and it's still the song most people know him by. If you want a sense of what it sounds like stripped down, there's a live KCRW performance from before the album was even out.

What's changed since 2022 is mostly on record. In 2024 Ostrander released *It's PRINCIPLE!*, the fourth Mondo Cozmo studio album, which came out in late August of that year. That fall NPR's World Cafe featured the album. The singles leading into it included the orchestral rocker "Angels" and "Wild Horses." So anyone who last saw him at The Ritz has a whole album's worth of songs they haven't heard live yet.

The room is a story of its own. The Guild opened in 1926 and spent most of its life as a single-screen cinema. It closed as a movie house in 2019. Drew Dunlevie's nonprofit, the Peninsula Arts Guild, stepped in to save it, and the Menlo Park City Council approved the plan to rebuild it in 2018. The renovated theater reopened for live music in 2022, after a $35 million rebuild that kept the historic blade sign and neon marquee. In 2025 it marked its centennial.

For an artist whose biggest song is a big, gospel-tinged sing-along, a 500-capacity room is close to ideal. It's large enough to feel like an event and small enough that the back row still feels involved. It's also a much easier weeknight trip for Peninsula and South Bay fans than heading up to the city.

Show starts at 8 p.m. on a Wednesday, two weeks before the holidays. Tickets are at the OpenDate link above. Bring your voice for "Shine."

Sources: OpenDate: Mondo Cozmo, December 9, 2026 (app.opendate.io); JamBase: Mondo Cozmo at The Guild Theatre (jambase.com); Wikipedia: Josh Ostrander (en.wikipedia.org); Music Connection: Mondo Cozmo on Reinventing, Shine and Team Cozmo (musicconnection.com); NPR: Watch Mondo Cozmo Perform 'Shine' Live For KCRW (npr.org); BroadwayWorld: Mondo Cozmo to Release Fourth Studio Album IT'S PRINCIPLE (broadwayworld.com); NPR World Cafe: Mondo Cozmo, It's PRINCIPLE! (npr.org); BroadwayWorld: Mondo Cozmo Drops Orchestral Rock Epic Single Angels (broadwayworld.com); WBJB: Mondo Cozmo, Wild Horses (wbjb.org); Cinema Treasures: Guild Theatre (cinematreasures.org); The Almanac: Menlo Park council approves project to rebuild the Guild (almanacnews.com); Local News Matters: Renovated Guild Theatre brings live music to downtown Menlo Park (localnewsmatters.org); Nob Hill Gazette: The Guild Theatre in Menlo Park turns 100 (nobhillgazette.com)