For one night this week, a Tudor-style theater that opened in 1927 trades its stage lights for candles. Candlelight: Halloween Classics comes to The Space at Westbury on Friday, October 30, with the Highline String Quartet playing two hour-long sessions, at 6 p.m. and 8:30 p.m., inside a hall lit by fields of flickering candles.

The program is a Halloween songbook translated to strings. The tentative set list runs from Michael Jackson's Thriller and the Stranger Things theme to Danny Elfman's Beetlejuice and Nightmare Before Christmas music, the Addams Family theme, John Carpenter's Halloween theme, Bernard Herrmann's prelude from Psycho, Ghostbusters, the Time Warp from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and the concert-hall side of the season: Saint-Saens' Danse Macabre, Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, Gounod's Funeral March of a Marionette, a Shostakovich quartet movement and Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, the piece The Exorcist made famous.

The room is half the show

The venue sells the evening as much as the set list does. The Space at Westbury, at 250 Post Avenue in the village, opened in 1927 as the Westbury Movie Theater and has kept its Tudor-style architecture through nearly a century of use. The building was saved from demolition and restored by Cyrus Hakakian and his partners, and today it runs as a concert hall and event space holding anywhere from 150 to 1,500 people, with food and drinks sold on site.

Candlelight is the touring concert series that stages classical musicians in notable buildings by candlelight, and its Halloween edition has become an annual fixture in the series. Friday's performances are played by the Highline String Quartet. Each session runs about 60 minutes, doors open an hour before showtime, and there is no entry once the music starts.

Tickets and the fine print

Tickets are sold by zone through the Candlelight series' site: Zone A seats are $82 and Zone B seats are $58, each plus a booking fee, and the $55 Zone C seats for Friday are listed as sold out. Seating is first come, first served within each zone. The show is open to ages 8 and up, and anyone under 16 must be accompanied by an adult. The listing notes it is a tribute concert experience, not affiliated with or endorsed by the artists whose music is performed.

For anyone mapping out the Halloween weekend, the timing works as an early evening out: the first session ends with time for dinner on Post Avenue, and the late session gets out well before midnight, with the real haunting still a day away on Saturday.

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