-
Oakland mayoral hopeful Cat Brooks brings activism to stage with SF’s 3Girls
Oakland mayoral hopeful Cat Brooks brings activism to stage with SF’s 3Girls
By Lily Janiak
It’s not every election cycle that you get a candidate for mayor who moonlights as a theater artist. But Cat Brooks, the noted Black Lives Matter activist and Oakland mayoral candidate, fights for the ...
This Week's Stories
25 years bringing a big voice to role wearing very big hats in ‘Beach Blanket Babylon’
For “Beach Blanket Babylon” performer Tammy Nelson, who marked her 25th anniversary this month with the musical revue, being in the show is “like when you drive stick shift.” “Once you learn, ...
Mission District’s Gray Area exists where art, technology intersect
By the time Josette Melchor had made her way to San Francisco in 2005, she had already created Gray Area , a gallery and studio space, in a warehouse in Los Angeles. But it was in the Bay Area, in a new ...
Cal Shakes’ ‘Everybody’ is difficult for anybody to appreciate
If you’re a playwright, you give yourself a daunting obstacle when you seek to make a centuries-obsolete dramatic form work for contemporary audiences. The medieval morality play doesn’t have an ...
Arts & Theater
‘Supergirl’ and ‘Alias’ star Carl Lumbly takes on...
Carl Lumbly first came across James Baldwin’s writing in the 1970s, when the future actor was in college. He began with Baldwin’s first semiautobiographical novel, “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” and ...
Remembering catastrophe in black history with ‘Port Chicago...
The munitions explosion on July 17, 1944, at Port Chicago, a naval pier north of Concord, killed 320 sailors and civilians and injured 390 others. Most of the dead and hurt were black; their conditions had ...
Theater capsule reviews and listings, week of July 29
Beach Blanket Babylon Steve Silver’s effervescent revue of send-ups and showstoppers in which Snow White looks for love in an onslaught of pop-culture lampoons and fantastic hats. ...
Art listings
San Francisco Asian Art Museum “Thursday Nights: The Pilipinx American Library: Opening Reception.” 6:30-9 p.m. Thurs., Aug. 2. Included with museum ...
Shakespeare’s ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ awash with...
LILY JANIAK’S THEATER PICK “Love’s Labour’s Lost” might not be the most frequently performed Shakespeare comedy, but it affords plenty of treats, especially for those who ...
‘Caticon,’ a show of art about cats at SFO
This is not a cat column. My beloved former page mate had that covered, and I am not trespassing on his territory. However, “Caticons: The Cat in Art,” has crept into the ...
San Francisco Ballet on tour to hit Napa, Stern Grove festivals
San Francisco Ballet’s home season doesn’t start till January, but fans can get a midsummer fix at two performances this weekend. The dance company will emerge from the rehearsal studio, where ...
BATCO juxtaposes Langston Hughes and Beyoncé with ‘I, Too,...
With “too,” the “darker brother” narrator in the Langston Hughes poem “I, Too” claims a space where none was given. He declares his own right to “sing America,” concluding that one day, ...
Marga Gomez makes sure machismo doesn’t rule in ‘King of...
Machismo gets hoisted by its own petard again and again in Central Works’ “King of Cuba.” Cristina García’s world premiere, which she adapted from her eponymous novel, repeatedly drains men’s ...
Word for Word: 25 years of finding the dramatic heart of...
The first time someone hears about Word for Word, the reaction is usually skepticism, confusion or both. It’s hard to picture how a theater company could make a short story work on stage without ...
Arts & Theater
Word for Word: 25 years of finding the dramatic heart of...
The first time someone hears about Word for Word, the reaction is usually skepticism, confusion or both. It’s hard to picture how a theater company could make a short story work on stage without ...
Form-defying output from foolsFury’s Fury Factory in SF and...
If you’re looking for theater that eschews boilerplate, whose form, language, politics and staging are as unique as the artists’ consciousnesses that created them, foolsFury’s 2018 Fury Factory ...
Now celebrating 50 years, Children’s Musical Theater San...
The remarkable thing about Children’s Musical Theater San Jose is this: Every young person who wants to be in the show gets to be in the show. No obstacles, be they financial, physical or mental, ...
Claudia Bauer’s dance pick for July 22
CLAUDIA BAUER’S DANCE PICK Programs like Deborah Slater Dance Theater’s Studio 210 Summer Residency help incubate the ...
Le Moana’s ‘1918’ remembers those wiped out by Spanish flu
It’s remembered as the Spanish flu, but the 1918 flu pandemic reached from Kansas to Indonesia. It traveled from New Zealand to Polynesia on the passenger and cargo ship Talune, and wiped out nearly a ...
Immigrant flags fly at Montalvo Arts Center for latest exhibition
Before Brazilian artist Marilá Dardot even made it through the door to Montalvo Arts Center, she knew what her installation would be. On the front lawn, which she estimated to be the ...
Never seen Beat photos debut in San Francisco’s North Beach
The Beats were shot in black-and-white because that’s what photos from the 1950s looked like. But 1960 brought color and that’s what Magnum photographer Burt Glinn brought to San Francisco. ...
ODC/Dance Summer Sampler offers two weeks of programming
Between stints in South Korea’s MODAFE Festival and the historic Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in the Berkshires, ODC/Dance is pausing at home to present its annual Summer Sampler. ...
Lily Janiak’s theater pick for July 22
LILY JANIAK’S THEATER PICK After solo performer Siobhan O’Loughlin broke her hand in a bike accident in 2014, she couldn’t shower with her cast on, but she didn’t have a bathtub ...
Theater capsule reviews and listings, week of July 15
Angels in America Berkeley Rep’s revival of Tony Kushner’s epic two-part masterpiece set in the height of the AIDS crisis gives reminders both timeless and timely for our own era ...
Ethnic Dance Festival soars to new heights at SF Opera House
Whenever I hear talking heads on a certain national TV station evoking “diversity” like a dangerous word, I yearn to show them two Bay Area spectacles. The first is any Saturday afternoon on ...
SF Playhouse dives into a painting with ‘Sunday in the Park...
For some visual art, merely looking doesn’t satisfy. Their composition is so rich, their figures so fertile for the imagination, that you hunger for more from them. To absorb the single exquisite frame ...
Japanese internment chillingly relevant in ‘Hold These...
It’s one of our most shameful lists, and it’s only growing: our roster of past atrocities that should feel like ancient history, unfathomable in our own more enlightened times, but that only ...
Too much white in ‘White’ by Shotgun Players in Berkeley
It might well be possible to write a show about an entitled white guy and have the piece as a whole be way less annoying than its central character. But Shotgun Players’ “White” is not yet that show. ...
A role and talent perfectly matched in 'Richard III'
L. Peter Callender has long been one of the Bay Area's finest stage actors. To role after role, the Julliard-trained performer brings crisp definition, piercing insight, magnetic charisma and mighty ...
ACT’s ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ rises again
If evanescence is part of the thrill of live theater, it can come at a heavy cost. When you see a show that changes you, you have limited opportunity to relive it or share it with others before it closes ...
Joe Goode invites guests to a homey experience at SF mansion
Built in 1886 for a family of German Jewish immigrants, San Francisco’s Haas-Lilienthal House holds plenty of history and no doubt its share of secrets as well. An emblem of civic preservation and the ...
Tony Matelli finds magic at David Ireland House
The first review I ever wrote for The Chronicle helped win me a major journalism award. Still, given the opportunity, I would take a do-over. The David Ireland House — also often called ...
SafeHouse Arts festival highlights queer, quirky and...
You never know what you’re going to see in a show at SafeHouse Arts. As one of the last ground-floor choreography and performance incubators in the city, it provides avant-garde artists with low-cost, ...
Susan Meiselas photography retrospective at SFMOMA
In “Mediations,” the retrospective of Susan Meiselas’ photographs at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, there are pictures from 1978 of young Nicaraguan men in Indian dance masks. They have an ...
‘Mujeres Muralistas’ discuss their move into mural making
RYAN KOST’S OFF-THE- RADAR PICK In the 1970s, a group of female muralists came together in the Mission District under ...
San Francisco’s Ethnic Dance Fest celebrates 40 years
Anyone who doubts the power of the arts to unite humanity has only to look at the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival . This season — its 40th — will feature 500 diverse performers representing 17 ...
Charles Desmarais’ art pick for July 15: Susanne...
CHARLES DESMARAIS’ ART PICK Berlin artist Susanne Kriemann’s exhibition “Canopy, canopy,” at the ...
Ethnic Dance Festival celebrates its festive 40th year
West African drum rhythms. Bold flamenco inspired by Cadíz. An Alaskan Yuk’ip Eskimo dance not seen in public for 200 years. A 10-year-old phenom in South Indian kuchipudi . Spanning all these and much ...
At SomArts, artists consider how the small challenge the powerful
In a new exhibition at SomArts Culture Center, a group of artists considers how those with less power “challenge the forces that threaten to make them invisible.” The show, curated by Juana Berrío, is ...
This Week's Stories
25 years bringing a big voice to role wearing very big hats in ‘Beach Blanket Babylon’
For “Beach Blanket Babylon” performer Tammy Nelson, who marked her 25th anniversary this month with the musical revue, being in the show is “like when you drive stick shift.” “Once you learn, ...
Mission District’s Gray Area exists where art, technology intersect
By the time Josette Melchor had made her way to San Francisco in 2005, she had already created Gray Area , a gallery and studio space, in a warehouse in Los Angeles. But it was in the Bay Area, in a new ...
Cal Shakes’ ‘Everybody’ is difficult for anybody to appreciate
If you’re a playwright, you give yourself a daunting obstacle when you seek to make a centuries-obsolete dramatic form work for contemporary audiences. The medieval morality play doesn’t have an ...