Join us on Thursday, December 3rd at 7:00 pm for Jay Bragg’s Chanukah in New Vaudeville! From the North Pole to the Borscht Belt — One Wild Holiday Show

This December, King Kazoo & The Reindeer Band bring their full holiday spectacle to The Gem Theater with a twist: a celebration of the deep, often invisible thread of Jewish tradition running through the American holiday season and the vaudeville stage itself. Long before it was “the holidays,” it was Jewish songwriters — Irving Berlin, Johnny Marks, Mel Tormé, Jule Styne — writing the songs that would define it, working in a showbiz tradition, vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley, that Jewish performers helped build from the ground up. This show puts that history front and center — not as a footnote, but as the story.

The man behind King Kazoo is Jay Bragg, a Nashville-based, third-generation entertainer with roughly 5,000 live shows behind him and a family lineage in this business that goes back to his grandparents’ vaudeville act in 1930s New York City and Massachusetts. Jay performs under the banner “the Wizard of Whimsy” — a spirit he first found doing hospice volunteer work, where dying patients taught him that great performance was never about the performer, only about what the room gets to feel. That philosophy shows up everywhere in his work, from his acoustic singing telegrams to New Vaudeville, his seasonal theatrical franchise built to reclaim and celebrate the different threads of who he actually is.

Expect a full band, big theatrical energy, and a set that mixes holiday standards with a heavy dose of Jay’s own original music — plus the stories behind the songs, told with the warmth and comic timing of a guy who’s spent a career believing entertainment is a form of hospitality.

6:00 pm Social Hour

7:00 pm Live Performance

‘Pay What You Can’ tickets benefit BAAM.