Where to Find Everything Happening in Montgomery County

The hardest part of a weekend in Montgomery County is not finding something to do. It is finding out about it in time.

Between the county’s theaters, music venues, libraries, farmers markets, festivals and school auditoriums, there is more happening on a given Saturday than any one person could track. Most of it gets announced somewhere nobody is looking. Here is how we are trying to fix that, and where to look.

The Calendar: MoCo Events Compass

MoCo Events Compass is ours. It is an app we built, and it does one thing: it pulls events from more than thirty different sources around Montgomery County into a single calendar at moco.events.

That is the whole reason it works. No single venue calendar, library page or chamber listing has everything, because none of them are trying to. A theater posts its own shows. A town posts its own festivals. A brewery posts its own music. Compass reads all of them and puts the results in one place, which is why it carries more of what is actually happening here than anywhere else we know of.

It is free to browse and free to list on. If you are running something and it is not showing up, that usually means the source we would have pulled it from does not list it either, and you should add it directly.

What is new is that we are now pulling from Compass for social. Events from the calendar go out through our Instagram, Facebook and TikTok accounts alongside our own stories, so things turn up in your feed whether or not you ever open a calendar.

Live Music, Every Week

Our weekly music roundup has run every weekend since the summer. It is a plain list of who is playing where, from the clubs to the breweries to the Strathmore stage, published before the weekend starts rather than after it.

We also write about the people making the music. Bronson Hoover’s first album, and the release party at Hank Dietle’s, got its own piece because the story behind the record was better than a listing could carry.

Arts and Theater, Covered Like a Beat

Community theater in this county is genuinely good and almost entirely unreviewed. We have been covering it as a regular beat: what is opening, what is worth the drive, and what the reviews actually said. The Game’s Afoot and Bernhardt/Hamlet both got written up. So did the mystery that opened at the F. Scott Fitzgerald Theater, and the month’s slate of drama, mystery and staged readings.

The bigger houses get the same attention. Strathmore’s season, its artists in residence, the Mansion’s programming, Imagination Stage’s touring shows and Olney’s announcements have all run here. When casting calls go out, we post those too, because somebody reading this is going to audition.

How to Use All of This

• Browse the full calendar at moco.events, and list your own event there free.
• Follow us on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, where events now run alongside the news.
• Check moderatelymoco.com on Thursdays for the weekend music roundup.
• Running a show, a festival or a fundraiser we should know about? Send it to us. We would rather hear about it early than read about it afterward.

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