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1. Spirit & Place Festival—November 1–10

IU Indianapolis hosts 100-plus cultural and religious organizations, speakers, and artists across more than 30 events, including exhibits, performances, panel discussions, workshops, and more designed to inspire conversation and reflection centered around this year’s theme, gratitude.

2. The Taming of the Shrew—November 1–10

Bard Fest presents one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays, adapted by community theater leader and Shakespeare enthusiast Dana Lesh, at the Mud Creek Theatre.

3. World Food Championships—November 8–12

More than 300 competitive cooking teams from around the globe battle it out in 12 categories, including Bacon, Live Fire, and Vegetarian, for the coveted title of World Food Champion and a slice of the $450,000 prize purse at the Indiana State Fairgrounds & Event Center.

4. Bands of America Grand Nationals—November 14–16

Music for All’s Bands of America Grand National Championships, America’s premier national marching band event, takes the stage at Lucas Oil Stadium.

5. Drumstick Dash—November 28

This annual run/walk raising proceeds for people experiencing homelessness kicks off Thanksgiving morning in Broad Ripple.

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THE CITY’S NFL venue serves many more purposes than just giving the Indianapolis Colts a place to play, as illustrated by the roughly 75 other events it hosts in a year. And most of those are nothing like a football game, ranging from gaming conventions, to mega-star concerts, to major marching band competitions. Lucas Oil Stadium director Eric Neuburger says the hulking facility can transform to handle just about anything with enough notice.

Planning for most of the stadium’s big events starts far, far in advance.  NCAA men’s and women’s basketball Final Four hosting privileges are awarded years before the jump ball, and the Lucas Oil folks start strategizing right away. “When a show moves from a prospect to an actual booking, that’s when the planning really begins,” Neuburger says. “And the bigger the event, the further out they tend to be booked.”

Each must slide seamlessly into a tiny window.  One of the trickiest issues is figuring out when an event can start setting up at the stadium and how long they have to break things down and clear out before the Next Big Thing rolls into town. “We have more than 200 days a year of high-quality events that are booked sometimes 10, 12 years out,” Neuburger says. “Availability is our biggest challenge in deciding which events we can have and which we can’t.”

If an event isn’t overly complicated, the stadium can be flipped with surprising speed. For instance, when Lucas Oil hosted the 2024 Drum Corps International World Championship Finals, which concluded at 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, August 10, it took until after 2 a.m. on Sunday, August 11, to break down its gear and clear it out. Yet the facility was reconfigured by 8 a.m. that morning for a Colts preseason game.

Setting up for a Colts game is dialed in. While each year brings some new elements, the stadium crew typically faces exactly the same setup procedures all season. That said, the recent five-hour turnover after the Drum Corps finals is as close as they care to cut it.

The U.S. Olympic Swimming Trials event was the most novel undertaking. Nothing about it was simple. Workers had to install a massive, Italian-built, Olympic-caliber competition pool, plus an auxiliary pool, then supply them with 2 million gallons of water, and inside a facility designed to accommodate pro football. Neuburger gives it an 8 or 9 on the difficulty scale. “It was a complex build that took place with the world watching,” he adds.

The most complex recurring event is the men’s Final Four. It lasts for weeks, features a long list of ancillary activities that changes with each rendition, and requires the placement of 22,000 additional seats and a special, raised court. “We also build additional media tables throughout the stands,” Neuburger says. “There’s a lot going on.”

The 2021 men’s Final Four was by far the weirdest. Neuburger, who calls it the Covid Final Four, keeps a unique souvenir in his office: a cardboard cutout of himself. It, along with hundreds of similar cutouts—all pictures of stadium staffers and regular civilians in sports attire—were stuck in the empty seats surrounding the relatively anemic crowd of human fans, who were kept apart for the sake of social distancing. “A paper version of myself got to watch part of March Madness,” he says.

Installation of event-specific props and equipment is accomplished by a mix of local and imported workers. Events typically send in a “brain trust” of organizers who oversee the necessary tweaks the stadium needs to accommodate its shows. But most of the work is done by a trusted cadre of local tradespeople with experience setting up special events. “Many of them are contractors who we use regularly, though sometimes specialty workers are brought in by the client,” Neuburger says. Even concerts are typically handled not by hordes of sweating roadies but by locals.

Lucas Oil has been the setting for all kinds of big events. Except for … baseball, mostly because of all the glass windows and fragile electronics that wouldn’t mix with high-speed baseball impacts. “There are ways to work around that, but they end up being so expensive that the client doesn’t want to undertake them,” Neuburger says. Also, he can’t recall a rodeo or a circus.

Somewhere in Indy is a hill of dirt. Two monster truck shows and a motorcycle extravaganza sit more-or-less permanently on Lucas Oil’s annual schedule. To stage them, the stadium’s athletic field is covered with heavy plastic sheeting and two layers of 0.75-inch-thick plywood. Then 400 dump trucks worth of dirt is layered on the stadium floor. “The client brings in their dirt artists, as I call them, to design the track and carve it up exactly the way it needs to be,” Neuburger says. Afterward, the dirt is trucked back and piled once more into a giant mound until next year. During dirt-intensive gatherings, the soil is kept moist to fight dust, but it still gets everywhere. “We have to wipe down every surface in the building afterward,” Neuburger says.

It’s typically easier to tear down a show than to install it. “We’re taking three or four days to set up for Taylor Swift in November, but it’ll be gone in one day,” Neuburger says.

The permanent football game surface is covered up during other events but almost never removed. The turf was pulled up for the swimming trials because the weight of the pools might have damaged its appearance. When 2 million gallons of water isn’t involved, the turf is adequately protected by a covering called Omni Deck, which can handle the weight of anything from large crowds to semis.

A last-minute issue hasn’t threatened to delay an event—except once. An automated confetti cannon randomly went off an hour before Lucas Oil Stadium opened for the 2021 Final Four. “We had to scramble to clean up the place,” Neuburger says. “You never know what’s going to happen, but we’ve been lucky to not have had anything that was an actual showstopper.”

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1. Jim Gaffigan: Barely Alive Tour—October 3–6
   Clowes Memorial Hall welcomes fellow Hoosier and seven-time Grammy nominated comedian Jim Gaffigan. A recent co-headliner with Jerry Seinfeld, he’s beloved as a clean comic with relatable, everyday-life sets. 
2. Riley Festival—October 3–6
   They take the birthday of their native son, poet James Whitcomb Riley, pretty seriously in Greenfield. The theme of this year’s four-day party with parades and scores of exhibitors is the poem “A Barefoot Boy.”
3. Headless Horseman Festival—October 3–27
   Gather the family and hop on a hayride to come face-to-face with Washington Irving’s legendary phantom. Keep the fun going by dashing through a corn maze, playing midway-style games, taking in a magic show, and more at Conner Prairie.
4. Heartland International Film Festival—October 10–20
   Our own Heartland was named one of the 25 coolest film festivals in the world. It’s back for its 33rd year at Indianapolis-area theaters. Expect documentaries and narrative films, as well as red carpet events and parties with filmmakers.
5. No Ruff “Dog” Days—October 13
   Wine and dogs in disguise? We’ll see you at Daniel’s Vineyard in McCordsville for their pup costume contest. Enjoy live music and pet-related vendors. Ticket proceeds benefit the Humane Society for Hamilton County.

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INDIANAPOLIS OPERA WANTS TO GET YOU UP TO SPEED ON PARKER. Five panel discussions are planned from February 15 through March 1. “These will be sort of informational performances,” says Shederick Whipple, Indianapolis Opera community outreach director, “not just about Charlie Parker but also about Indiana Avenue and jazz history.” Contact Indianapolis Opera at 317-236-2099 for the latest information about these events. They’ll offer a solid grounding in his work—unlike the opera itself.

OF THE 20 MUSICAL NUMBERS IN THE 90-MINUTE SHOW, ZERO ARE CHARLIE PARKER COMPOSITIONS. The production, composed by Swiss American composer Daniel Schnyder with the libretto by late playwright Bridgette A. Wimberly, is a fictionalized account of the artist’s struggle to write a final masterpiece while trapped in a sort of purgatory represented by Birdland, his New York City jazz club. The music is primarily devoted to the various inspirations (including his mother and his wives) and trials (racial inequality, his heroin addiction) that shaped his character. Yardbird isn’t so much a salute to jazz music as it is an operatic exploration of a jazz artist’s life and influences.

THAT’S PROBABLY JUST AS WELL. “You can’t ask an opera singer to sing jazz,” David Starkey, Indianapolis Opera general director and Yardbird producer, insists. “That’s one of the very few things that they really can’t do. Most classically trained singers can sing musical theater, art songs, country-western, even some pop. But jazz is unique because it’s far more instrumental in its construction.” Add to this the fact that Parker wasn’t a vocalist but a saxophonist.

BOOKING MADAM WALKER THEATRE WAS A LONG PROCESS, AND IT CAN ONLY ACCOMMODATE ONE PERFORMANCE. Indianapolis Opera describes the process started in 2019 as “not necessarily a smooth one.” Everything from an extensive remodeling of the theater to the pandemic gummed up the works. The time needed for staging Yardbird didn’t help. “[The theater is] used to bringing in projects that are one-day affairs,” Starkey says. “But we need multiple days, and that’s much more of a challenge for them to schedule.” Landing the storied stage for even just one performance was well worth the trouble, though.

THE VENUE GIVES YARDBIRD A SPECIAL HISTORICAL RESONANCE. It turns out Parker was something of a regular at Walker Theatre. He and Dizzy Gillespie fine-tuned their jazz shows there before taking them to Chicago. “This is the only venue and street where this opera has been produced that has an association with Parker himself,” Starkey says. “It’s unique to Indianapolis.”

IT’LL BE THE CABARET VERSION. The show’s staging was reorganized “to get the opera into nontraditional venues,” Starkey explains. Yardbird was first performed by Opera Philadelphia and Minnesota Opera in full-scale opera houses. However, New York City’s Apollo Theater hosted the third production when an opera house fell through. The musicians performed onstage instead of being hidden away in a classic orchestra pit—a move that seemed more in keeping with the jazz club setting where much of the show takes place. “Walker doesn’t have an orchestra pit either, so the orchestra will become part of the set,” Starkey adds.

THE SHOW’S FEMALE LEAD IS AN INDY NATIVE. The role of Charlie Parker’s mother, Addie Parker, was literally written for Angela Brown, one of the leading voices of today’s opera scene. “Angela’s reprising the role of Addie Parker in her hometown,” Starkey notes. “And she’s been my artistic collaborator from day one.”

THANKS TO ANGELA BROWN, THE INDIANAPOLIS OPERA HAS ASSEMBLED THE MOST EXPERIENCED CAST OF ANY YARDBIRD PRODUCTION. Internationally famous tenor Martin Bakari is assuming the lead role, baritone Jorell Williams plays Dizzy Gillespie, and Clinton Smith, who originated the show’s “cabaret version,” conducts. “We have been able to assemble a world-renowned cast that’s on par with any other production that’s ever been done,” Starkey says. “That’s a testament to Angela Brown’s influence.”

IT WASN’T CHEAP. “It’s going to cost more than $100,000 to put this project together,” says Starkey. “It could even hit $200,000 after we add in marketing, staff, and outreach events.”

YOU MAY WANT TO GRAB TICKETS NOW. The theater only seats about 800 people, so visit indyopera.org tout de suite. Tickets run $39 to $92.

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