Irregular Repeating Events

How do you handle events that repeat but on an irregular schedule?

For example, we had a theatre production that ran from Thursday-Saturday at 8 p.m. for two weeks and then had a final show the next Sunday at 2 p.m.

That’s just one example, but these types of events often don’t have a regular repeating pattern. Often there are arbitrary dates with no discernible pattern and/or varying start times.

Is it possible to keep them all tied together and not have to create individual instances for each one (or at least each different one)?

We’d like to be able to create a widget that just shows the next instance of these events, but that is difficult when they are not actually connected except by name. The only thing I can think of is to just show all events in a widget and use a custom module on load (or even easier with JS) to remove subsequent instances on the page with the same name.

We make a news story: “the theatre department is putting on Hamlet!” – and then make individual events based on the irregular schedule. (The events have no description, but link to the news story, if you know I’m saying.)