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Halsey is taking on a new role. The Grammy-nominated singer has signed on to star as Sally in a live production of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas.

The three-night concert event — celebrating the movie’s 30th anniversary — will be held at the Hollywood Bowl from Oct. 27-29.

Halsey will portray Sally for the first two nights of the production, starting on Oct. 27. Katherine O’ Hara, who voiced the character in the original film, will reprise the role on Oct. 29, Variety reported Monday (Oct. 9).

Tickets to the concert are available at Ticketmaster, Vivid Seats, Stub Hub, HollywoodBowl.com and other ticketing sites. Pricing ranges from approximately $75-$85 for the cheapest seats.

Tickets for the terrace and garden area range from approximately $350-$600, but you might be able to find tickets for around $200 (at Vivid Seats). Some of the tickets for the pool circle, located closest to the stage, are priced above $600.

Danny Elfman also returns to The Nightmare Before Christmas live concert as Jack Skellington. Elfman composed the music for the 1993 stop-motion film, which centers around Skellington, the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town. The Nightmare Before Christmas concert will feature a live orchestra led by conductor John Mauceri. 

Special guests include Saturday Night Live alum Fred Armison as Lock and Ken Page as Oogie Boogie. More special guests are expected to be announced at a later date.

The Nightmare Before Christmas live concert has welcomed other recording stars in the past. Billie Eilish graced the stage as Sally in 2021.

If you’re unable to the make it to the Hollywood Bowl, you can probably find a Nightmare Before Christmas production or concert in your area for Halloween and the holidays. Click here to see more productions in Atlanta, Staten Island, N.Y., and other cities.

The Nightmare Before Christmas returns to theaters for its 30th anniversary on Oct. 20 (get movie tickets here). Additionally, the movie will air on ABC on Oct. 22 at 6 p.m.

If you don’t have access to local channels, you can watch the broadcast with an HD antenna, or subscribe to Hulu + Live TV ($49.99/month for a limited time), DirecTV (free trial included) and other streamers that provide live channels.

Where is The Nightmare Before Christmas streaming? Watch it free with a subscription to Disney+ or rent a digital copy through platforms such as Prime Video and Apple TV (it’s also available on Blu-ray).

Halloween is the perfect time to bust out some Nightmare Before Christmas merch, and Amazon has more than enough must-haves for fans of the franchise. Shop spooky decorations, Halloween costumes, clothing, Funko Pop! figurines and other collectibles such as the Little People’s Collector’s Set ($25), this Nightmare Before Christmas Cuckoo Clock ($250) and more at Amazon.

On Saturday, Bruno Mars was set to become the third American artist ever to perform two sold out concerts at the 70,000-capacity HaYarkon Park in Tel Aviv, Israel — following Madonna in 2009 and Michael Jackson in 1993.

He played his first show there last Wednesday with two Tel Aviv acts opening, running nearly four hours in total. Both shows were promoted by Bluestone Group, which is owned by Live Nation Israel.

“I say Tel Aviv!” Mars shouted to the audience. “The Hooligans made it to Israel – thank you so guys so much for coming out,” Mars told fans after opening his show with his hit 2016 song “24k Magic.”

Mars’ Saturday show was supposed to be the second-to-last date on a brief world tour that previously stopped in Tbilisi, Georgia, on Oct. 1 and was headed to Doha, Qatar, for an Oct. 8 show to follow the Formula 1 Qatar Grand Prix.

Early Saturday, though, reports began to circulate of a coordinated Hamas-led terrorist attack that would escalate the ongoing Israel-Palestinian conflict. Later that day, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared on television and declared that his country was now “at war” with Hamas. By afternoon, Live Nation Israel issued a statement that the concert was canceled. (The following day, Mars also cancelled his planned Doha concert.)

“All ticket purchases to the show will receive an automatic refund to the credit card through which the purchase was made,” said a statement that Bluestone Group shared online.

Securing the venue, located inside Tel Aviv’s one-and-a-half-square mile Yarkon Park, along the banks of the Yarkon River, during active fighting would present unnecessary risks to concertgoers, a source tells Billboard, noting that the decision to cancel was made a few hours after the attacks began that morning. By 2 p.m., Bruno Mars and his 60-person crew were at Ben Gurion Airport, where they boarded a flight to Athens.

From Athens, Mars was supposed to travel to Doha for his performance, but he was reportedly unable to pack up and transport his production gear out of Israel in time for that performance. On Sunday, hours before he was scheduled to take the stage in Doha, Lusail International Circuit racetrack announced on Instagram that Mars would not perform, and that French producer and artist DJ Snake would take his place.

Mars’ concert cancellation represents a symbolic setback for Israel’s touring business. For more than a decade, artists announcing plans to perform in the country faced harsh public criticism from activists and artists like Roger Waters and Brian Eno, who urged musicians to boycott the country over what they describe as its unjust treatment of the Palestinians.

In 2018, Lana Del Rey was booked to headline the Meteor Music Festival when Waters urged her to reconsider. (Her trip fell apart due to scheduling issues.) Waters, a proponent of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, a Palestinian-led campaign to isolate Israel, has also targeted Radiohead, Bon Jovi and Jennifer Lopez, albeit unsuccessfully.

New generation promoters like Tel Aviv-based Bluestone Group — which Live Nation bought in 2017 as a joint venture of several investors, including Maverick’s Guy Oseary — has worked to increase the potential gross artists can make playing Israel, while also helping them to navigate anti-Israel backlash. In 2023, the country hosted a number of top tier Western acts including Imagine Dragons, Tiesto, Ozuna, Christina Aguilera, the Black Keys and Guns N’ Roses.

An artist manager who had several acts scheduled to play the Paralello Universo festival in Re’im, Israel, near the Gaza Strip, and who was there during the attack on the festival, describes a scene of chaos and terror.

Raz Gaster had multiple artists playing the electronic music festival, where at least 260 people were killed and others were abducted amid an attack by Hamas operatives Saturday (Oct. 7).

Gaster arrived on site at the festival event at approximately 5:30 a.m. on Saturday, with the party — which had started the night prior — meant to go until approximately 5 p.m. Saturday evening. An offshoot of the Paralello Universo festival brand started in Brazil nearly 20 years ago; the Israel event was called Supernova Sukkot Gathering after the Jewish holiday and was hosting several thousand attendees in a rural location near the Gaza Strip, with a lineup focused on the electronic psytrance genre.

Everything changed, though, when rockets and missiles launched from the Gaza Strip by Hamas starting landing on the site an hour later, part of a widespread attack on Israel.  

“Around 6:30 in the morning we started hearing explosions,” Gaster says. “We went out of the backstage and we saw a full bombardment everywhere. It was hundreds of rockets and mortars flying from everywhere and explosions all around us.”  

Gaster says that at this point, festival security advised everyone to get down on the floor and put their hands above their heads for protection. But after 5-10 minutes, Gaster says, “the policemen shouted in the microphones, ‘Okay, get in your cars and go.’” 

“The moment the policemen said ‘go now,’ I ran,” Gaster recalls. “I didn’t wait, because we know it’s a rocket attack. You need to act quick.”  

Because his car was parked near the stage very close to where he was standing, Gaster and three other men — including Universo Paralello co-founder Juarez Petrillo — were able to immediately get in Gaster’s car and drive out minutes later, after Gaster made sure the artists he works with were also in vehicles fleeing the site.

Gaster says he was “driving super fast, not stopping for anything, even when missiles are coming down. My instinct told me don’t stop for shelter, just drive… We drove so fast we didn’t even know what was happening.” 

By the time Gaster and the others made it to a villa rented by the production team, located approximately 30 kilometers away from the festival, they had started getting texts and phone calls telling them that minutes after they drove away from the site, Hamas fighters had arrived “with machine guns, with RPGs, with grenades, and just slaughtered whoever they could.”

He says that these attackers arrived by motorcycles, quads and trucks approximately 20 minutes after missiles started landing. 

Gaster and those he was with turned the villa into a command center, contacting IDF, other Israeli security services and “all of our friends that we know personally that have firearms that have connections that can go there.”  

During this time he and the others were receiving messages from friends and colleagues still on site, who reported that the attackers were shooting attendees in their cars as they attempted to drive away. A friend of Gaster’s messaged to say that the driver of her car had been shot and that she and another friend were pretending to be dead to avoid being killed. He says these women ultimately played dead for five hours before being rescued. As of Sunday (Oct. 8), Israeli rescue service Zaka has reported at least 260 bodies at the site.

“People were hiding in ditches, hiding in bushes, hiding in the woods, hiding wherever you can think of,” says Gaster. “We were getting horrible messages from friends saying, ‘Please help us, they are shooting people next to us.’” 

Gaster says it took IDF and special forces a few hours to arrive on site, with those who were there attempting to defend themselves in the meantime.  

“At the party there was already a police force, like any licensed party,” Gaster says, “and they were the first ones to try to give assistance by fighting… We are Israelites, so most of us have military experience, and a few from the production managed to kill some terrorists with their bare hands and their weapons.”  

Gaster says that the owner of the production company behind the festival, Nova Tribe, killed two of the attackers after taking their guns. Gaster says he and the team at the production villa were being sent on-site locations from various attendees and then sending these locations to the owner, who then went to help these attendees.  

“It was 24 hours of working to find as many people as we could and get as many signs of life as we could,” says Gaster.  

Universo Paralello was not origintally intended to take place at the Re’im site, with organizers moving it to this location only two days before it started, when another site in southern Israel fell through. The new site at Re’im featured a pair of stages, with the Israeli producer Artifex playing the mainstage when the attack started. Gaster was told that the attackers closed the road into the festival from both sides so attendees could not escape.  

Other festival attendees have been abducted by Hamas. As a group of between 15-20 people gathered at the production villa, they, says Gaster, “started seeing videos on social media of hostages and people we know that are kidnapped and bodies we could recognize [as] our friends. Many friends are still missing, and we still don’t know where they are.” 

He approximates that there are still 600-700 people missing from the party. All but one artist on the festival lineup has left Israel, with Gaster and others putting artists on any available flight into Europe as airlines canceled flights amid the attacks.

While Gaster had just arrived to his home in the north of Israel when Billboard spoke with him at around 1 a.m. local Israeli time (he says the IDF controls most of the area between where he was and where he lives, so he felt safe to drive home), he says that amid the chaos they are all “still trying to find any signs of life.”

“We are a peaceful community, we are a musical community, we do it for the creation of fun,” says Gaster. “We only wanted to dance and have a good time and enjoy music together, and it turned into a nightmare.”

Jennie‘s “You & Me” tops this week’s new music poll.

Music fans voted in a poll published Friday (Oct. 6) on Billboard, choosing Jennie’s solo song as their favorite new music release of the past week.

The BLACKPINK member’s “You & Me” brought in more than 83% of the vote, beating out new music from NewJeans, Drake and more. Blinks really showed up for Jennie this week, pulling in a landslide victory for the K-pop star’s new solo track on Billboard‘s weekly poll.

“You & Me” is Jennie’s second solo release, following 2018’s “Solo.” She performs “You & Me” during the solo section of BLACKPINK’s Born Pink World Tour, and the song was officially released on Friday.

“I love you and me dancing in the moonlight/ Nobody can see, it’s just you and me tonight/ I love you and me, dancing in the moonlight/ Nobody can see, it’s just you and me tonight,” she sings on the chorus.

Trailing behind “You & Me” on the poll is NewJeans’ “GODS,” with 13% of the vote, and Drake’s For All the Dogs, with 1% of the vote.

See the final results of this week’s poll below.