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It seems like only yesterday that Lindsey Stirling was buzzed off America’s Got Talent by Piers Morgan. Morgan said she wasn’t talented enough to play violin and dance at the same time. (Morgan forgot to add that he’s insufferable, but we took it as read.) And bizarrely, Sharon Osbourne suggested Stirling couldn’t hold an audience on her own: “What you’re doing isn’t enough to fill a theater in Vegas.”
Cut to the SpongeBob interstitial card with the French guy saying “15 years later.” Stirling heard Morgan’s and Osbourne’s advice and sensibly ignored it. She took risks with her playing, incorporating genres from dubstep (“Crystallize”) to hard rock (“Monday Not Sick Anymore”). She leveled up her stage performance, incorporating acrobatics. She built her YouTube channel (@lindseystirling) into a 14.3 million-subscriber juggernaut and sold records by the truckload. And she’s made a regular habit of filling Vegas theaters, usually around the holidays: The Chelsea in 2017, the Smith Center in 2023.
This year, Stirling brings her Snow Waltz tour to the Venetian Theatre for a three-night run. And this holiday-themed show features all the good stuff—the dancing, the costumes, the circus-inspired aerial acrobatics and naturally, that genre-hopping violin—that AGT tried to buzz out of her. And she’s generously sharing those hard-earned gifts with Vegas audiences.
“I’m pretty proud of this show,” Stirling tells the Weekly. “I love Christmas; I always have. I feel so fortunate that I get to spread Christmas cheer every year as my version of a holiday tradition.”
Stirling says the Snow Waltz show, inspired by the 2022 holiday album of the same name, represents a more personalized approach to the holidays. Snow Waltz is her second album of holiday music following 2017’s Warmer in the Winter, and having already mastered many of the holiday standards on her first go—Warmer includes “Carol of the Bells,” “Silent Night” and “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch,” the latter recorded with an ascendant Sabrina Carpenter—Stirling felt a bit more jolly this time out.
“Snow Waltz was really fun,” Stirling says. “My first Christmas album was a little more jazz-centered stuff, and it was really a fun departure. But when I wrote Snow Waltz, I was like, I want to make it sound very magical, very whimsical.”
That it is. Snow Waltz features a dramatic Stirling original in “Ice Storm” (“That one is just really, really fun to play live.”) and a bouncy version of “Sleigh Ride,” which she’d wanted on the first holiday LP but “never quite cracked the code.” And it probably goes without saying that she’ll perform these songs while doing exactly what Piers Morgan told her not to do.
“I never would have imagined that 15-plus years later, I’d be able to hang upside down and play, have choreography and do full-blown back bends and kicks,” she says. “I’m a very visual person, so for me, the look and feel and the variety of a show is really important.”
And as for Stirling bringing the holidays to Vegas, of all places … well, she was kind of born to it.
“I’m an Arizona girl, so I grew up in that same exact desert environment. I never experienced a white Christmas until I was in college,” she says, chuckling. “I kind of love a desert Christmas. I believe Christmas can come in all shapes, sizes and temperatures.”
LINDSEY STIRLING December 10 & 12-13, 8 p.m., $88+. Venetian Theatre, ticketmaster.com.
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