10 Best Performing Arts in New Orleans, Louisiana

The biggest event on the city's cultural calendar is also the oldest—it's been around for more than a century. Parades roll almost nightly for the last few weeks of the Carnival season, which starts on Twelfth Night and culminates on Mardi Gras (or Fat Tuesday), the last blow-out party before Lent begins on Ash Wednesday. The big day itself is a city holiday, with the streets taken over by costumed revelers, floats, marching bands, and throngs of partiers. Plastic beads are the currency of the day. Every year, Mardi Gras falls on a different date, but it's always in either February or March.

Art lovers and people-watchers alike pack Warehouse District and Magazine Street galleries in early October for the annual Saturday-evening kickoff to the visual arts season. What's on the walls usually takes a back seat to the party scene.

Three fun parades hit the streets of the French Quarter on Easter Sunday: one led by local entertainer Chris Owens, another dedicated to the late socialite Germaine Wells, and the last an incredible gay parade that takes the festive bonnet tradition to a whole new level.

With stages set up throughout the Quarter and on the river at Woldenberg Park, the focus here is on free local entertainment—and, of course, food. A lot of locals consider this April festival the best in the city.

Socialite Germaine Wells, step-daughter of the founder of Arnaud's Restaurant (and eventually its owner), started this New York–style Easter Parade in the French Quarter in 1956. Her legacy lives on, as women riding in convertibles and carriages don floppy chapeaus and hand out stuffed bunnies along the route. The parade ends in time for noon Mass at St. Louis Cathedral.

Fashion takes a front seat at this parade, which ambles through the Quarter midafternoon on Easter Sunday, passing gay and gay-owned bars, restaurants and shops.

For more than 65 years, the Irish Channel St. Patrick's Day Club has put on a Saturday-afternoon-before-St. Paddy's Day parade with floats, bands and marching groups. Preferred throws here include green beads, cabbages, carrots and the occasional potato.

Join the crowd for live music on Jackson Square, and help count down to the new year with the drop of a giant fleur-de-lis on the riverfront near Jax Brewery. A barrage of fireworks lights up the Mississippi as clocks strike midnight.

The August weekend-long tribute to the late, great Louis Armstrong honors Satchmo with jazz performances staged throughout the Quarter, seminars and discussions with Armstrong scholars, a Satchmo Club Strut down Frenchmen Street, and the Louis Armstrong Birthday Party.

A couple of big parades roll on the weekend closest to March 17: one starts at Molly's at the Market and winds through the French Quarter; the other, in Uptown, goes down Magazine Street and turns the area around Irish Channel neighborhood bars Parasol's and Tracey's into one big, green block party. Two days later (March 19) the town celebrates St. Joseph's Day with home-cooked food and goodie bags filled with cookies and lucky fava beans. Check the NOLA tourism website for announcements of altars that you can visit.