Ghostbusters in Concert
By late October, Sarasota’s calendar has usually begun its seasonal turn toward the theatrical: darker evenings, brighter stages, and just enough humidity to make a ghost story feel plausible.
By Edit Sarasota Staff
By late October, Sarasota’s calendar has usually begun its seasonal turn toward the theatrical: darker evenings, brighter stages, and just enough humidity to make a ghost story feel plausible. This Halloween, the city gets a cinematic one. Ghostbusters in Concert brings the beloved 1984 comedy to the concert hall, where the familiar paranormal caper will be accompanied by a live orchestra.
For anyone who grew up quoting Peter Venkman, admiring the Ectomobile, or wondering whether crossing the streams was ever a sound scientific strategy, the film remains a particularly generous kind of nostalgia. It is funny without being weightless, spooky without becoming grim, and rooted in the pleasures of a great ensemble. Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson, and Annie Potts gave the movie its distinctive rhythm; New York supplied its restless, slightly battered sense of possibility.
The concert format adds another dimension to that memory. Rather than treating the soundtrack as background, it places the score and the movie’s sonic world in the foreground, allowing audiences to hear the tension, comic timing, and supernatural grandeur in fresh relief. Elmer Bernstein’s music moves from jaunty investigation to full-scale spectral adventure, while Ray Parker Jr.’s instantly recognizable theme has long since escaped the film to become a piece of pop-culture folklore on its own.
For Sarasota, an evening like this also speaks to the city’s expanding appetite for performances that bridge generations and disciplines. Film-with-orchestra programs invite longtime arts patrons, devoted moviegoers, families, and first-time concert audiences into the same room. They are social occasions as much as screenings: the kind of event where a familiar story becomes newly communal, experienced not on a living-room television but amid the shared anticipation and acoustics of a theater.
The setting is part of the pleasure. With its sweeping curves, purple exterior, and waterfront presence, the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall has been one of Sarasota’s most recognizable cultural landmarks since opening in 1970. Its theatrical architecture feels especially well matched to a story about portals, apparitions, and the unseen world.
Ghostbusters in Concert takes place Thursday, October 29, 2026, at the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall in Sarasota—a fitting pre-Halloween night for revisiting an American classic with the lights low, the orchestra playing, and a little supernatural activity in the air.