If you have someone in your life who harbors a love for all things artsy...theatre, dance, opera, classical music...then I'm here to give you some ideas on the latest hot gifts to stir their artsy fartsy soul. (Consider this is my atonement to the great theatre gods for writing about Reality TV most of the time!)

1. The number one gift for any theatre lover has got to be 2 tickets to see Tim Burton's cinematic take on the Stephen Sondheim musical masterpiece Sweeney Todd. You can use Fandango to preview this gift idea. Whether you can tell from the trailers or not, Sweeney Todd is a nearly-sung-thru, and very dark, tale of revenge and mayhem, starring Burton's muse Johnny Depp. Here's why I'm so excited about it: I saw Sweeney in its original 1979 incarnation, starring Broadway's Len Cariou as Sweeney. He was scary...and sexy. Since that show made an indelible mark on my soul (it remains my favorite musical ever) I've seen many many productions, but I've never seen another Sweeney who captured that duality of being as sexy as he was scary. I think Depp may be just the man for the job!

2. Of course one of the big losses this year for the performing arts world was opera great Luciano Pavarotti. Watch him on YouTube singing one of his signature pieces, Nessun Dorma, if you wonder what the big deal is. Glorious aria sung by a glorious tenor at the peak of his power. You can buy the DVD of the very first Three Tenors concert, which features Pavarotti singing Nessun Dorma among other great pieces. Or if your opera-loving friend also loves the holiday season and its music, then how about a Christmas album from Pavarotti, featuring one of my favorites...the lesser known Bach-Gounod Ave Maria. (Lesser known than the Schubert Ave Maria, but certainly one of the top Aves out there.)

3. Know a film buff who prides themselves on only seeing indies, documentaries and foreign films? FYI: I dated him in college. Anyway, that film buff might appreciate a membership to Netflix-alternative GreenCine. You can buy or rent DVDs, and they also have a Video-on-Demand service.

4. Consider a museum membership. Most museum memberships come with a variety of benefits, usually including free admission, priority entry for new exhibitions, discounts at the museum gift shop and more. The Met in NYC even has a special Met Net membership that comes with geek-oriented benefits like Met screen savers.

5. Bring your arts lover to a sing-along or dance-along something this holiday season. Here in my neck of woods you can find the usual Sing-Along Messiah, but also a Dance Along Nutcracker. OK, so that might not be as common, but singing along with the Messiah...a fine tradition in many cities large and small.

6. Speaking of the Nutcracker, I've got nothing against the classic renditions...we were taken to the Nutcracker at the San Francisco Ballet every year when I was a kid...but if you know a dance buff and want to treat them to something a little more untraditional, how about Matthew Bourne's Nutcracker? Of course if any Nutcracker is too "theme-y" for you, how about Bourne's Swan Lake, featuring a male Swan. Beautiful and avant garde.

7. Now, I know that MP3 players are a big holiday gift, from the small and simple to the feature-rich. But it would be pretty cool if you gave an MP3 player already loaded with some artsy podcast subscriptions. Here's a sampling of some that sound intriguing, entertaining, enlightening, you get the gist: Try The New York Times Book Review podcast, IndieFeed.com's Performance Poetry podcast, the Broadway Bullet podcasts, the DrummerTalk podcast and Philosophy Bites.

8. Back to Broadway, for the friend who is convinced musicals are cheesy or superficial, I suggest some Spring Awakening. It's the new musical by pop singer-songwriter Duncan Sheik (and choreographed by modern dance figure Bill T. Jones.) Based on a late-19th Century German play, Spring Awakening was/is innovative, emotional, but most of all..it doesn't spoon feed you your emotions like most musicals (and I'm a musical lover.) You can read my review of the Broadway production here, and you can buy tickets to the real-live Broadway production here. If a trip to NYC isn't in your future,. you can settle for the recording, the Vocal Selections for your musician friends or even a copy of the original play.

9. If you like to do good while you go shopping then my last two suggestions will be for you: first you can shop from the Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS online catalog. There are books, CDs, DVDs, clothing, jewelry, lots of red ribbon items and a variety of artsy tchotchkes. And while the name of the organization might indicate it's all "Broadway", all the time, there are items geared towards dancers and musicians too.

10. How about remembering New Orleans and its fine musicians this holiday season? There are a couple of organizations dedicated to trying to help affected New Orleans musicians, and bring the displaced ones home. Tipitina's Foundation. and the New Orleans Musican Relief Fund are two. Not too many people watched Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, I guess, since it got canceled, but my S.O. and I loved it, and in honor of this last suggestion, here's an MP3 of the New Orleans musicians' version of O Holy Night that was played on that show's holiday episode last year, courtesy of Tipitina's Foundation.

Finally, Happy Chanukah, which starts at sundown tonight (Tuesday). In honor of it I found this brief little recording of the song we always sang upon lighting the menorah when I was growing up. Through my internet trolling tonight I learned that all my life I had one of the lyrics wrong in a "donzer lee lied" kind of way. Don't let it happen to you! Check it out here.

What other gifts would you recommend for those who are so inclined?