Stage

A tUnE-yArDs phone date from the road

Steven T. Jones
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Being weird in a good way seems like a more difficult status for artists to attain than it used to be. We can tell when you’re trying too hard — the Gaga meat dress, the Miley tongue-wags felt ’round the world — and it’s straight-up unappealing. Thanks to Ye Olde Internet, we’re also genuinely harder to shock than we used to be. At the same time, the acceptable box that artists seem to need to fit into to be marketable, to achieve anything like mainstream success, feels smaller all the time.

Enter tUnE-yArDs: Even if you count yourself in the camp of people who “just don’t get” the music, there’s no denying that the delightful weirdness that spews forth from the brain of Oakland’s Merrill Garbus has never felt anything but authentic. On her new album, Nikki Nack — out today on 4AD — she seems more than ever like she’s receiving musical cues from sort of secret invisible wood nymph from the future, and also that wood nymph has been listening to a lot of drumming and hand-clapping videos and maybe some Janet Jackson lately. She (Garbus) keeps you guessing, and you get the sense that that’s due, in part, to keeping herself guessing. All of this is good. It’s good for music.

Garbus debuted some new songs last month at The Chapel, then hit the road for a national tour, including several dates opening for the Arcade Fire. She won’t be back in the Bay until two Fillmore shows (June 6 and 7, with Sylvan Esso and The Seshen opening, respectively), but she gave us a call from the road to chat about the new record’s Haitian influences, how tour is going so far, and The Arcade Fire’s culinary prowess.

San Francisco Bay Guardian Thanks for talking! Where are you right now?

Merrill Garbus I’m in a hotel room in Nashville, Tennessee. We just drove all the way from Columbus and now we have a night off, which is nice. But I’ll probably spend most of it on the phone, doing interviews.

SFBG I’m so sorry.

MG No, it’s great! It’s your job! (laughs) I’m excited that people want to talk about the record.

SFBG I do love the new record. Can you talk a little about how heavy it is on the drums, and some of its Haitian influences? I know you traveled to Haiti not too long ago.

MG Thanks so much. As far as the Haitian influences, I would say it was less about the trip than a community I got involved with at home, at the Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts in downtown Oakland, which is a center for African arts, and the culture of Africa and the diaspora. It’s an incredible place. So for about a year I was studying with Portsha Jefferson, who is an amazing American woman who has devoted much of her life to studying Haitian folklore and dance, and Daniel Brevil, a Haitian-born drummer who teaches drum classes. This company they’ve created in Oakland is a community of people who are studying and immersed in Haitian culture, to see how it’s affected people around the world, especially as the first independent black republic that’s been an inspiration for generations of people. 

For me it was, oh my gosh, music and revolution and cultural history, and folk music versus pop music, all of those [topics] were really present in studying with these two people. And it was important to me that I wasn’t just going “Oh, that sounds cool, give me that cool rhythm” — I was a student of those drums. And there are definitely through lines of Haitian drumming in a lot of the songs that, lyrically, deal with the relationship between the quote-unquote developed world and the developing.

SFBG Your last album, 2011’s w h o k i l l, brought you to such a bigger platform (the national stage, really) than your first one had. Did you feel pressure with this album to follow that up with something even bigger, or to try to reach the people who still don’t “get” you?

MG I really do everything I can to not think about what how other people are going to receivewhat I’m making while I’m making it, because it just kills it right away. It’s something I have to practice, just like I have to practice singing or practice things with music, I have to practice not considering what other people think. Especially when you feel like you’re failing, because there are always moments when you’re making something going ‘This is not good.’ Or ‘people are not gonna like it.’

It’s the same thing with reading reviews or interviews — unless someone tells me “Oh, I think this one would actually really be helpful for you to read.” Otherwise it’s kind of poison, regardless of it’s good or bad. Because there’s a sense of being outside of yourself, and I always want to get really inside myself. I kinda shut down on the social media.

SFBG How’s Oakland treating you these days? Have you reached the point where you feel like a a kind of famous person, or is life pretty much business as usual?

MG You know, people say hi at the farmer’s market, but no one really cares. Which is great. Oakland’s been really good for my head, and I feel like there are a number of factors that keep me grounded. My relationship, the ways I’ve started to ground myself. It helps to remember that it’s all a mirage — I mean, if I give [press and publicity] any more weight than that, it’s kind of entering into the fictional world.

SFBG How’s tour been going so far? What’s it like opening for the Arcade Fire?

MG It’s awesome. One of them the other day was like, “If you want to sit in on anything, let us know,” and I was just like — I don’t even know what that would be, or mean (laughs). They’ve been so nice to us. I knew some of these guys from Montreal, and what they want to do is nerd out about music. Which is exactly what I want it to be about. They’re crazy, too; they play for two hours.

Tour in general — I love seeing new places around the world. Driving from Denver to Nashville is such a cool way to see this country, and we got to go to Australia this year, Europe several times. I do have to navigate my extreme fear of getting ill on the road, and it’s not so emotionally easy to be with seven people riding in a van for so long, but that’s why I feel so lucky that all the people with me are really dedicated to the project — Nate [Brenner] and I wrote a lot of this music together and then asked these people to play it with us for the next few months of their lives, and there’s no way I could do it without them. I’m also really excited that we sold out the Fillmore.

SFBG Best thing you’ve eaten on this tour?

MG When we were in Kansas City, the Arcade Fire guys got these huge things of barbecue backstage, and they knew what they were doing. Let me think…yeah, definitely that.

Happy Hour: The week in music

Steven T. Jones
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Happy Hour: The week in music

— The 2014 Music Video Race, the competition that pairs local bands with filmmakers for the 48-hour speed-creation of music video magic, is now accepting applications from musicians and filmmakers. The filmmaking weekend is July 11-13, and the screening/party, due to popular demand, has been upgraded to The Independent on July 20. Yours truly will be one of the judges, so, er, make this tough for me.

— The Stern Grove Festival, AKA one of the few summer festivals that delivers killer live performances without killing your hopes of ever sending your unborn kids to college, announced this year’s lineup of Sunday afternoon shows. For the low price of zero dollars, you’ll get such heavy hitters as Smokey Robinson, Rufus Wainwright, Andrew Bird, Darlene Love, Allen Stone, and plenty of other local stars, like LoCura, Vetiver, and, of course, the SF Symphony. Pack a picnic, bring a jacket (this is summer in San Francisco, after all) and get there early if you actually want to see the stage.

— Here is an insane new video from A Million Billion Dying Suns:

— The women of Warpaint stuck their feet in their pretty mouths, calling out Beyoncé and Rihanna for dressing like “sluts,” then they apologized. Some people had some smart things to say about it.

— Best rap feud ever.

Kitten Grenade on why you shouldn’t underestimate the ukulele

Steven T. Jones
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Kitten Grenade on why you shouldn’t underestimate the ukulele

By Rebecca Huval

Kitten Grenade takes the ukulele seriously. Katelyn Sullivan picked up the instrument when she was lonely and unhappy in Los Angeles, jonesing to be back in San Francisco. Now the instrument adds chiaroscuro to her self-titled debut EP released this January: the lilting chords contrast her brassy voice and its message of heartbreak.

“It’s got a deep soul, the ukulele,” she says ahead of her Friday, May 2nd show at the DNA Lounge. People unfairly pick on the instrument for being silly, Sullivan says, and she laughs when she reveals that she now has eight of them. Like a defensive cat lady, she says, “Each one has a different sound and personality.”

Her band, started in January 2013, is built on the idea of contrast. She named it Kitten Grenade after her art illustration thesis about juxtaposition: “Something cute and fuzzy, and something destructive. That idea captures a lot that’s in the music and my life.”

Even though Sullivan is engaged to her boyfriend of eight years, she says she’s dealt with her share of tragedies and unrequited loves that have wormed their way into her lyrics. Just recently, Sullivan has been coping with the death of her fiance’s 24-year-old brother, who fell off a balcony. Grief enters her songs through a “heartbreak filter.” In the first track on her EP, “Anomaly,” she sings about a lovers’ quarrel: “Touching fingers, eyes linger everywhere they’re not supposed to be/Said I’m sorry, no you hurt me, or were you not listening.” Her minimal orchestration, with mournful harmonies and light percussion, set the stage for her clarion voice to deliver these confessional lyrics.

Not every track is a tear-jerker. The surprisingly upbeat “Death Song” uses catchy, syncopated ukulele strumming to accompany Sullivan’s dreamy melody. The song begins quietly, “We started out without our lungs and somehow learned to breathe,” and builds to a shout, “the dust that we create is all that’s left of our dreams.” Her track “Gray,” with some vaudevillian-tinged vocals, uses ethereal background singing and the higher registers of the ukulele to seem reminiscent of Yael Naim. With musical role models from Fiona Apple to tUnE-yArDs, Sullivan reflects the range of their difference in her broad palette of styles.

Her lyrics are uniquely San Franciscan as Karl enters: “Oh these starry eyes get misty, fog rolls in and hides the misery.” Originally from Maryland, Sullivan has lived in San Francisco for 10 years. She adores the music scene here and playing with fellow band Halcyonaire, “the freaking sweetest guys.” But given the recent tech boom, she advocates that music supporters see shows regularly to keep artists from leaving the city. “I make that a goal to make a band’s week by seeing their Wednesday 11 o’clock show. It means a lot to me, so you have to pass it forward.”

She’s seen San Francisco from both sides: before as a retailer on 16th and Valencia Streets, and now as a tech worker for the karaoke app StarMaker. “I get to sing all the time,” she says. “I love my company — they’re down-to-earth and they’re all about getting people to sing.”

Sullivan herself needed some coaxing before singing in public. She started her musical life in middle school through opera and musical theatre, and her training shows up today in her voice’s creaminess and smooth projection. But she went through a period in high school when she was too shy to sing. She abandoned music for art school, where she met her current fiance.

“He helped me find my confidence,” she says. “If I hadn’t met him, I wouldn’t have the confidence to go up on stage and sing these personal songs. The path of life is so interesting. If I hadn’t lost my confidence, I wouldn’t have gotten into art and illustration, I wouldn’t have met my fiance, and that’s how I regained my confidence. Life wouldn’t have been the same if I hadn’t had that hiatus.” Contrasts formed Kitten Grenade and continue to give it a full-bodied sound, with ukulele playing that is both sweet and seriously soulful.

Kitten Grenade

With Electric Strawberry and The Stand Out State
Friday, May 2
7pm, $10
DNA Lounge
375 11th St, SF
(415) 626-1409

Hurray for the Riff Raff grow up at the Independent

Steven T. Jones
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By Avi Vinocur. Photos by Avi Vinocur and TJ Mimbs.

So as we speak I’m crammed between an NPR listener, a Louisiana native longing to be home for Jazz Fest, and a cool dude with lensless glasses awaiting the gospel of a Puerto Rican girl from the Bronx, who found her home in New Orleans singing mountain music. I love America.

Her name is Alynda Lee Segarra — short, cute, Aubrey Plazaesque (but smiley) with an incredibly evocative voice not quite like anything I’ve heard. fHer songs are simple and short in a way you might find at the Grand Ole Opry in 1950. Currently she is standing on the side of the stage swooning over the opening band Clear Plastic Masks.

I get her attraction. These songs are good. I can tell that Andrew Katz — the Mick Jagger-lipped lead singer — is a closet stand-up comedian. Not to mention they have the most exciting bearded drummer since Meg White. The guy, Charles Garmendia, can’t even stay seated. It’s tough to do so when the guitar tone is this good. I also immediately realize that their song “When the Night Time Comes” contains one of the, if not the, best uses of the phrase “too cool for school” in show business. All in all I’m liking this band. Their energy level is high. How will a girl with a stripped band and an acoustic guitar feel after this?

cpm
Clear Plastic Masks photo by Avi Vinocur.

Alynda Lee Segarra, the soul of Hurray For the Riff Raff (who are playing on Conan tonight, Tue/29) takes the stage alone, in her sequin country nudie suit and begins with her own “The New SF Bay Blues” — a slow picked ballad with an epic seventh note that gets me every time. For a crowd rocking out moments ago, they are silent, respectful and focused. The line “If you love her, she’ll give you all she’s got, and buddy, that can be an awful lot,” sails over the sold-out room, and over most of our heads. But I think I get it. This set has a stark simplicity that feels both effortless and like she’s giving San Francisco “all she’s got.”
Fiddle player Yosi Perlstein, upright bassist Callie Millington, drummer David Jamison, and slide/keys player Casey McAllister join Segarra on the stage and dive into “Blue Ridge Mountain” the old-timey fiddle laden opening track from their phenomenal new record “Small Town Heroes”. I find myself relating to her immensely. Born of the big city, but feeling at home in the humidity with simple, calm, accepting people — playing music, living cheap and easy.
hfrr
Hurray for the Riff Raff photo by TJ Mimbs.

“The Body Electric.” Finally. I was waiting for this song. It strikes me in such an honest earnest way. Maybe it’s the profound simplicity of the song itself — being only two and half chords. Or maybe it’s the fact that this murder ballad, with a titular nod to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, (Whitman too left New York for New Orleans) is one of the few semi-political songs our over-saturated generation can still stomach. I think truly its success is in her delivery of this beautiful poem. Like she is listening to herself say every word and intending every annunciation to be understood by the crowd. Like suddenly she is singing into the eyes of the audience instead of into darkness. This is the song that proves single-handedly that this band has much more depth to uncover as they continue to develop.

The set comes to a close with the fun and vibrant “Little Black Star,” the breezy yet lonesome “St Roch Blues” and a cover of Lucinda Williams’ “People Talkin’.” The excitement with seeing this band isn’t necessarily the show itself, but knowing you are witnessing this group turning into a timeless American band. And buddy, that can be an awful lot.

hfrr

Photo by TJ Mimbs.

This Week’s Picks: April 30 – May 6, 2014

Michael Redmond
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May the fourth be with you

THURSDAY 1

 

Carletta Sue Kay

Randy Walker has been active in the San Francisco music scene for over 15 years, singing in various bands and working at our beloved Amoeba records, but it was only when he adopted the female persona befitting of his songwriting that he began gaining recognition. For his alter ego, Walker adopted the name of his cousin, an ex-con who served time for domestic terrorism and threatening to blow up her boyfriend with a pipe bomb. As Carletta Sue Kay, Walker is a sight to behold, wig askew, makeup smeared, and dress disheveled. But what comes out of Carletta’s mouth is anything but messy. Ranging from torch songs to pure rock and roll, Walker’s voice soars clearly and beautifully, singing of love and heartbreak in a truly touching way. (Haley Zaremba)

With the Young Lovers, Moon Honey, Queen Crescent

8pm, $10

The Rickshaw Stop

155 Fell, SF

(415) 861-2011

www.rickshawstop.com

 

 

Astonishing Animation

If you have yet to experience the mystical and beautiful worlds built by Hayao Miyazaki, your inner child is missing out. From the lush countryside where a magical Totoro roams, to an ethereal castle that floats high in the clouds, to a bustling bathhouse filled with both good and bad spirits, Miyazaki’s films bring together stunning animation and sublime storytelling that’s entertaining for both children and adults. This week, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts begins its monthlong tribute to Japanese animation with a retrospective of the most influential films by Studio Ghibli and its founder. After 50 years in animation — and a well-deserved Oscar — the Japanese animator and director announced his retirement (for the third time) last month on the eve of the US release of his The Wind Rises. While the films are crucial to Japanese culture, with countless references to Japanese mythology, they also serve as social commentary on the environment, technology, and gender roles. Explore the astonishing realms and characters that have captivated audiences for centuries, beginning with Miyazaki’s debut film, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. (Laura B. Childs)

7:30pm, $10

Check YBCA’s website for additional showtimes

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

701 Mission, SF

(415) 978 2787

www.ybca.org

 

 

 

San Francisco Ballet

This is San Francisco Ballet’s last program of the season, and one that illustrates why some of us still love ballet the way we do. The intellectual rigor and deep musicality of George Balanchine’s Agon remains as breathtaking as it was when premiered in 1957. In 1983, Jerome Robbins — who has been called the greatest American-born choreographer — also took the music of his time and made it his own. In Glass Pieces, named after its composer but perhaps also for its luminous transparency, you see the music come to life by giving it a swing that is quintessentially Robbins. In between the two, Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson programmed Mr. B’s Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet. The work is musically intriguing, and gorgeously choreographed. You need first-class dancers to make it work. SFB has them. (Rita Felciano)

May 1, 3, 6, 9, 8pm; May 3 and 11, 2pm; May 7, 7:30pm; $15-$340

War Memorial Opera House, SF

(415) 865-2000

www.sfballet.org

 

FRIDAY 2

 

Marcus Shelby: The Legacy of Duke Ellington: 50 Years of Swing!

Put up your dukes: Shakespeare’s got them, and so does jazz. They come together in this glorious tribute to Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington by Marcus Shelby and his 16-piece jazz orchestra. The two-part program begins with selections from the incomparable composer’s full half-century of music making, featuring guest appearances by singer Faye Carol and violinist Mathew Szemela. Then, in the second half,Shelby and his orchestra join forces with members of the California Shakespeare Theater, performing Such Sweet Thunder, Ellington and celebrated collaborator Billy Strayhorn’s 12-part musical suite inspired by the woks of the Bard. (Robert Avila)

May 2, 8pm, $22 and up

Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley

(510) 642-9988

www.calperformances.org

 

SATURDAY 3


Cinco de Mayo Block Party

It’s that time of year again when the United States celebrates a Mexican holiday that Mexico doesn’t celebrate. Where Americans see the date as a sort of Mexican Fourth of July, Mexican-Americans observe Cinco de Mayo to honor their heritage. In their 152 years, the Cinco de Mayo festivities have continuously brought together Americans and Mexicans from a variety of communities and backgrounds. This year’s celebration will take place in the heart of the Mission District on Valencia Street between 21st and 24th streets. The block party will include yummy Latino foods, exotic music and dance as well as colorful artistry for purchase. Enjoy the sunny Sunday with this vibrant community that has shaped our city’s culture. (Childs)

10am-6pm, free

Valencia between 21st and 24th streets, SF

(415) 206-7752

www.sfcincodemayo.com

 

Trainwreck Cabaret

One part comedy show, one part burlesque night, one part off-color magic showcase, Trainwreck Cabaret bills itself as “San Francisco’s most unusual variety show,” a wild, woolly mashup of singers, dancers, and all kinds of other performers from the city’s creative underground; the idea is to take the vibe of old vaudeville and give it a dark (darker?) modern twist. Hire a babysitter, grab an early drink nearby, and enter the charmingly divey Dark Room Theater with zero expectations — this monthly showcase is the place to be for a good, weird time. Who says the Mission’s all yuppies these days? (Emma Silvers)

10pm, $20

Dark Room Theater

2263 Mission, SF

www.darkroomsf.com

 

SUNDAY 4

 

Yerba Buena Gardens Festival

If you tire of the Powell and Market street performers — no disrespect, that dude on the buckets is no joke — ’tis the season to wiggle over a few blocks and check out the impressive talent on display at this year’s Yerba Buena Gardens festival. Today’s kick-off concert features a 10-time Grammy winner, Latin jazz pianist Eddie Palmieri, and his Salsa Orchestra; Palmieri is 77 years young and has been putting out records since 1962. The rest of the fest, which runs through Oct. 26, includes a wide array of performers, with the next few weeks bringing San Jose Taiko, Pacific Mambo Orchestra, Ensemble Mik Nawooj, André Thieffy and Zydeco Magic, John Santos Sextet, and more to the stage. Pack a lunch and soak up the sounds. (Cheryl Eddy)

1pm, free

Yerba Buena Gardens

760 Howard, SF

www.ybgfestival.org

 

 

 

Urban Air Market

Hayes Valley welcomes the Urban Air Market for the first time this year. Explore over 100 booths selling sustainable men’s, women’s, and children’s apparel, eco-friendly art and home decor, and organic beauty and health products. What’s more, in celebration of its 10th anniversary, the sustainable marketplace will have live music and creative performances, DIY demos and “re-fashion” workshops. Whether you’re on the hunt for a special Mother’s Day gift, looking for a unique gift for yourself, or just in need of an outdoor stroll, this urban block party is the perfect lazy Sunday afternoon affair. (Childs)

11am-6pm, free

Octavia at Hayes, SF

www.urbanairmarket.com

 

 

 

How Weird Street Faire

This street fair, an electronic music dance party that has long been one of our favorite events in San Francisco, returns for its 15th annual incarnation, bigger and better than ever. With a tip of its space helmet to the date it landed on this year — “May the Fourth be with you,” the unofficial Star Wars Day — the theme for this year is How Weird in Outer Space. So come as your favorite alien or space cadet, or come in good old-fashioned raver ware, but just come — because this is a seven-stage dance party not to be missed. (Steven T. Jones)

Noon-8pm, $10 requested donation (gets you a Magic Sticker good for reduced-price drinks)

Howard at 2nd St, SF

www.howweird.org

 

MONDAY 5

 

Ingrid Michaelson

Picking up the piano at age four and attending private music schools throughout her upbringing, Ingrid Michaelson’s entire life has revolved around music. Now, at 34, it shows. Michaelson has perfected the art of the pop hook and disarming lyricism. After she worked tirelessly to self-record, self-promote, and even co-release all her own work, Michaelson’s DIY ethic finally got her noticed on the Internet in 2006. Thanks to her insanely catchy and cleverly tender “The Way I Am,” Michaelson found her way to the spotlight and continues to churn out charming sing-alongs that are impossible to dislike. Her songs have been featured in virtually every popular TV show, and you may be surprised at just how many of her songs you’re familiar with. Her charged, confident live act is not to be missed. (Zaremba)

With Storyman, The Alternate Routes

7:30pm, $29.50

Fox Theater

1807 Telegraph, Oakland

(510) 302-2250

www.thefoxoakland.com

 

TUESDAY 6


The Pains of Being Pure at Heart

With a name like The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, it’s difficult not to regress into your angsty 16-year-old self. The band was born in the time of MySpace, putting out songs with longer titles than length, making them relatable and, better yet, quotable — perfect for scribbling in notebook margins or typing into AIM away messages. The Pains have grown from an awkward trio playing drum beats on an iPod into a solid indie foursome since Kip Berman and Alex Naidus formed the band based on a mutual reverence for Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana. Fun fact: Keyboard and backup vocalist Peggy Wang doubles as one of the pioneering editors at BuzzFeed. The indie band veers into shoegaze with its lulling boy-girl vocals. The Pains are playing at the Independent just a week before the release of Days of Abandon, so expect several songs from the band’s upcoming third album. (Childs)

8pm, $15

The Independent

628 Divisadero, SF

(415) 771-1421

www.theindependentsf.com

 


Atomic Bomb! The Music of William Onyeabor with David Byrne

Having recently been re-issued via Luaka Bop, featured from NPR to Vice, and championed by Damon Albarn, now is the opportune time for Nigerian musician William Onyeabor to rise from (near hoax-like) obscurity and revel in belated fame. [See: Rodriguez.] Just one problem: a born-again Christian, Onyeabor has cast out and disowned the synthesizer-driven (and occasionally politically minded) Afro-funk dance tracks he created in the ’70s and ’80s. But to celebrate the music, a cover band featuring David Byrne, Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor, Bloc Party’s Kele Okereke, and LCD Soundsystem drummer Pat Mahoney should do it justice. (Ryan Prendiville)

With The Lijadu Sisters, Joshua Redman, Sinkane, Money Mark, and more

8pm, $32.50-45

The Warfield

982 Market, SF

(415) 345-0900

www.thewarfieldtheatre.com

 

The Guardian listings deadline is two weeks prior to our Wednesday publication date. To submit an item for consideration, please include the title of the event, a brief description of the event, date and time, venue name, street address (listing cross streets only isn’t sufficient), city, telephone number readers can call for more information, telephone number for media, and admission costs. Send information to Listings, the Guardian, 225 Bush, 17th Flr., SF, CA 94105; or e-mail (paste press release into e-mail body — no attachments, please) to listings@sfbg.com. Digital photos may be submitted in jpeg format; the image must be at least 240 dpi and four inches by six inches in size. We regret we cannot accept listings over the phone.

Theater Listings: April 30 – May 6, 2014

Michael Redmond
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Stage listings are compiled by Guardian staff. Performance times may change; call venues to confirm. Reviewers are Robert Avila, Rita Felciano, and Nicole Gluckstern. Submit items for the listings at listings@sfbg.com.

THEATER

OPENING

“Des Voix: Found in Translation Biennial 2014” Various venues, SF; www.desvoixfestival.com. Prices vary. May 1-25. In addition to Communiqué N°10 (listed in Ongoing, below), this festival of contemporary French playwrights and cinema includes four new play translations, a “New Play Nightclub,” film screenings, and more. Presented by Playwrights Foundation, Tides Theatre, Cutting Ball Theater, French International School, and the French Consulate of San Francisco.

“DIVAfest” Exit Theatre, 156 Eddy, SF; www.divafest.info. Prices and showtimes vary. May 1-24. This 13th annual festival celebrates the work of women artists, with performances including the premiere of Rat Girl (adapted from the memoir by rocker Kristin Hersh), Margery Fairchild’s ballet comedy The Pas De Quatre, a reading by acclaimed poet Diane di Prima, and more.

Dracula Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; sfdracula.blogspot.com. $35. Opens Thu/1, 8pm. Runs Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through May 31. Kellerson Productions presents a new adaptation of the Bram Stoker classic.

Du Barry Was a Lady Eureka Theatre, 215 Jackson, SF; www.42ndstmoon.org. $25-75. Previews Wed/30-Thu/1, 7pm; Fri/2, 8pm. Opens Sat/3, 6pm. Runs Wed-Thu, 7pm; Fri, 8pm; Sat, 6pm (also May 10 and 17, 1pm); Sun, 3pm. Through May 18. 42nd Street Moon presents Cole Porter’s saucy musical comedy, with comedian and writer Bruce Vilanch starring.

Romeo and Juliet Phoenix Theatre, 414 Mason, Ste 601, SF; www.eventbrite.com. $20. Previews Thu/1, 8pm. Opens Fri/2, 8pm. Runs Thu-Sat, 8pm; May 11 and 24, 3pm. Through May 24. Ninjaz of Drama performs Shakespeare’s tragic romance.

Seminar San Francisco Playhouse, 450 Post, Second Flr, SF; www.sfplayhouse.org. $20-100. Previews Wed/30-Fri/2, 8pm. Opens Sat/3, 8pm. Runs Tue-Thu, 7pm; Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 3pm); May 18 and June 1 and 8, 2pm. Through June 14. San Francisco Playhouse performs Theresa Rebeck’s biting comedy.

Waxing West Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th St, SF; www.brava.org. $20. Opens Thu/1, 8pm. Runs Thu-Sat, 8pm (Sat/3, show at 3pm); Sun, 3pm. Through May 18. Brava! For Women in the Arts and RasaNova Theater present the West Coast premiere of Saviana Stanescu’s tale of a Romanian mail-order bride haunted by her country’s past.

BAY AREA

Nantucket Marsh Berkeley MainStage, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. $25-100 (all tickets include a picnic dinner). Opens Sat/3, 7pm. Runs Thu and Sat, 7pm. Through June 14. Acclaimed solo perfomer Mark Kenward presents his “haunting yet hilarious” autobiographical show about growing up on Nantucket.

ONGOING

Communiqué N°10 Exit on Taylor, 277 Taylor, SF; www.cuttingball.com. $10-50. Opens Thu/1, 7:30pm. Runs Thu, 7:30; Fri-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Sun, 5pm. Through May 25. Cutting Ball Theater closes its 15th season with the American premiere of Samuel Gallet’s drama inspired by recent racial tensions in France.

E-i-E-i-OY! In Bed with the Farmer’s Daughter NOHSpace, 2840 Mariposa, SF; www.vivienstraus.com. $20. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Through May 10. Vivien Straus performs her autobiographical solo show.

Feisty Old Jew Marsh San Francisco Main Stage, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $25-100. Sat, 8pm; Sun, 7pm. Starting May 17, performance schedule changes to Sat-Sun, 5pm. Extended through July 13. Charlie Varon performs his latest solo show, a fictional comedy about “a 20th century man living in a 21st century city.”

Foodies! The Musical Shelton Theater, 533 Sutter, SF; www.foodiesthemusical.com. $32-34. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. AWAT Productions presents Morris Bobrow’s musical comedy revue all about food.

Pearls Over Shanghai Hypnodrome Theatre, 575 10th St, SF; www.thrillpeddlers.com. $30-35. Thu-Sat, 8pm. Through May 31. Five years ago, Thrillpeddlers breathed new life into a glitter-dusted piece of Sixties flotsam, beautifully reimagining the Cockettes’ raunchy mock-operetta Pearls Over Shanghai (in collaboration with several surviving members of San Francisco’s storied acid-drag troupe) and running it for a whopping 22 months. Written by Cockette Link Martin as a carefree interpretation of a 1926 Broadway play, the baldly stereotyped Shanghai Gesture, it was the perfectly lurid vehicle for irreverence in all directions. It’s back in this revival, once again helmed by artistic director Russell Blackwood with musical direction by Cockette and local favorite Scrumbly Koldewyn. But despite the frisson of featuring some original-original cast members — including “Sweet Pam” Tent (who with Koldewyn also contributes some new dialogue) and Rumi Missabu (regally reprising the role of Madam Gin Sling) — there’s less fire the second time around as the production straddles the line between carefully slick and appropriately sloppy. Nevertheless, there are some fine musical numbers and moments throughout. Among these, Zelda Koznofsky, Birdie-Bob Watt, and Jesse Cortez consistently hit high notes as the singing Andrews Sisters-like trio of Americans thrown into white slavery; Bonni Suval’s Lottie Wu is a fierce vixen; and Noah Haydon (as the sultry Petrushka) is a class act. Koldewyn’s musical direction and piano accompaniment, meanwhile, provide strong and sure momentum as well as exquisite atmosphere. (Avila)

The Provoked Wife Fort Mason Center, Southside Theater, SF; www.generationtheatre.com. $15-35. Thu/1-Sat/3, 8pm; Sun/4, 3pm. Generation Theatre performs Sir John Vanbrugh’s Restoration comedy.

Shit & Champagne Rebel, 1772 Market, SF; shitandchampagne.eventbrite.com. $25. Fri-Sat, 8pm. Open-ended. D’Arcy Drollinger is Champagne White, bodacious blond innocent with a wicked left hook in this cross-dressing ’70s-style white-sploitation flick, played out live on Rebel’s intimate but action-packed barroom stage. Written by Drollinger and co-directed with Laurie Bushman (with high-flying choreography by John Paolillo, Drollinger, and Matthew Martin), this high-octane camp send-up of a favored formula comes dependably stocked with stock characters and delightfully protracted by a convoluted plot (involving, among other things, a certain street drug that’s triggered an epidemic of poopy pants) — all of it played to the hilt by an excellent cast that includes Martin as Dixie Stampede, an evil corporate dominatrix at the head of some sinister front for world domination called Mal*Wart; Alex Brown as Detective Jack Hammer, rough-hewn cop on the case and ambivalent love interest; Rotimi Agbabiaka as Sergio, gay Puerto Rican impresario and confidante; Steven Lemay as Brandy, high-end calf model and Champagne’s (much) beloved roommate; and Nancy French as Rod, Champagne’s doomed fiancé. Sprawling often literally across two buxom acts, the show maintains admirable consistency: The energy never flags and the brow stays decidedly low. (Avila)

Sleeping Cutie: A Fractured Fairy Tale Musical Thick House, 1695 18th St, SF; sleepingcutiemusical.tix.com. $30-40. Thu-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Though May 11. Off a Cliff Productions and PlayGround present Diane Sampson and Doug Katsaros’ world-premiere musical.

The Speakeasy Undisclosed location (ticket buyers receive a text with directions), SF; www.thespeakeasysf.com. $70 (gambling chips, $5-10 extra; after-hours admission, $10). Thu-Sat, 7:40, 7:50, and 8pm admittance times. Extended through May 24. Boxcar Theater’s most ambitious project to date is also one of the more involved and impressively orchestrated theatrical experiences on any Bay Area stage just now. An immersive time-tripping environmental work, The Speakeasy takes place in an “undisclosed location” (in fact, a wonderfully redesigned version of the company’s Hyde Street theater complex) amid a period-specific cocktail lounge, cabaret, and gambling den inhabited by dozens of Prohibition-era characters and scenarios that unfold around an audience ultimately invited to wander around at will. At one level, this is an invitation to pure dress-up social entertainment. But there are artistic aims here too. Intentionally designed (by co-director and creator Nick A. Olivero with co-director Peter Ruocco) as a fractured super-narrative — in which audiences perceive snatches of overheard stories rather than complete arcs, and can follow those of their own choosing — there’s a way the piece becomes specifically and ever more subtly about time itself. This is most pointedly demonstrated in the opening vignettes in the cocktail lounge, where even the ticking of Joe’s Clock Shop (the “cover” storefront for the illicit 1920s den inside) can be heard underscoring conversations (deeply ironic in historical hindsight) about war, loss, and regained hope for the future. For a San Francisco currently gripped by a kind of historical double-recurrence of the roaring Twenties and dire Thirties at once, The Speakeasy is not a bad place to sit and ponder the simulacra of our elusive moment. (Avila)

The Suit ACT’s Geary Theater, 415 Geary, SF; www.act-sf.org. $20-120. Opens Wed/30, 8pm. Runs Wed-Sat, 8pm (also Sat and May 7 and 14, 2pm); Sun, 2pm (May 18, show at 1pm); Tue, 7pm (May 13, show at 8pm). Through May 18. ACT performs Peter Brook, Marie Hélène Estienne, and Franck Krawcyzk’s music-infused drama about betrayal and resentment adapted from the short story by South African author Can Themba.

Tipped & Tipsy Marsh Studio Theater, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $20-50. Sat, 5pm; Sun, 7pm. Extended through May 17. Last fall’s San Francisco Fringe Festival began on a high note with Jill Vice’s witty and deft solo, Tipped & Tipsy, and the Best of Fringe winner is now enjoying another round at solo theater outpost the Marsh. Without set or costume changes, Vice (who developed the piece with Dave Dennison and David Ford) brings the querulous regulars of a skid-row bar to life both vividly and with real quasi-Depression-Era charm. She’s a protean physical performer, seamlessly inhabiting the series of oddball outcasts lined up each day at Happy’s before bartender Candy — two names as loaded as the clientele. After some hilarious expert summarizing of the dos and don’ts of bar culture, a story unfolds around a battered former boxer and his avuncular relationship with Candy, who tries to cut him off in light of his clearly deteriorating health. Her stance causes much consternation, and even fear, in his barfly associates, while provoking a dangerous showdown with the bar’s self-aggrandizing sleazeball owner, Rico. With a love of the underdog and strong writing and acting at its core, Tipsy breezes by, leaving a superlative buzz. (Avila)

The World’s Funniest Bubble Show Marsh San Francisco, 1062 Valencia, SF; www.themarsh.org. $8-11. Sun, 11am. Extended through May 25. The popular, kid-friendly show by Louis Pearl (aka “The Amazing Bubble Man”) returns to the Marsh.

BAY AREA

Fences Marin Theatre Company, 397 Miller, Mill Valley; www.marintheatre.org. $37-58. Tue and Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat/3 and May 10, 2pm); Wed, 7:30pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Through May 11. Marin Theatre Company performs August Wilson’s Pulitzer- and Tony-winning drama, with an all-star cast of Bay Area talent: Carl Lumbly, Steven Anthony Jones, and Margo Hall.

The Letters Harry’s UpStage, Aurora Theatre Company, 2081 Addison, Berk; www.auroratheatre.org. $28-32. Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2pm. Through June 1. Aurora Theatre Company showcases its new second-stage performance space with John W. Lowell’s suspenseful thriller.

Not a Genuine Black Man Osher Studio, 2055 Center, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $30-45. Wed, 7pm (no shows May 14, 21, or 28); Thu-Sat, 8pm (no shows Sat/3 or May 9-10). Through May 31. Brian Copeland brings his acclaimed, long-running solo show to Berkeley Rep for a 10th anniversary limited run.

Smash Dragon Theatre, 2120 Broadway, Redwood City; www.dragonproductions.net. $30. Thu/1-Sat/3, 8pm; Sun/4, 2pm. Dragon Theatre performs Jeffrey Hatcher’s political comedy.

Tribes Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Roda Theatre, 2015 Addison, Berk; www.berkeleyrep.org. $29-99. Tue and Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Wed and Sun, 7pm (also Sun, 2pm; no 2pm show May 18). Through May 18. Berkeley Rep performs Nina Raine’s family drama about a young deaf man who comes of age.

The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee Julia Morgan Theater, 2640 College, Berk; www.berkeleyplayhouse.org. $18-60. Thu/1-Fri/2, 7pm; Sat/3, 1 and 6pm; Sun/4, noon and 5pm. Berkeley Playhouse performs the Tony-winning musical comedy.

Wittenberg Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison, Berk; www.auroratheatre.org. $32-60. Tue, 7pm; Wed-Sat, 8pm; Sun, 2 and 7pm. Extended through May 11. Aurora Theatre Company performs David Davalos’ comedy about reason versus faith.

PERFORMANCE/DANCE

“Acting Out: For the Health of It” Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th St, SF; bcation.org/actingout2014. Thu/1, VIP reception 6-7pm; show 7:15-9pm. $35-75. Breast Cancer Action benefits from this variety show featuring author Peggy Orenstein, the Sarah Bush Dance Project, comedian Irene Tu, bluegrass band Beauty Operators, and host Tania Katan.

“Baile en la Calle: The Mural Dances” Precita Eyes Mural Center, 2981 24th St, and Balmy Alley, SF; www.brava.org. Sun/4, tours at 11am, noon, 1pm, and 2pm. Free. Epiphany Productions, CuicacallDance Company, Cuicacalli Escuela de Danza, and Loco Bloco offer dance interpretations of the murals along the Mission’s historic Balmy Alley.

“Bay Area National Dance Week” Various locations; www.bayareadance.org. Wed/30-Sun/4. Free. This year’s theme is “iconic dance moves from pop culture,” and includes film screenings, free classes, outdoor dance performances, and more.

Caroline Lugo and Carolé Acuña’s Ballet Flamenco Peña Pachamama, 1630 Powell, SF; www.carolinalugo.com. Sun/4, May 10, 17, and 25, 6:15pm; May 11, 1pm. $15-19. Flamenco performance by the mother-daughter dance company, featuring live musicians.

Company C Contemporary Ballet ODC Theater, 3153 17th St, SF; www.odcdance.org. Thu/1-Sat/3, 8pm. $25-48. Also May 8-10, 8pm; May 11, 2pm, $25-48, Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic, Walnut Creek; www.lesherartscenter.org. With two world premieres by Maurice Causey and Charles Moulton.

“Dancing on the Edge of the World” Dance Mission, 3316 24th St, SF; www.dancemission.com. Fri/2, 8pm; Sat/3-Sun/4, 3pm (also Sun/4, 7pm). $15-20. Grrrl Brigade performs an homage to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.

“Dirty Little Ditties” Phoenix Theatre, 414 Mason, SF; www.brownpapertickets.com. Fri/2-Sat/3, 8pm. $20. Miss Jane Aquilina and Miss Robusta Capp perform a show that promises to be “not your mother’s cabaret.”

“The Eye of Horus” Jessie Square, 736 Mission, SF; www.dancersgroup.org. Wed/30 and Sat/3, 12:30pm. Free. Dancers’ Group and Yerba Buena Gardens Festival present a new, site-specific work by Sara Shelton Mann.

Feinstein’s at the Nikko 222 Mason, SF; www.feinsteinssf.com. This week: Jeremy Jordan, Thu/1-Fri/2, 8pm; Sat/3-Sun/4, 7pm, $45-60.

“Five Funny Females” Great Star Theater, 636 Jackson, SF; 5funnyfemales.eventbrite.com. Fri/2-Sat/3, 8 and 10pm. $20. A different bill of five female comedians at each show.

“Leonard Cohen Love Fest” Mechanics’ Institute Library and Chess Room, 57 Post, SF; www.milibrary.org. Wed/30, 7pm. $10-20. A capella choir Conspiracy of Beards and author-musician Sylvie Simmons pay tribute to the music of Leonard Cohen.

“The Lusty Month of May” Martuni’s, 4 Valencia, SF; www.tomshawtrio.com. Sat/3, 7pm. $10. Vocalist Karen Hirst salures spring, the Great American Songbook, and more, with singer-pianist Tom Shaw, drummer Roberta Drake, and violinist Donny Lobree.

“Magic at the Rex” Hotel Rex, 562 Sutter, SF; www.magicattherex.com. Sat, 8pm. Ongoing. $25. Magic and mystery with Adam Sachs and mentalist Sebastian Boswell III.

“Out of Line Improv” Stage Werx, 446 Valencia, SF; outoflineimprov.brownpapertickets.com. Sat, 10:30pm. $12. Ongoing. A new, completely improvised show every week.

“Purple: A Circus Tribute to Prince” Circus Center, 755 Frederick, SF; purpleshow.eventbrite.com. Sat/3, 7:30pm. $15-20. Circus acts set to Prince hits like “1999” and “Raspberry Beret.”

“Rotunda Dance Series” San Francisco City Hall, 1 Carlton B. Goodlett Place, SF; www.dancersgroup.org. Fri/2, noon. Free. This month: La Tania Baile Flamenco performs dances from Spain.

“San Francisco Comedy College” Purple Onion at Kells, 530 Jackson, SF; www.purpleonionatkells.com. $5-10. “New Talent Show,” Wed-Thu, 7. Ongoing. “The Cellar Dwellers,” stand-up comedy, Wed-Thu, 8:15pm and Fri-Sat, 7:30pm. Ongoing.

“Shiner” Mojo Theater, 2940 16th St, SF; www.faultlinetheater.com. Thu/1-Sat/3, 8pm; Sun/4, 7pm. $10-20. FaultLine Theater performs Christian Durso’s grunge-era drama.

“Terminator Too: Judgment Play” DNA Lounge, 373 11th St, SF; www.dnalounge.com. Thu/1, 9pm. $25-50. The creators of Point Break Live! take on James Cameron’s 1991 sci-fi classic, with an audience member picked on the night of the show to embody Schwarzenegger’s iconic role.

“Yerba Buena Gardens Festival” Yerba Buena Gardens, 760 Howard, SF; www.ybgfestival.org. Sun/4, 1pm. Free. Eddie Palmieri Salsa Orchestra kicks off the annual outdoor performance festival, which runs through Oct 26.

BAY AREA

“Cinderella” Lesher Center for the Arts, Margaret Lesher Theatre, 1601 Civic, Walnut Creek; www.fantasyforum.org. Thu/1-Fri/2, 9:30 and 11am (also Fri/1, 7pm); Sat/3, 10am, noon, 2pm, and 4pm; Sun/4, 11am and 1pm. $14. Fantasy Forum Actors Ensemble performs a family-friendly musical based on the fairy tale, with audience participation encouraged.

“Dance on Center” Osher Studio, 2055 Center, Berk; www.dlkdance.com. Sat/3, 8pm. $15-25. Kathryn Roszak’s Danse Lumiere kicks off a new series with dance works by Lissa Resnick, Dalia Rawson, and Kathryn Roszak, plus a film by Amy Seiwert.

“Doapcoev: A Town Where Dancing Was Not Allowed” Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts, 1428 Alice, Oakl; www.brownpapertickets.com. Sun/4, 3pm. $15-25. Dimensions Dance Theater and Rites of Passage present this dance performance inspired by Footloose.

“The Fifth String: Ziryab’s Passage to Cordoba” Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California, 1433 Madison, Oakl; www.goldenthread.org. Fri/2-Sat/3, 7pm; Sun/4, 3pm. $15-22. Also May 15-17, 8pm; May 18, 3pm, Brava Theatre Center, 2781 24th St, SF. Golden Thread continues its “Islam 101” performance series with this family-friendly play with live music.

“Lilith, The Night Demon in One Lewd Act” Hoytt Theater, Osher Marin JCC, 200 N. San Pedro, San Rafael; www.marinjcc.org. Thu/1, 7:30pm. $39-49. Also Sat/3, 8pm, $30-35, JCC of the East Bay, 1414 Walnut, Berk; www.jcceastbay.org. Also Sun/4, 3pm, $39-49, Menlo-Atherton High School, 555 Middlefield, Atherton; www.thecenteratma.org. “The bawdy alternate Jewish story of creation,” presented in folk-opera form.

“MarshJam Improv Comedy Show” Marsh Berkeley, 2120 Allston, Berk; www.themarsh.org. Fri, 8pm. Ongoing. $10. Improv comedy with local legends and drop-in guests.

“Pele Ma” Hamilton Amphitheater Park, Hamilton Parkway, Novato; www.hulaon.org. Sat/3, 1-3pm. $10. Hula performance directed by Kumu Hula Shawna Alapa’i and featuring the students of Halau Hula Na Pua O Ka La’akea.

“Piñata Dance Ritual” Shawl Anderson Dance Center, 2704 Alcatraz, Berk; www.lizboubion.org. Sun/4, 4pm. $5-50. Piñata Dance Collective presents this performance to benefit artistic director Liz Boubion’s 350 Xochi Quetzal Artist Residency. *

 

Mr. Nice Guy

Michael Redmond
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1
Mr. Nice Guy

cheryl@sfbg.com

FILM Almost 10 years ago, a sprawling music doc entitled Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey kick-started the careers of Canadian filmmakers Sam Dunn and Scot McFadyen. Since 2005, the duo has worked on films about Rush, Iron Maiden, and Motorhead; they’ve also collaborated on a doc about Satan and will soon take on a project about “a very important heavy metal band who shall temporarily remain nameless.” Their current feature adds a third co-director, Reginald Harkema, for the colorful story of Alice Cooper, née Vincent Furnier, who’s as famous for songs like 1972’s “School’s Out” as he is for his horror-meets-vaudeville stage shtick.

Though Super Duper Alice Cooper retraces tales that will be familiar to anyone who’s read Cooper’s autobiographies or seen his Behind the Music episode, the directors tried to make the film as visually dynamic as possible, tapping old footage and animation and avoiding any talking heads. On the eve of the film’s premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, and just ahead of its local screenings, I spoke to them about their approach.

SF Bay Guardian You’ve made a number of rock docs. What’s different about Super Duper Alice Cooper?

Scot McFadyen We’d finished doing Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage (2010), and we were at an awards ceremony in London, where we were approached by Shep [Gordon, Alice Cooper’s longtime manager] about doing a doc on Alice. We decided that we’d be into it if we could do it in this sort of “doc opera,” highly visual way without talking heads. We thought that would be a really fun challenge. He’s such a cultural icon — I think it’s important for people to realize how much effect he’s had since the early 1970s, and how much an influence he’s been as a pioneering shock rocker.

SFBG Can you elaborate on “doc opera”?

Reginald Harkema The idea came because Sam and Scot have cut their teeth on documentaries, whereas I come in from a feature-drama side. I said, why don’t we take the approach of mythologizing our character? Why don’t we take the usual documentary material — TV appearances and magazine spreads, concerts and photos — and marry it with a rock opera concept? And Alice’s music is perfect for that because he’s very self-referential. His music became the soundtrack to his own rock opera.

SFBG Cooper has been open about his past and this film doesn’t contain any shocking new revelations. How did you strategize around that? 

SM Alice is such a showman. He does a lot of interviews, and we hear the same stories over and over. We did, like, 40 hours of interviews with him just trying to get him to go beyond the surface. And it was great to talk with [original Alice Cooper band bassist and Cooper childhood friend] Dennis Dunaway, because he was a big part of creating that character and bringing the band to life.

RH Also, when we were talking to Bernie Taupin, he wanted to tell the real story of his experiences with Alice, which involved cocaine and freebasing, which he felt a little bit guilty about bringing Alice into. And Alice has been very protective of that part of his past being revealed until now.

SFBG How did you choose your interview subjects? 

RH We didn’t want to have any journalistic voices in the film, or anyone observing Alice from an analytical point of view. We treated it more like a drama, in the sense that people enter the story as Alice moves through his life. So obviously, Dennis at the outset, meeting Shep Gordon, and eventually we hear from Elton John, who was really blown away by his concert at the Hollywood Bowl. We really wanted to talk to the pivotal characters in terms of Alice’s development as an artist.

SFBG Coincidentally, the doc Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon is also about to hit theaters. Have you seen it?

SM Yes! It’s funny, because you’ll see there are a couple of stories in there that are similar to our film — and what’s great is that they’re completely different in his doc than in Alice’s doc. It really shows you how everyone’s memories are affected from that period. By the end, [Supermensch] is much more about Shep and his life than about him and Alice, but there are some moments of crossover for sure.

SFBG Supermensch is directed by Mike Myers, which leads to the obvious question: why no Wayne’s World (1992) clips in your movie?

SM We’d seen the docs about Alice in the past, but it seemed like the most Shakespearean, dramatic moment of his life was when he stepped onstage sober. And that was in 1986. That was the point where this Jekyll and Hyde character was able to overcome his demons. Yeah, he went on and did “Poison” and had a number one hit with that, and then did Wayne’s World, but that was after the endpoint of our story.

SFBG Ending the movie in the 1980s also allows you to avoid going into Alice’s conservative political views. 

RH He’s pretty apolitical, really — he’s a rich guy who lives in Arizona. He’s no Ted Nugent. But the goal of the story was to talk about how this kid, Vincent Furnier, transformed into the character of Alice Cooper. If you ask any performer, especially vocalists, they’ll tell you they go through some sort of transition before they go onstage. I think what makes Alice unique is that he becomes this character. And so while we didn’t necessarily want to touch on the political side of his life, we did want to show that this was a nice Christian kid from suburban Phoenix who became the godfather of shock rock. It was important to us to paint that picture. *

SUPER DUPER ALICE COOPER

Thu/1, 7 and 9:30pm, $7.50-10

Balboa Theater

3630 Balboa, SF

www.cinemasf.com

 

Thu/1 and May 8, 7pm, $7-11

Smith Rafael Film Center

1118 Fourth St, San Rafael

www.cafilm.org

Opening up

Leo Herrera
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0
Opening up

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE “Location, location, location” is real estate’s mantra, as those of us who keep running up against it know only too well. But location has also become essential to dance, especially for artists who want to forego the theater and make the outside world their stage.

For the last six years, Dancers’ Group, the Bay Area’s dance service organization, has sponsored the ONSITE series, weaving free dance performances into the urban fabric. Recent events have showcased Amara Tabor-Smith’s He Moved Swiftly (various locations), Jo Kreiter’s Niagara Falling (Seventh and Market streets), and Erika Chong Shuch’s Love Everywhere (City Hall Rotunda). Sara Shelton Mann’s The Eye of Horus, performed in Jessie Square, is the latest addition. She could not have chosen a better location.

Gently terraced and surrounded on three sides by glass and steel — but also the warmth of the old bricks of St. Patrick Church and the newer ones of the Contemporary Jewish Museum — Jessie Square opens itself to the greenery of Yerba Buena Gardens. The totality suggests an urban environment in which disparate perspectives (nature and culture, the past and the present, private and public spaces) harmoniously bump against each other.

In other words, Jessie Square was a perfect stage for Mann to send her dancer-disciples into a 40-minute performance in which they revealed different aspects of themselves, inspired by the way the Egyptian god Horus embodied multiple identities.

Each of the four — Christine Bonansea, Jorge de Hoyos, Jesse Hewit, and Sara Yassky — had developed a multi-sectional solo that, according to the preperformance information, was based on archetypes as derived from Caroline Myss’ book Sacred Contracts. Whatever the generating forces for these solos were, in performance they emerged and receded into the much larger activities at Jessie Square, the whole becoming a kind of moving tableau vivant. The dancers transformed lunchtime crowd actions — eating, talking, strolling, and waiting — into something beyond the commonplace. They injected poetry into daily life.

Generous and welcoming as these types of performances are, I personally miss the more intimate and more focused encounters that inside spaces offer. Mann and production designer David Szlasa stepped in with props or directions as needed. In a favorite moment, Szlasa’s breadcrumbs coaxed a flock of pigeons into a procession across the square. Mann pulled Bonansea up to her full height to send her off on an imaginary tightrope; she also shushed (or at least I think she did) Hewit’s screaming tantrum. Later on, when he sat immobile in a beggar’s pose, she brought him what I first saw as a fishing rod. It was a whip.

Eye is full of small incidents — some touching, some hilarious, some nonsensical — controlled by planning and a lot of serendipity. Hewit tried a shoulder stand, holding a carnation. De Hoyos raced along a diagonal as if shot from a bow. Yassick played what looked like a solitary game of bocce ball. Interspersing these lighter incidents were moments of anguish, lack of stability, and a sense of mortality. At one point or another, just about everyone looked dead as the plank that de Hoyos dragged around.

Bonansea bitterly wept as she put her clown makeup on; her mad laughter while racing the square became monstrous. Yassky, apparently in severe pain, rubbed a balloon against her belly and approached a passerby who politely put his phone away to acknowledge her.

Sometimes, the dancers disappeared in the crowd. I had lost sight of de Hoyos when someone pointed him out leaping and gesticulating on top of the parking garage. If there were any narrative suggestions, it was the ongoing give and take between de Hoyos and Mann. Or perhaps it was Bonansea marching up to de Hoyos, who had dropped to the ground after his lovely ballad fragment. In her best French rhetorical manner, the petite performer started a discourse (on, among other things, mortality) and the corpse in front of her. She finally decided that theory had run into reality and proceeded with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

If Bonansea was something of clown figure, the powerful Yassky seemed imprisoned inside her own body. She is a slender, gamine performer, and I don’t think I ever saw her relax. When she held her limbs tight to her body, they looked like they were enchaining her. When she crouched on a tiny stool on one leg, she repeatedly spilled water and salt offered to her. Whispering into a mike, she asked for help. Clawing her throat while lying on her back, she looked about ready to expire.

For all the portentous self-examination in Eye, the work was free-spirited, unpretentious, and yet quite serious. The boom box sound score, however, needs rethinking; much of it was too blatantly obvious. While Eye greatly benefited from its gorgeous location, at times it looked too thin, dissipating some of its energy. It probably will benefit from the additional performers — Sherwood Chen and a group of community volunteers — who will join the final show Sat/3. *

THE EYE OF HORUS

Wed/30 and Sat/3, 12:30pm, free

Jessie Square

736 Mission, SF

www.dancersgroup.org

 

Sounds of silence

Michael Redmond
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1
Sounds of silence

arts@sfbg.com

THEATER How we hear — or if we hear — is to some extent a matter of association. We’re inclined to listen to, take seriously, and treat as equal those people with whom we identify and can sympathize, people who seem to share basic things, including certain values, with us. Such is the implication (and provocation) in English playwright Nina Raine’s engaging drama, Tribes, which roots itself in an eccentric London family — one of whose members is deaf — in order to explore wider social questions of affiliation and communication, exclusion and indifference. The play in this way takes on literal and metaphorical deafness, exploring clan-like thinking and behavior in and through the politics of the deaf community.

The serious questions at the heart of the play, however, come agreeably packaged in a very loud and amusing family of cantankerous extraverts headed by a former scholar turned author named Christopher (a gruffly and charmingly expansive Paul Whitworth) and his wife, a novice novelist named Beth (a cheerful yet concerned Anita Carey, in an admirably supple performance). The household has recently expanded to former proportions with the return of grown 20-something children Sylvia (Nell Geisslinger) and Daniel (Dan Clegg), who rejoin their grown and deaf brother, Billy (a sympathetic, impressively complex James Caverly), around the family’s book-lined living room (in Todd Rosenthal’s detailed, naturalistic scenic design, which transforms when necessary into offsite locations or inner spaces via Christopher Akerlind’s mutable lighting and Jake Rodriguez’s evocative sound design).

We meet this dysfunctional, codependent set of oddball overachievers and outcasts around the long table to the left of center stage, where they engage in clearly quotidian bouts of whining and dining. “Why am I surrounded by my children again,” wonders Christopher rhetorically. “When are you going to fuck off?”

Playwright Raine has an ear for the kinds of cruel jabs, off-color remarks, and outrageous propositions that, it seems, only a family can indulge in (let along get away with) without so much as a tremor of trepidation or regret. In this smarty secular Jewish household, that sniping is especially vituperative, colorfully earthy (especially in Dad’s frequent bon mots), and colored over by an intellectual hue: Christopher’s pet theme is the rootedness of feeling and personality in language. Daniel, plagued by a damning superego that has produced condemnatory voices in his head, is writing a thesis more or less arguing the opposite — that language does not determine meaning. His socially awkward sister, meanwhile, has taken up the pursuit of music (where feeling transcends language), singing opera in pubs. Moreover, despite their constant assailing of one another, there’s a collective pride undergirding it all — a satisfied sense of the family’s own positive difference from the rest of the (alternatingly intimidating and pitiable) world.

But, notably, these animated discussions among the family tribe, with which the play begins, rarely include Billy. When he speaks — in the pronounced but muted tones of someone who does not completely hear his own voice — it’s usually to ask what everyone else is talking about. Treated as an equal (with a nonchalance bordering at times on indifference) and yet simultaneously eclipsed by his loudmouthed, self-involved relatives, Billy ironically stands out (to us) by virtue of his quiet remove.

He soon breaks free and into clearer view after meeting a woman named Ruth (a sharp and vital Elizabeth Morton) with whom he falls instantly in love. Ruth is losing her hearing, but coming from deaf parents, she is well acquainted with the community and culture of the deaf. This does not make her transition any easier, however. Indeed, it complicates it in subtle ways. More than any other character, she straddles both worlds: the hearing and the non-hearing. It makes her both threatening and attractive to Billy’s family, who fear Billy’s categorization and cooptation as part of a deaf minority.

Billy, unusually adept at lip reading and emboldened by his love for Ruth and the community she provides access to, takes a job with a law court providing crucial transcriptions from audio-less video for criminal trials. This allows him to move out of the family home for the first time. Ruth teaches him ASL, which he begins to use more and more exclusively. Both he and Ruth meanwhile confront a family that places a premium on the connection between language and feeling. From this constellation of voices and positions, a serious split emerges that throws the family into a tailspin while asking a series of stimulating questions about where, and how, we belong.

Raine’s 2010 play (originally produced by London’s Royal Court Theatre) gets a spirited, involving production from Berkeley Rep and director Jonathan Moscone. Moscone (the artistic director of California Shakespeare Theater who excelled at another contemporary family-social drama when he helmed Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park at ACT) stirs the hornet’s nest of mad, madcap family living with an expert hand, and his fine cast delivers Raine’s witty (albeit sometimes too thematically forceful) dialogue with precision and ease. If the play wraps up a little abruptly, it also leaves much in the ensuing silence to continue listening to. 2

TRIBES

Through May 18

Tue and Thu-Sat, 8pm (also Sat, 2pm); Wed and Sun, 7pm (also Sun, 2pm; no 2pm show May 18), $29-99

Berkeley Repertory Theatre

2015 Addison, Berk

www.berkeleyrep.org

 

Projections

Michael Redmond
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27
Projections

The 57th San Francisco International Film Festival runs April 24-May 8. Screening venues include the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; New People Cinema, 1746 Post, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk; and Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, 1881 Post, SF. For tickets (most shows $15) and complete schedule, visit festival.sffs.org.

Harmony Lessons (Emir Baigazin, Kazakhstan/Germany/France, 2013) Darwinian natural selection seems to be the guiding principle at the rural Kazakh school where bright farm boy Aslan (Timur Aidarbekov) is sent to further his education. What he learns there is mostly about survival, as he soon discovers the institution is dominated by an elaborate system of bullying and extortion in which a few older students terrorize the younger and weaker. Emir Baigazin’s striking debut feature applies a rigor both aesthetic and intellectual to a familiar theme here, his script as methodical as his minimalist compositions in dissecting the havoc wreaked by (and eventual unraveling of) a corrupt system that’s a microcosm of a societal whole. Fri/25, 3:30pm, Kabuki; May 4, 12:45pm, Kabuki; May 5, 6:15pm, Kabuki. (Dennis Harvey)

When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism (Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania/France, 2013) Romanian moviemaker Corneliu Porumboiu (2009’s Police, Adjective) turns his lens around, toward the casting couch and the oh-so-delicate damage done, in his third feature film. An everyday kind of corruption, sex, lies, and video — zipless, tapeless, and forging way beyond the limits of film — is the name of the game when a director (Bogdan Dumitrache) nonchalantly drops a nude scene on his actress (Diana Avramut) and the two try out a few ideas, on-camera for the screen and off-camera in the bedroom. The hardly working relationship plays both ways, as the moviemaker bends in turn to his producer, in this minimalist albeit layered glimpse into the unlovely guts of the last sacred cow: the so-called creative process. Fri/25, 3:45pm, New People; Sat/26, 6:30pm, Kabuki; Mon/28, 8:30pm, PFA. (Kimberly Chun)

Hellion (Kat Candler, US) Beer drinking and metal tees, shit-talking and shit-kicking, boys and their toys and their broken dreams — the signatures of director-writer Kat Candler are familiar even to those unversed in her 2006 Jumping Off Bridges and the short that this extended-play feature is based on. Yet somehow the motocross-fixated Jacob (Josh Wiggins) is finding his own fresh hell amid this testosterone-scape: with the death of his mother, his faded baseball star of a father (Aaron Paul) is struggling to hold the family together and kick his tendency to take refuge at the bottom of a beer can. Meanwhile younger brother Wes (Deke Garner) has been taken away and placed with the boys’ Aunt Pam (Juliette Lewis). Candler makes this hell of hurts fresh with her close attention to detail, relishing the whipped cream sandwiches and sofa bounce-offs of home-alone kids as well as the throttled rage of the Metallica and Slayer soundtrack, and charged performances from all, in particular Paul, also an executive producer here, and Lewis, two small-town castaways just a hair less lost than the kids. Fri/25, 6:30pm, Kabuki; Tue/29, 4pm, Kabuki. (Chun)

Blind Dates (Levan Koguashvili, Georgia, 2013) This rather wonderful deadpan comedy from Georgia (the former Soviet territory, not Jimmy Carter’s home) revolves around two best friends, male schoolteachers looking for love on the mutual brink of 40. Doleful-looking history prof Sandro (Andro Sakhvarelidze) and robust soccer coach Iva (Archil Kikodze) seem hapless and thwarted at every turn, yet simultaneously oblivious to scads of available women around them. The gentle, rueful tenor sneaks up on you, delivering some big laughs and narrative surprises as well as a very soulful sum impact. One of this year’s SFIFF sleepers (with no US distribution in sight), this droll yet bighearted gem is not to be missed. Fri/25, 9pm, Kabuki; Sun/27, 8:15pm, PFA; Tue/29, 6:30pm, New People. (Harvey)

Child of God (James Franco, US, 2013) You may not know that SFIFF It Guy James Franco has directed nearly two dozen shorts, documentaries, and features since 2005, in addition to his acting and miscellaneous multimedia dabblings. Don’t worry: You haven’t missed much. But this adaptation of a 1973 Cormac McCarthy novel is a great leap forward from his prior efforts, most of which felt like pretentious grad school thesis films. Scott Haze is startlingly good as Lester Ballard, a Tennessee hillbilly whose lack of conventional home, family, social instincts, or behavioral restraint gets him perpetually in trouble with the law — trouble that takes a macabre turn when he finds a dead woman’s body. The story’s shock value might easily have played as exploitative or ludicrous, but Franco hits the right tenor of mad intensity to reflect Lester’s near-feral state, in which acts that might appall any “civilized” mindset make perfect sense to him. Fri/25, 9:30pm, Kabuki; Mon/28, 3:45pm, New People. (Harvey)

The Double (Richard Ayoade, UK, 2013) Simon (Jesse Eisenberg) is a lowly clerk who gets nothing but indifference and scorn both at work and in his pitiful private life. Things slip even more insidiously beyond his control with the arrival of James (Eisenberg again), his exact doppelgänger — though no one else seems to notice that — and a climber as ruthlessly efficient as Simon is hapless. Not only does he steal his look-alike’s ideas in a rapid rise to the top, he seems to take great pleasure in kicking Simon further downward. Applying a Kafkaesque gloss to Dostoyevsky’s novella, with stylistic hat-tips to the Coens and Terry Gilliam, Richard Ayoade’s second feature is very different from his prior Submarine (2010) in all ways but one: It, too, is both overwhelmed and rendered fascinating by an excess of high directorial “style” whose self-consciousness infuses every frame and puts quote marks around every emotion. As a result, The Double is a striking objet d’art you’ll either love or hate — or enjoy aesthetically while being annoyed by its sacrifice of depth for a showoff surface. Sat/26, 1pm, Kabuki; Tue/29, 9:15pm, Kabuki. (Harvey)

Tangerines (Zaza Urushadze, Estonia/Georgia, 2013) It’s 1992, and carpenter Ivo (Lemit Ulfsak) and farmer Marcus (Elmo Nuganen) are old neighbors who are practically the only residents left in their rural Abkhazia village — everyone else has fled the approaching war between Georgian and Russia-backed North Caucasian forces that erupted over this disputed land after the USSR’s dissolution. The 60-something men have stayed behind out of habit, and to harvest Marcus’ latest (perhaps last) tangerine crop. When a shootout on Ivo’s doorstep leaves him stuck with one wounded soldier from each side, these uninvited guests must be kept from outside discovery — and from one another’s throats — as they recover. Wry and poignant, Georgian writer-director Zaza Urushadze’s antiwar microcosm is beautifully crafted, particularly in Rein Kotov’s gorgeous photography of the verdant countryside. Sat/26, 9pm, Kabuki; Sun/27, 6:15pm, Kabuki; May 6, 8:30pm, PFA. (Harvey)

The Sacrament (Ti West, US, 2013) This very disappointing latest by Ti West, of flavorful indie horrors The House of the Devil (2009) and The Innkeepers (2011), basically puts a piece of tracing paper over the climactic events at Jonestown, changing the names but otherwise refusing to do anything different — or really anything at all — with that historical model of mass religious cult freak out. Joe Swanberg, A.J. Bowen, and Kentucker Audley play filmmakers who visit a secretive jungle compound in order to figure out if somebody’s sister (Amy Seimetz) is staying there of her own free will or not. She seems to be doing OK, and in fact appears to be the favored apostle of enigmatic leader “Father” (Gene Jones). But once the strangers get a glimpse behind the facade of their carefully stage-managed visit, they glean that not everyone is happy here — indeed, some may be desperate to escape. Despite some good performance moments, there’s little psychological insight or real suspense to this fictionalized take on the 1978 catastrophe at Rev. Jim Jones’ Guyana settlement, and its quasi-“found footage” aesthetic feels very tired. Sat/26, 11:45pm, Kabuki; Mon/28, 9pm, Kabuki. (Harvey)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UD8TrqVrFyU

All That Jazz (Bob Fosse, US, 1979) Stage and screen choreographer and director Bob Fosse’s autobiographical phantasmagoria modeled itself on Fellini’s very Italian 1963 8 1/2 (which also inspired the stage/film musical Nine), but its heart is pure, cold American show-biz brass. Roy Scheider is terrific as Fosse alter ego Joe Gideon, a driven workaholic whose decades of numerous excesses (pills, smoking, women, etc.) have put him at serious risk of a fatal heart attack just as he’s simultaneously starting rehearsals for a Broadway musical and finishing up editing on a Hollywood feature. The external pressure is exceeded only by his own compulsive perfectionism. He reviews his life of professional triumphs and failed relationships as it very possibly sputters toward an end. Like Joe’s character (and creator), Jazz is egomaniacal, charming, over-the-top, sexy, sexist, indulgent, and overbearing — a glitzy portrait of a brilliant heel, with dazzling musical numbers. Seldom revived in recent years, it’s being shown in a newly restored print. Sun/27, 12:30pm, Kabuki; May 2, 8:30pm, PFA. (Harvey)

Belle (Amma Asante, UK, 2013) The child of a British naval officer and a Caribbean slave, Belle (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is deposited on the doorstep — well, the estate grounds — of her father’s relatives in 1769 England after her mother dies. Soon she’s entirely orphaned, which makes her a wealthy heiress and aristocratic title holder at the same time that she is something less than human in the eyes of her adopted society. For Belle is black (or more properly, mixed-race), and thus a useless curiosity at best as a well-bred noblewoman of the “wrong” racial makeup. Based on a murky actual historical chapter, Amma Asante’s film is that rare sumptuous costume drama which actually has something on its mind beyond romance and royalty. Not least among its pleasures is a fine supporting cast including Tom Wilkinson, Miranda Richardson, Penelope Wilton, and Emily Watson. Sun/27, 6:30pm, Kabuki; Tue/29, 3:30pm, Kabuki. (Harvey)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nL-0RLaFcSg

Stray Dogs (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan/France, 2013) The fate of those left behind — the homeless, the stray dogs — amid the go-go aggression of tiger markets is ostensibly Tsai Ming-liang’s first concern in what he’s said is his last film. But the “Second Wave” Taiwanese director can’t help but leave a mark — those amazing performances, those achingly long, meditative shots — that makes you hungry for more. Ever so loosely knitting together a series of lengthy, gorgeously composed images that resemble still lifes of a metamorphosing Taipei that’s rapidly leaving its cultural core, the family, in the dust, Stray Dogs wanders, hangs, then drifts once more, much like the homeless father (Tsai regular Lee Kang-sheng) and two children at its rootless center. Dad holds an advertising sign at an intersection — necessitating what might be the longest urination shot in cinema and a singular burst into poetry and song — while the kids feed themselves with supermarket samples and wash up in public restrooms. Will they be brought together by the missing matriarch, in the form of a grocery store manager, or just a random instance of art or beauty in a crumbling building? Beauty, it seems, is everywhere, Tsai seems to signal, and time — here, spent and bent to new ends — might or might not tell, while this mesmerizing, testing, and ultimately rewarding digital farewell to the movies keeps you hanging on. Mon/28, 6pm, Kabuki; Tue/29, 3:15pm, New People; April 30, 6:30pm, PFA. (Chun)

The Overnighters (Jesse Moss, US) If you’re looking for a movie to affirm the resilient generosity of the American spirit (or economy), this isn’t it. But Bay Area filmmaker Jesse Moss’ new documentary is as engrossing as it is dismaying. When a fracking-related job boom hits low-population North Dakota, close-knit Williston — which had a population of just 12,000 at the millennium’s turn — suddenly becomes a magnet for the unemployed and desperate. That includes a diverse racial mix of men, including some transients, a few felons and ex-cons, plus others whom many locals are willing to skittishly term “trash.” There’s scant housing available to accommodate them; Pastor Jay Reinke of Concordia Lutheran tries to help out by letting some new arrivals sleep on the church (and even his family home’s) floor. But his congregation is increasingly unhappy about that, as is the community in general. The Overnighters grows more complicated, however, than a simple portrait of small-town closed-mindedness and a clergyman acting like Jesus would. Not every charity case is grateful, or honest, or manageable. Meanwhile, Rev. Reinke’s own psychological baggage starts looking pretty dang heavy well before a game changing late revelation that is painful on about 20 different levels. Mon/28, 6:30pm, Kabuki; May 3, 1pm, New People. (Harvey)

The Other One: The Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir (Mike Fleiss, US) Bob Weir gets a little of his share of the critical limelight in this doc by Mike Fleiss, which focuses on Weir’s personal life and gives Grateful Dead chronology a light scramble. It kicks off with a cruise across the Golden Gate Bridge with the SF-born musician, who was taught to drive by Neal Cassady and gleans admiration from both expected quarters (Sammy Hagar) and less so (The National, which tries a brief jam with Weir) and drops tidbits about his dyslexia, early hangouts with Palo Alto banjo player Jerry Garcia, his chronic shoulder pain, and songwriting approaches (“There’s no logic to it. It comes through the window when it wants to come though the window”), along with a visit to the famed Dead house at 710 Ashbury with his wife and daughters. Couched amid a bevy of performance snippets, none very long, the road-weathered rhythm guitarist comes off as a bit of tough nut to crack and almost too humdrum in his current downplayed presentation to ever really lead us on a truly “long, strange trip.” Still, this document serves as a decent primer for the rock generalist on the man (though not of his bands apart from the Dead) and goes a little way toward generating gratitude for the man oft dubbed an unsung hero. Tue/29, 8:50pm, PFA; May 2, 9:30pm, Kabuki. (Chun)

Eastern Boys (Robin Campillo, France, 2013) We first meet well-off, middle-aged single gay man Daniel (Olivier Rabourdin) as he’s cruising a Paris train station for rough trade in writer-director Robin Campillo’s bravura opening sequence. He settles on impish Marek (Kirill Emelyanov), negotiates an assignation, and goes home. But later on it’s not Marek who turns up on Daniel’s doorstep, but a couple dozen young former-Soviet-bloc illegal émigrés who take over his luxury apartment for an epic party as they cart his possessions out the door. (This unpleasant passage is the most difficult to swallow, as there’s no explanation why our protagonist is so passive about being robbed.) Yet Marek does eventually turn up, and despite all, a relationship develops — always at risk of incurring anger from “Boss” (Danill Vorobyev), the thuggish leader of the immigrant community Marek has aligned himself with. Like the Laurent Cantet films (1999’s Human Resources, 2001’s Time Out, 2008’s The Class) Campillo has edited, Eastern Boys doesn’t fill in all its narrative blanks, but is grounded in recognizable characters we can empathize with as the scenario takes unexpected turns. It’s a provoking movie that’s ultimately well worthwhile. April 30, 9:10pm, PFA; May 2, 6pm, Kabuki; May 4, 8:45pm, New People. (Harvey)

Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (David Zellner, US) Fargo (1996), now also an FX series, is having a moment — and as bracingly sweet, tragicomic, and strange as its inspiration, Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter sets course from where the Coen Brothers left off. Essential ingredients include another moviemaking team of brothers, David and Nathan Zeller, and a waterlogged VHS tape of the North Dakota micro-epic, the latter leading one woman into white-out lunacy beyond the grinding conformity of Tokyo office work or small-town Minnesota mundanities. Shy, odd, and obsessive Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi) is the nail that must be pounded down, as the Japanese saying goes; as she trudges through her job at a large, alienating company, her fantasy world is fueled by a video of Fargo she finds buried in a sea cave. Those grainy images set her on a quest among the determinedly kawaii in Japan and the hilariously humane in the States, which she compares to that of the conquistadors’. Even when accompanied by the Octopus Project’s vivid electronic score, which spells out the horror of this journey, Kumiko’s no Aguirre — though, like Fargo, her adventure’s end is based on a true case. A wonderfully weird — and ultimately compassionate — vamp on the power of fantasy and obsession that crosses international datelines. May 1, 8:45pm, Kabuki; May 3, 2:30pm, Kabuki; May 4, 12:30pm, Kabuki. (Chun)

Difret (Zeresenay Berhane Mehari, Ethiopia) Zeresenay Berhane Mehari’s film dramatizes a shocking human rights issue in Ethiopia: the continuing acceptance in rural areas of forcibly abducting young women for marriage. Fourteen-year-old Hirut (Tizita Hagere) is walking home from school one day when she’s surrounded by seven armed men, dragged off to a hut, then raped by the suitor whose marriage proposal she’d already rejected. When later she kills him in an escape attempt, tribal law decrees she be executed (and buried alongside him as “wife”). But a city lawyer for a women’s rights organization (Meron Getnet) takes up her cause. This is powerful material, but Difret would be a better film, and even better advocacy, if it didn’t handle its fictive events in such heavy-handed, pedestrian, everything spelled-out-for-you fashion. May 1, 6:30pm, Pacific Film Archive; May 3, 3:15pm, Kabuki; May 7, 3:30pm, Kabuki. (Harvey)

Abuse of Weakness (Catherine Breillat, France/Belgium/Germany, 2013) Those who last saw Isabelle Huppert as a dutiful daughter in 2012’s Amour will be both thrilled and piqued to see the tables turned so remarkably in Catherine Breillat’s Abuse of Weakness. Huppert gives an unapologetic, stunning tour de force performance in what appears to be a story torn from the filmmaker’s own life, when Breillat suffered a series of strokes in the ’00s and ended up entangled in a loving and predatory friendship with con man Christophe Rocancourt. Here, moviemaker and writer Maud (Huppert) is particularly vulnerable when she meets celebrity criminal and best-selling writer Vilko (Kool Shen). She is determined to have him star in her next film, despite the protestations of friends and family, and he helps her in return — by simply helping her get around and giving her focus when half her body seems beyond her control, while his constant machinations continue to compel her. Crafting a layered, resonant response to what seems like an otherwise clear-cut case of abuse, Breillat seems to have gotten something close to one of her best films out of the sorry situation, while Huppert reminds us — with the painful precision of this intensely physical role — why she’s one of France’s finest. May 1, 9pm, Kabuki. (Chun)

Of Horses and Men (Benedikt Erlingsson, Iceland/Germany, 2013) Benedikt Erlingsson’s astonishing directorial debut weaves together a half dozen disparate stories involving beautiful horses and mostly unlucky humans in and near a modern Icelandic small town. It’s a horsey movie like no other, each surprising tale marked to various degrees by black comedy, cruel fate, very earthy humor, and hints of the fantastical. Nature being a harsh mistress, some events here are rather shocking or tragic — those who automatically despise any film in which animals come to harm (only in dramatic terms, of course) had best stay clear. But less delicate souls may well find this unique equine-themed mix of folk art and fable exhilaratingly original. May 2, 4:30pm, Kabuki; May 3, 8:45pm, Kabuki; May 5, 6pm, Kabuki. (Harvey)

Salvation Army (Abdellah Taïa, Morocco, 2013) Paris-based Moroccan writer Abdellah Taïa adapts his presumably autobiographical 2006 novel in this accomplished feature. Teenaged Abdellah (Said Mrini) is stuck in the middle of a large, rambunctious family where his parents continually fight, sometimes violently, and he has to keep his feelings hidden — not least because they largely revolve around an infatuation with older brother Slimane (Amine Ennaji). While that attraction remains forbidden, Abdellah does find ways to access love or at least sex with other older men, though these sometimes exploitative interludes leave him dissatisfied. Salvation Army would be an effective if unmemorable portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-queer if it didn’t take an abrupt, unexpected jump forward 10 years, to chart the rough early days of a now-adult protagonist (Karim Ait M’Hand) in supposedly more gay-friendly (but not necessarily immigrant-friendly) France. It’s these later scenes that lend this directorial debut by (so far) the only out gay Arab Moroccan scribe its lingering gravity. May 2, 9pm, Kabuki; May 4, 8:30pm, PFA; May 6, 6:30pm, Kabuki. (Harvey)

Intruders (Noh Young-seok, South Korea, 2013) Noh Young-seok’s insidiously clever black comedy-thriller takes its time getting to the nasty stuff — although things start getting weird for our protagonist right away, when his bus ride to a remote resort region is interrupted by an overly-friendly local who will figure in his troubles later on. Sang-jin (Jun Kuk-ho) is here to spend some alone time finishing a screenplay. But he’s unlikely to get much work done, given various pesterings from the hitherto mentioned ex-con New Best Friend (Oh Tae-kyung), an obnoxious quartet of skiers, some hostile poachers, and … well, you’ll have to wait until the very end to get the complete list of unwanted guests. As misunderstandings and bodies pile up, Intruders cleverly finds ways to make the worst possible scenario even worse. May 2, 9:45pm, Kabuki; May 7, 9:30pm, Kabuki; May 8, 5:30pm, Kabuki. (Harvey)

Palo Alto (Gia Coppola, US) Adapted from the 2010 short story collection by James Franco, first-time director Gia Coppola’s depressive, aimless tale of disaffected youth tracks the ennuis and misadventures of a handful of Palo Alto teenagers: shy, inexperienced April (Emma Roberts), teetering on the edge of an affair with her soccer coach (Franco); naively promiscuous Emily (Zoe Levin); budding head case Fred (Nat Wolff); and his friend Teddy (Jack Kilmer, son of Val, who plays April’s out-to-lunch stepfather), who ambivalently participates in Fred’s mayhem while pining after April. Adult supervision is nearly Peanuts-level sparse — in other Peninsula households, helicopter parents may be fine-tuning the lives of their children down to the last extracurricular; here, the stoned, distracted elders who occasionally wander in front of the camera are more like flaky, absentee roommates. Meanwhile, their young charges fill the empty hours with copious amounts of alcohol consumption, random property destruction, and a round or two of social crucifixion. May 3, 7:30pm, Kabuki. (Lynn Rapoport)

The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, US, 1941) Superficially the most conventional of Preston Sturges’ classics — being a romantic comedy vehicle for two major stars — this 1941 gem is no less great for it. Barbara Stanwyck plays Jean, the feminine lure in a team of wily con artists who spy easy prey in Henry Fonda, a fabulously wealthy “bumble-puppy” more interested in studying Amazonian snakes than inheriting the family brewery fortune. They relieve him of considerable cash at the card table, but when Jean decides she really does love the big dope and comes clean, he thinks she’s still lying. Now a woman scorned — and whatta woman! — Jean hatches a spectacular revenge scheme to teach him the lesson he deserves. As is Sturges’ wont, the film goes over the top a bit toward the end. But who cares, when Eve is so brilliantly written and performed, not to mention consistently hilarious. Film critic David Thomson and journalist-novelist Geoff Dyer will be present for this screening in conjunction with Thomson’s acceptance of the Mel Novikoff Award. May 4, 3pm, Kabuki. (Harvey)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5rVCYqW8U4

Ping Pong Summer (Michael Tully, US) Eighties teen flicks of the My Bodyguard (1980), smart-dweebs-beat-the-bullies ilk are paid homage in Michael Tully’s deadpan satire, which is closer in spirit to the Comedy of Lameness school whose patron saint is Napoleon Dynamite. Radley (Marcello Conte) is an average teen so excited to be spending the summer of 1985 in Ocean City, Md., with his family that he renames himself “Rad Miracle.” He acquires a New Best Friend in Teddy (Myles Massey), who as the whitest black kid imaginable might make even Rad look cool by comparison. However, they are both dismayed to discover the local center for video gaming and everything else they like is ruled by bigger, older, cuter, and snottier douchebag Lyle Ace (Joseph McCaughtry) and his sidekick. Only kicking Lyle’s ass at ping pong — with some help from a local weirdo (a miscast Susan Sarandon, apparently here because she’s an offscreen ping pong enthusiast) — can save Rad’s wounded dignity, and the summer in general. A big step up from Tully’s odd but pointless prior Septien (2011), this has all the right stuff (including a soundtrack packed with the likes of Mr. Mister, the Fat Boys, Mary Jane Girls, New Edition, Whodini, and Night Ranger) to hilariously parody the era’s inanities. But it’s just mildly amusing — a droll attitude with lots of period detail but not much bite. May 4, 6:30pm, Kabuki; May 7, 8:45pm, New People. (Harvey)

The One I Love (Charlie McDowell, US) Sophie (Elisabeth Moss) and Ethan (Mark Duplass) have hit a speed bump in their relationship — they don’t have fun together like they used to, and even direct attempts to replicate that past magic fall completely flat. Ergo they take the advice of a couples counselor (Ted Danson) and book a weekend at a country getaway he swears has done “wonders” for all his previous clients in relationship trouble. Things get off to a pleasant enough start, but the duo’s delight at recapturing their old mojo becomes complicated when they realize … well, it’s best to know as little as possible going into The One I Love, a first feature for director Charlie McDowell and scenarist Justin Lader that approaches a fantastical narrative idea with a poker face and considerable ingenuity. Duplass and (especially) Moss are terrific in roles that eventually require some very complicated (and subtle) nuances. May 6, 9:15pm, Kabuki. (Harvey)

Night Moves (Kelly Reichardt, US, 2013) Not to be confused with Arthur Penn’s same-named 1975 Gene Hackman thriller, Kelly Reichardt’s latest film nonetheless is also a memorably quiet, unsettling tale of conspiracy and paranoia. It takes us some time to understand what makes temporary allies of jittery Josh (Jesse Eisenberg), Portland, Ore.-style alterna-chick Dena (Dakota Fanning) and genial rural recluse Harmon (Peter Sarsgaard), beyond it being a mission of considerable danger and secrecy. When things don’t go exactly as planned, however, the three react very differently to the resulting fallout, becoming possibly greater threats to one another than the police or FBI personnel pursuing them. While still spare by mainstream standard, this is easily Reichardt’s most accessible work, carrying the observational strengths of 2010’s Meek’s Cutoff, 2008’s Wendy and Lucy, and 2006’s Old Joy over to a genuinely tense story that actually goes somewhere. May 7, 9pm, Kabuki; May 8, 7:30pm, Kabuki. (Harvey)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Reel-ality

Michael Redmond
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3
Reel-ality

cheryl@sfbg.com

SFIFF “I’m the wrong kind of person to be really big and famous,” Elliott Smith admits in Heaven Adores You, Nickolas Rossi’s moving portrait of the late indie musician, who went from regional star to superstar after his Oscar nomination for 1997’s Good Will Hunting. “It was fun … for a day,” Smith reflects — and anyone who saw Smith’s hushed Academy Awards performance, on a night that also included Celine Dion’s chest-thumping rendition of “My Heart Will Go On,” has likely never forgotten it.

But Heaven isn’t overly concerned with Smith’s sudden celebrity and mysterious end (in 2003, he was found with two apparently self-inflicted stab wounds to the chest, but his death was ruled “undetermined,” rather than a suicide). Instead, it’s an artfully crafted study of a unique talent, avoiding music doc clichés in favor of more creative choices, like illustrating college-radio interviews — far more revealing than anything Smith would share with journos seeking Oscar sound bites — with gorgeously composed shots of Smith’s beloved Portland, Ore. Heaven widens to contextualize Smith’s importance within the 1990s Portland scene, with former members of his pre-solo band, Heatmiser, and fellow musician and longtime girlfriend Joanna Bolme among the interviewees. (Unfortunately absent: Hunting director Gus Van Sant.) But Smith’s soulful, eerily timeless songs (described here as “little pictures made of words”) remain Heaven‘s focus — appropriate, since they were always Smith’s focus, too.

A less-tragic tale of reluctant fame unfolds in Jody Shapiro’s Burt’s Buzz, which opens as its subject, Burt’s Bees co-founder Burt Shavitz, arrives in Taiwan to what can only be described as a hero’s welcome. Given the fact that Burt’s Bees products crowd drugstore shelves as ubiquitously as Neutrogena and Cover Girl, you’d be forgiven for assuming THE Burt lives the lavish life of a lip-balm magnate. Which is not the case, since the aging Shavitz prefers an exceedingly spartan life in rural Maine, with a woodstove providing heat and a begrudging acceptance of running water. “A good day is when no one shows up, and you don’t have to go anywhere,” Shavitz opines.

Not that he has any choice. When Burt’s Bees went from homespun to corporate, all the dough went to Shavitz’s former business (and romantic) partner Roxanne Quimby, who’d bought him out when their relationship went sour; most of Shavitz’s income seems to stem from making personal appearances for a company he no longer has much else to do with. (Quimby’s upbeat son is interviewed in her stead, though we do glimpse her in excerpts from a TV program entitled How I Made My Millions.) Still, Shavitz — knowing that Burt’s Bees is stuck with him forever, since his name and bearded visage decorate the brand’s folksy packaging — remains remarkably blasé about his financial situation. He’s not into material possessions, though he’s comfortable enough to have a “majordomo” help him with his affairs, and is enough of a diva to demand rice milk rather than the soy milk proffered by his eager-to-please Taiwanese hosts.

Shapiro’s documentary is a bit overlong (do we really need to see ol’ Burt Skyping with his dog?), but it wisely highlights the most interesting element of Shavitz’s story, which is not “Did he get ripped off?” or “Look at this crazy hippie!” but “Is this guy more self-aware than he’s letting on?” Though his assistant insists “He’s like Colonel Sanders, and he simply does not understand that,” it’s never entirely clear — though Shavitz’s own assertion that “No one has ever accused me of being ambitious” certainly has the ring of truth, rather than bitterness, to it.

Elsewhere in SFIFF’s documentary programming, two films take contrasting approaches to the artistic process. Of local interest, Jeremy Ambers’ Impossible Light, a close-up look at the Bay Lights — the high-tech art installation that illuminates the western span of the Bay Bridge — smartly runs a lean 71 minutes. First, we meet project founder Ben Davis, who had a brain wave one sunny day while idly staring at the bridge, which he’d always appreciated despite its ugly-stepsister status next to the glamorous Golden Gate. After artist and LED wizard Leo Villareal joins up, the ball really gets rolling, and Light tags along as a dedicated group of big thinkers form alliances with Caltrans engineers and other hands-on types who believe in Davis’ “impossible idea.” Nobody who sees this film about what became a truly collaborative process — Bridge workers scale the towers, tinkering with laptops! Creative types scramble to raise eight million bucks from private donors! — will ever take the intricately twinkling end result for granted.

The opposite of straightforward: The Seventh Walk, inspired by the nature-themed art of Indian painter Paramjit Singh. Director Amit Dutta brings Singh’s work to life with his questing camera, floating through the Kangra Valley’s leafy forests and across streams as water rushes, birds squawk, and insects hiss on the soundtrack. We also see Singh himself, dabbing his textured, abstract work onto canvases as the movie around him becomes more surreal. Occasional poetry fragments appear on screen to make the waking-dream vibe even more immersive: “Deep in the forest, the musk deer frantically pursues its own fragrance: laughter!”

Despite its title, it takes awhile for laughter to enter Happiness, Thomas Balmès’ tale of Peyangki, a restless nine-year-old monk living in remote Bhutan — the last pocket of the country, which prizes its “gross national happiness,” to get electricity. Stunningly composed shots (those mountains!) showcase a simple, deeply traditional lifestyle that’s about to completely change, for better and probably worse — ominously, everyone’s conversations already revolve around television. When Peyangki gets the chance to travel to the capital city, he’s fascinated by everything: mannequins, crutches, packaged snacks, aquarium fish, and, at last, TV, where the first thing he glimpses is Wrestlemania (and he’s on to it immediately: “Is it real?”), and you can practically see the innocence melting away.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA7FKRygwLc

A more conventionally-structured doc comes from Stanley Nelson, no stranger to powerful material with previous films like 2011’s Freedom Riders, 2006’s Jonestown: The Life and Death of People’s Temple, and 2003’s The Murder of Emmett Till. Nelson returns to the civil rights movement for Freedom Summer, which mixes archival material and contemporary interviews to detail the youth-propelled African American voter drive amid menacing intolerance in 1964 Mississippi.

News reports about the disappearances of workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner — “Mickey” to wife Rita, as eloquent and composed today as she is in 1964 footage — weave throughout the film, with the discovery of their bodies recalled by folk legend Pete Seeger, who learned about it while performing on a Mississippi stage. While the events detailed in Freedom Summer have been covered by numerous other documentaries, Nelson’s impressive array of talking heads (not identified by name, though many are recognizable) brings a personal, eyewitness touch to this history lesson. *

 

The 57th San Francisco International Film Festival runs April 24-May 8. Screening venues include the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, SF; New People Cinema, 1746 Post, SF; Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft, Berk; and Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, 1881 Post, SF. For tickets (most shows $15) and complete schedule, visit festival.sffs.org.

Motörhead delivers a classic ear-beating at the Warfield

Steven T. Jones
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1
Motörhead delivers a classic ear-beating at the Warfield

There’s something special about seeing the name Motörhead, umlaut and all, mounted on that grand Market Street marquee, next to a strip club and at the intersection of one of San Francisco’s seediest streets. If you know anything about the band, its history, and iconic frontman Lemmy Kilmister, it just feels right.

The black-clad masses had congregated outside the historic Warfield Theater well before showtime and the mood was noticeably high, as show-goers were surely thankful for either a first chance, another chance, but hopefully not last chance to see and hear the true king of metal live and in-person.

The room was about half-full for opener Graveyard’s set and those in attendance were engaged and impressed.  The Swedish ’70s revival rockers played a solid set consisting mostly of songs from their first two albums, peppered with a few from Lights Out, their third and decidedly less metal offering. Motörhead’s Phil Campbell would later describe them as “the only good thing to come out of Sweden.”

graveyard
Graveyard. All photos by Brittany Powell.

As the main event neared, the room packed up quickly and the mood felt like what one might expect at an appearance of the Pope at a monster truck rally, with the latter being a bit closer to the beating that our ears were about to take.

With the predictability of the tides, the loudest band in the world emerged and delivered the standard greeting:

“We are Motörhead, and we play rock and roll.”

They immediately lunged into “Damage Case,” Lemmy’s head craned upward towards his trademark high mic, where it would remain for most of the show.  He doesn’t move around much these days, but did he ever?  Nonetheless, at 68, his gravelly snarl is still a force to be reckoned with. The floor got rowdy pretty quick and security could be seen ushering, quite roughly, more than a handful of audience members off the floor and presumably out the door. This is the effect that Motörhead has on people, and it has some significance at the Warfield, which used to have seats that went all the way to the front, until the first three rows were ripped out in 1984 at — you guessed it — a Motörhead show. 

motorhead
Motörhead

After the second number, “Stay Clean,” Lemmy took a moment to address the dipshit (or dipshits) in the crowd who were hurling water bottles at the stage. “Please don’t throw shit at us and we won’t throw anything at you,” he said in a polite deadpan, before Campbell threatened  to walk off if it continued. One final item, a pink lighter, whose hurler Campbell called “a real star,” hit the stage — and the barrage was finished, probably thanks to crowd or security intervention, or perhaps a combination of both. 

Despite the disrespect, Lemmy twice told the crowd that we were the best on the tour and that “Coachella definitely isn’t giving [us] any competition.”  Maybe he was just being nice, but I believed him.  

motorhead

The remainder of the show went smoothly enough, with the band playing most of the live favorites punctuated by Campbell’s glowing (like, actually glowing) guitar solo and Mikkey Dee’s bombastic, elevated drum solo, bookended by blasts of smoke, both of which felt a little dated, but this is real rock ‘n’ roll ,and modern-day gimmicks  weren’t needed. The guys didn’t waste much time between songs, except for the occasional intro, and a moment to dedicate “Just ‘Cos You Got the Power” to the “politicians who are stealing all of our money.” 

motorhead

The regular set ended with “Ace of Spades,” during which nobody missed their chance to scream “That’s the way I like it baby, I don’t want to live forever,” all the while probably wishing that Lemmy would live forever, so they would’t have to wonder how long it might be before they’re reminiscing about the times when rock gods still walked the earth. 

SETLIST
Damage Case
Stay Clean
Metropolis
Over the Top
The Chase is Better Than the Catch
Rock It
Lost Woman Blues
Doctor Rock
Just ‘Cos You Got the Power
Going to Brazil
Killed By Death
Ace of Spades
Overkill

Moscow weather report

Michael Redmond
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0
Moscow weather report

THEATER Moscow’s temperatures had been climbing up to 70 degrees just a week before my arrival, but by the first of April, it had slipped back into the 30s and 40s, collecting snow on the ground and clouds overhead in a gloomy replay of winter. In a novel this would have looked like a cheap literary device: nature manifesting a political climate that had also grown decidedly chillier. But with Russia’s recent reabsorption of Crimea, and talk everywhere of a new Cold War, it was pretty apt nonetheless.

At the same time, theatrical fires were burning brightly in the weeklong Russia Case, an annual mini-festival spotlighting (for an international audience of presenters, journalists, and others) exceptional theatrical work from the much larger national Golden Mask Festival, with some additional offerings thrown in for good measure.

Curated by Kristina Matvienko, theater critic and member of the Golden Mask board of experts, this year’s Russia Case included 20 productions, in addition to other public events, such as an absorbing tour of Moscow’s famed Taganka Theatre, the country’s center of theatrical innovation and radicalism in the 1960s–70s under founding director and actor Yuri Lyubimov. It’s now celebrating its 50th year with a special jubilee program of exhibitions, projects, and new work headed by a group of young theater artists, managers, and critics commissioned by the city’s Culture Committee and Cultural Minister Sergei Kapkov.

Things began auspiciously with a sparkling new piece by famed director Kama Ginkas at Moscow TYuZ (pronounced “tooz” and standing for Young Generation Theater), the theater led by his wife, Henrietta Yanovskaya, also an acclaimed director with a production in the festival. Lady Macbeth of Our District, based on a short story by 19th-century Russian writer Nikolai Leskov that was also adapted into an opera by Shostakovich, concerns the ebullient young wife of a village merchant whose lust for life entangles her with a brash laborer with tragic results. Staged with muscular precision and effortless invention — including a shrewd use of winter coats as malleable second-skins and visceral bursts of song and energetic movement — this excellent ensemble piece, led by the vibrant Elizaveta Boyarskaya in the title role, cut right through the serious jetlag of the hour.

Among other highlights was a new work by internationally renowned director Dmitry Krymov (whose In Paris premiered locally at the Berkeley Rep in 2012). The captivating Honoré de Balzac: Notes About Berdichev derives its title from a line in Three Sisters, and this inspired riff on Chekhov’s characters sneaks in a fitting depth of thought and emotion beneath its macabre comical surface. With the consummate attention to design and ensemble playing that Krymov and his collaborators have rightly become known for, the production unfolds as a kind of Grand Guignol spectacle, holding up a funhouse mirror to the iconic figures of Chekhov’s oeuvre in order to see them afresh as the pitiful, horrifying, hilarious, and beautiful creations they are. The production then shifts into a prolonged denouement in which the actors remove their elaborate makeup and converse and play with one another in a wistful and teasing middle ground between art and life that speaks quietly of that communion that is the essence of theater.

Equally effective was a timely adaptation of a Rainer Werner Fassbinder film at the vibrant Gogol-Centre, a new and leading venue with four resident companies and a popular youthful following. Fear, adapted by young playwright Lyubov Strizhak from Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, is one in a trilogy of works by Latvian director Vladislav Nastavshev that adapt famous films (the others being Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers and Lars Von Trier’s The Idiots, each in some way dealing with the negotiation of borders and the plight of outsiders). The story concerns the socially unsanctioned love affair between a young Tajik migrant worker and an elderly Moscow widow. Unfolding with a bold, forceful grace on a spare arena-style stage that made dynamic use of a set of white plastic tables, this well acted and moving piece was also among the most overtly political, dealing head-on with the rising xenophobia that has plagued Russia in general and Moscow in particular in recent years. (The one other piece in the program with comparable political punch came from the tiny but intrepid Theater.doc, an independent documentary theater, run by Elena Gremina. Documentary theater is the mode of choice for much political work on Moscow stages, and perhaps not surprisingly Fear‘s playwright Strizhak is well associated with the form.)

In all, I took in half of the total program of the Russia Case, in a packed week of theater and discussion, as part of a group of Americans traveling under the auspices of the Center for International Theatre Development. Needless to say, politics were in the air throughout, and not only because of recent events in Ukraine. The theater in Russia is far more culturally important and influential than theater tends to be here. And while not overtly political in what it stages (except in some notable instances like those just mentioned), it remains a site of many progressive and antiauthoritarian voices as well as big personalities and vested interests. Even the Taganka jubilee was marked by internal turmoil and public scandal, stemming in part from Lyubimov’s contentious public departure from the theater in 2011 but sparked by a historical exhibition on the walls of the theater that provoked defacement from outraged members of the company.

More broadly and urgently, however, the Russians and their international guests mulled over the future of theater in a country drifting rapidly toward ultranationalist extremes. All seemed to agree that whatever happens, this year’s Russia Case will likely not look like next year’s, and that artists and audiences are in for a wild ride.

 

A few last thoughts from Coachella

Steven T. Jones
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0

Words and photos by Eric Lynch.

If Friday was about jorts and flower crowns and Saturday was about sandstorms and solid “lesser” acts, then Sunday was about Coachella babies and big performers who totally brought it.

Arcade Fire played to their 80,000 lost souls with a world of possibilities ahead of them, introducing one of their tour de forces, “There’s a lot of kind of like fake VIP room bullshit happening at this festival and I just want to say that sometimes people dream of getting in places like that and it super sucks in there so don’t worry about it.  This song’s called ‘The Suburbs’…”

AF

Debbie Harry and Regina Chassagne sang “Heart of Glass” then Harry stood there looking shell-shocked and awkward during Chassagne’s “Sprawl II.”

There is an obvious predecessor to Pharrell’s (stupid) Vivienne Westwood hat — you know, the hat that contained all his friends that showed up to bounce around the stage with him on Saturday: Nelly, Diddy, Busta, Snoop, Gwen, et al. Beck’s hat is senior.

Much to the glee of the crowd, Beck took us on a mind-journey in his Hyundai during “Debra,” giving shout-outs to SoCal cities along the way.  Tongue-in-cheek, sure, but the masses loved it as they “stepped inside the passenger door.” He played, along with his son Cosimo on tambourine, until the Golden Voice clock-watchers turned out the power.

beck

AlunaGeorge gave a great performance, despite an outfit that included comfortable/restaurant worker-appropriate shoes. Shape-Ups? Troubling opening with an overwhelming bass line (she opened with “Attracting Flies”) but she adjusted very well. 

aluna

DARKSIDE: Probably the best performance of the weekend. Nicolas Jaar (who played a solo DJ set on Friday in the Yuma tent) and Dave Harrington consecutively constructed and destroyed throughout their set. Plus Nicolas Jaar is dreamy.

darkside

Despite Neutral Milk Hotel’s lo-fi output, devoted fans worshipped every  spangle-jangled second. Sing-alongs aplenty and clapping 30-somethings and mid-life couples with one and a half babies. 

The 1975 brought fun and a bit of realness to the festival early on Sunday. Hot skinny slim-mustachioed gay boys and white jeans with matching boat shoes-sporting straight feys regaled.

Ty Segall gave the longest and loudest sound check in the history of outdoor festivals. They know we’re standing ring here, right?!  The band’s energy was palpable.

ty

CHVRCHES apologized for having to wear sunglasses because “we’re really not from here.” But their performance was anything but apologetic. Polished and clean.

chvrches

Future Islands: I thought Black Flag front man Henry Rollins had been reincarnated as a less punk, more enraged white guy, mugging for the crowd, bleating and blathering with testosterone force.

Warpaint had the most crowded photographer’s pit. Full of 20-something bloggers and middle-aged stock photogs. The ladies did not disappoint. 

warpaint

As a photographer, I’m always hoping for a performance and a persona like Solange. She can just electrify with her presence. Not knowing at the time who she was, I actually snapped some great shots of her last year at Coachella, while  watching the Jesse Ware performance — simply because I could not take my eye off of her adorable sundress covered in bright yellow lemons.  This year onstage, she teased and taunted us in an orange shorts suit.  At one point she jokingly admonished the YouTube videographer to get out of her crotch as she writhed and pined in front of his lens. Something for the gays, the girls and the bros! Yes, and big sis Beyonce showed up, duh.

solange

Overall: Blood Orange, Holy Ghost, Warpaint, The Knife, Solange, DARKSIDE, the 1975 and Arcade Fire were absolute standouts.

East Bay Beats

Steven T. Jones
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0
East Bay Beats

esilvers@sfbg.com

LEFT OF THE DIAL Dayvid Michael, a West Oakland native and member of the CaliMade hip-hop crew, clearly has some mixed feelings about his debut record, Frienemy.

“I mean, I wrote those songs when I was 18,” says the rapper, drinking boba milk tea during an interview in downtown Oakland. “I’m still proud of them, but I’ve learned so much since then.”

That album dropped the last week of December 2012 — which means Michael’s reminiscing at the ripe old age of 21. But, to be fair, the past couple years have been big ones for someone who calls himself a “reluctant rapper” (until about age 17, he mostly wanted to sing and play guitar).

With CaliMade, a loose collective of Oakland-born guys who’ve been friends from elementary school, as well as other young DJs and producers, he performed at Hiero Day, steps away from Bay Area hip-hop legends. He’s guested on a few songs by Iamsu, a rapper whom, Michael rightly notes, you will hear if you put on 106.1 KMEL for more than 15 minutes right now; CaliMade is now working closely with the (slightly) elder rapper’s own crew, the HBK Gang. And 2014’s shaping up to be a big one: He just got done recording a new project with Azure, an Oakland rapper poised for big things in his own right as well as being Iamsu’s DJ, and Clyde Shankle, another member of CaliMade. Michael’s also working on his sophomore solo album, which will be out by the end of the year.

In other words, he’s an Oakland kid to keep your eye on — which makes him a perfect selection for Oakland Drops Beats, a new free, all-ages, quarterly music festival that features some 30-plus East Bay artists, spread out over 10 different stages and venues in downtown Oakland; the kickoff festival is April 19.

Its lineup is, in and of itself, a testament to the range of music coming out of Oakland right now: From the jazz-hip-hop blend of the Kev Choice Ensemble to the underrated indie rock of Oakland mainstays B. Hamilton to the funk-soul dance party music of Sal’s Greenhouse — not to mention a distinctly family-friendly vibe courtesy of Bay Area Girls Rock Camp and the presence of Youth Radio — the music “crawl,” as organizers are billing it, aims to serve as both a celebration of the city’s established artists and a new platform through which up-and-coming musicians can get some stage time.

Inspired by the Venice Music Crawl in LA, musician-organizer-founder Angelica Tavella first began reaching out to Oakland event producers over the summer, with the idea in mind that there are lots of community organizers and promoters “already doing cool stuff in other parts of Oakland, but really doing their own thing,” she says.

“This was, here’s a space where we could all do that together, for a couple hours, on this one day. And I really had in mind that it should be downtown Oakland — specifically not in Uptown, which already has the Art Murmur…there are a lot of great small shop owners, a lot of great energy, and cool new things going on downtown. But there aren’t a lot of venues for something like a public music performance to happen.”

Tavella was quickly overwhelmed by the level of interest and enthusiasm from business owners and event producers — especially considering that the festival is all volunteer-run for now (including pro bono performances by musicians). The goal for the next one, which will take place in the last week of July or the first week of August, is to fundraise enough to pay musicians for their performances, while keeping admission free to the public.

Eventually, Tavella hopes to have the free daytime performances segue into a nighttime music crawl that would bring business to the venues in downtown Oakland. And with more and more musicians and artists getting priced out of San Francisco and heading East, organizers shouldn’t have too hard a time finding fresh talent to fill a bill every three months.

Dayvid Michael will be performing in the afternoon with the CaliMade crew at Le Qui Vive, a gallery at 15th and Webster. He feels at home there — it’s one of the first venues where CaliMade began performing a few years ago, and he says the folks behind it are part of the community that makes him feel so lucky to be calling Oakland home.

“When people from outside the Bay Area think about the Bay Area, they think of two things — we’re hyphy, we know how to have fun; and also the diversity of the city,” says Michael, who also does graphics work for Youth Radio (he basically “hung around” until they let him). “I feel like as representatives, the HBK Gang and Cali Made can fulfill both of those perceptions. And my personal goal is to show the world that we’re more than just party music. We can do that too — but we want to offer more than that.”

“This place is so rich in culture, intelligence, legacy. I love it here,” he says, and thinks for a minute. “If Oakland had waterfalls, I would never go anywhere else.” Fair enough.

Oakland Drops Beats
Sat/19, 2pm (all day), free
10 venues between Broadway and Harrison/14th and 19th St, Oak.
www.oaklanddropsbeats.com  

ONLY YOU CAN SAVE COLLEGE RADIO

 Talk about “left of the dial.” If you’ve only been in the city a couple years, you might not be aware that there was a time when KUSF — that’s the student-run radio station of the University of San Francisco — wasn’t in exile. It’s been over three years since the university sold the station (which had been broadcasting since 1963 at 90.3 FM) without public input or comment, for $3.75 million, to the Classical Public Radio Network, aka CPRN, via a complex three-way deal between the University of Southern California, that station, and the corporate broadcasting giant Entercom.

Since that time, KUSF DJs and friends of the station have been operating the station online, 24 hours a day, from the Lightrail Studios, growing a registered nonprofit arm with a new name: San Francisco Community Radio. All the while, those who love the station have been embroiled in — to use the technical legal terminology — a bureaucratic shitshow, as they try to prove that the sale was illegal. They’ve had some small successes in proving certain aspects of the transaction were unlawful, and currently have an appeal before the FCC.

Then, at the end of 2013, the FCC began issuing low-power FM licenses for the first time in about a decade. KUSF-In-Exile has an application in for 102.5 — but they’re up against at least seven other groups, including, as KUSF members understand it, a mega-church. The central goal, say organizers, is simply to get back on the (non-internet based) airwaves, one way or another. But “It’s a lot of hurry up and wait,” says SFCR board member and treasurer Damin Esper of the situation. “Which, obviously, isn’t very satisfying to us or to our supporters.”

In the meantime, the station has been throwing fundraiser shows to help pay for ongoing legal fees, and the one this April 20, naturally, is the third incarnation of their annual stoner-rama affair. Oakland punks Violence Creeps, who’ll be opening for the current incarnation of Black Flag at Brick & Mortar in May, will be headlining, alongside psych-rockers Mondo Drag and plenty of other wild, weird, woolly favorites; visuals, should you happen to have ingested anything that would make you want to look at cool visuals, will be provided by veteran stock-footage auteurs Oddball Films. All of the funds raised will go to SFCR’s legal fight; there will also be members on hand to talk volunteer opportunities — college radio-loving grantwriters, are you out there?

When it comes to the original sale, Esper says, “It’s clear that laws were broken. It could be found to be illegal in court…but one of the reasons the big guys always win in situations like this is it’s hard to keep people engaged, reminded of the situation. This is bigger than just KUSF. This is happening all over the country. College radio is under attack.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0MiS923Jfo

SFCR’s Blown-Out, Blowout Benefit III
Sun/20, 8pm, $7
Thee Parkside 1600 17th St, SF
www.theeparkside.com

Oh, one last thing: There’s also a little event called Record Store Day coming up, so get out that piggy bank — this is what people mean when they talk about having an “emergency fund,” right? Anyway: So much going on, so little space. Check the Bay Guardian’s Noise blog this week for special in-store events and one-day-only releases.

Think again

Michael Redmond
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Think again

arts@sfbg.com

DANCE With three world premieres in its recent Spring Home Season performances, Hope Mohr Dance gave the audiences pieces that were both opaque and transparent. They were opaque because their physical imagery contained narrative traces that resonated beyond the stage, but was often equally focused on a gesture’s physicality in the moment. They were transparent because of the clarity and intensity that these fabulous dancers brought to their tasks. Their presence burnt itself into your retina and your soul. Any way you want to take this, Hope Mohr Dance is a head trip these days.

For Route 20, Connie Strayer put Jeremy Bannon-Neches, James Graham, and Tegan Schwab into off-white, hooded unitards. It made the dancers look like robotic extraterrestrials, except that the red streaks on their bodies suggested freshly spilled blood. Given enough time, designer David Szlasa’s dripping block of ice, which encased some dark mystery, might have revealed its secrets.

While the body suits encouraged seeing the dancers as gender-neutral — a hopeless task as far as I am concerned — the choreography treated the three performers as equals. The tension, such as it was, seemed to be based more on an inherent lack of stability within the triangle than on any specific movement patterns. It allowed for a constant flow of interactions without much emotional baggage. Abrupt turns, collapsing torsos, and dancers jumping on each other and being carried aloft felt neutral. The music’s brilliant pointillism seemed to encourage the lack of a clear trajectory in favor of an intense presence. And yet there were moments — the ice melting? — when Mohr’s neutral beings became more individualized. When Schwab streaked between the two men, was she breaking something up? When two dancers held on to each other at arms’ length, was one of them looking into a mirror? Repeatedly, a nuzzling gesture suggested skin-on-skin contact.

There are moments in ridetherhythm, a sextet for which theater director Mark Jackson signed on as dramaturge, when the work approached pure music in the way fractured language rose into a chorus to retreat again into individual voices. Fragments of text flew from dancer to dancer, and countdown patterns became threatening even as they tried to impose a sense of order. It’s rare that dancers become truly expert at delivering words and movement; Mohr’s troupe was first-rate in both.

The choreographer went for inspiration to Anne Carson’s Antigonick, the poet’s translation of Sophocles’ play, and to Todd Haynes’ 1995 Safe, in which Julianne Moore plays a housewife trapped in a poisonous environment. Katharine Hawthorne, in a beautifully subtle performance that ebbed and swelled, was the woman who went her own way despite the fact that she lived in a man’s world. When she fell, Schwab threw herself on top of her, in what was perhaps the work’s single most touching moment. The narrative emerged only in bits and pieces, but Mohr’s ability to suggest a pervading doom, despite Evan Johnson’s soothsaying along the lines of “everything is all right, we are safe,” and “he’s a jolly good fellow,” was impressive. In one spot, the group’s search for an oasis of safety was almost comical, and when the dancers kneeled you didn’t know whether they did so in despair or with hope.

I never could figure out the work’s connection between Hegel, Beckett, and Sophocles. But then Megan Brian, a character in high heels and sunglasses who tried to bring order into the chaotic proceedings by obsessively writing down whatever she saw — not unlike some dance critics — finally threw in the towel. ridetherhythm clearly warrants repeated viewing.

Exuberant and yet ever so controlled, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction was a two-way street in terms of improvisation. Here the musicians — Michael Coleman on keyboard, Henry Hung on trumpet, Tommy Folen on bass, and Gerald Patrick Korte on percussion — responded as much to the dancers as the other way around. For this choreography the excellent Lindsey Renee Derry, Roche Janken, and David Schleiffers joined Bannon-Neches, Graham, and Schwab, who also individualized the dancers with color-saturated tank tops.

Schwab and Hung engaged each other in a playful duet, while Folen’s bass sent Bannon-Neches into spasmodic travels. Graham at one point strode upstage with every part of his torso alive to the music. I don’t know whether his greeting of dancers was a spur of the moment idea but it felt right on.

While some sections — unisons for instance — served as time markers and probably were planned, a duet between Schwab and Janken, for instance, could have been improvised. It was important that spontaneity blossomed within given parameters, sometimes determined by simple commands like “stop” and “go.” With Szlasa favoring slightly dimmed houselights, thus suggesting the breaking of the fourth wall, Notes came to look like a spacious and airy informal get-together. I kept thinking of watching outdoor ice skaters on a sunny afternoon. *

 

Diamonds on the soles of their shoes: Bay Area artists start a dance party in the street with ‘Graceland’ tribute

Steven T. Jones
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By Jeff Kaliss

For Paul Simon’s 1986 hit album Graceland, both its production and its long-time success moved across boundaries of space, time, and genre. The movement continued this past weekend inside the San Francisco Jewish Community Center’s Kanbar Hall, where the quarterly UnderCover project and Faultline Studios presented a tantalizing tribute to Graceland, with each of 11 groups/artists performing one of the album’s 11 tracks.A bit about the album: Simon, recovering from an artistic slump and a failed marriage to Carrie Fisher (aka Princess Leia), had been turned on in the mid-1980s to the black South African pop music genre known as township jive, an infectious stew of early rock, jazz, and tribal syncopation. The songwriting and arrangements on Graceland formed an homage to a variety of South African music, and to that nation’s musicians, including Zulu Sipho Mchunu and his white bandmate Johnny Clegg. Simon traveled to the source of those sounds, recording input to the album from the a cappella township men’s choir Ladysmith Black Mambazo and others. As on his future albums showcasing world music, Simon had no problem integrating material and musicians from his own country, who on Graceland included jazzmen Randy Brecker and Steve Gadd, the Everly Brothers, Linda Ronstadt, the Rubin family of Zydeco fame, and members of Los Lobos.

fely
Fely Tchaco. Photo by Steve Roby.

Following Simon’s example, the Oakland-based Rob Shelton, serving as music director for Friday and Saturday’s Graceland tribute concerts, culled an eclectic array from the Bay Area’s xenophillic talent pool; they were emceed throughout the evening by ebullient UnderCover founder Lyz Luke. As on Simon’s Graceland, horns and vocals played major roles throughout the evening. First up was Fanfare Zambaleta, a Balkan brass band who buoyed “The Boy in the Bubble,” the album’s opening track, on bursts of trumpet and euphonium. By contrast, the album’s title tune was given to guitarist and singer John Vanderslice, the closest thing to the songwriter’s solo act. Also changing from act-to-act throughout the evening were the projections on a large screen behind the performers, assembled by Elia Vargas. Zambelata got pulsing patterns; Vanderslice was backed by scenes of a road trip.

Fely Tchaco took “I Know What I Know” to a different but sympathetic corner of the vast African continent — her native Ivory Coast — dancing as well as singing, with booty-shaking impetus from conga player Paul Sonnabend and rest of her band. Mexican-born Diana Gameros put a folksy, slightly Latinized tinge on “Gumboots,” the song which first turned Simon towards South Africa and one of the few on the album not written by him. Music director Shelton appeared on keyboards with DRMS in their somewhat loungey version of “Diamonds On the Soles of Her Shoes.” Bill Baird, rather resembling Dana Carvey in a poncho, did “You Can Call Me Al,” but I wouldn’t know what to call his mixture of musical madness and madcap theater.

vanderslice
John Vanderslice. Photo by Don Albonico.

The Afrofunk Experience put “Under African Skies” under their soulful spell, with Sandy House and David James trading vocals. Sung by the thrilling, all-male, all-adult Ladysmith Black Mambazo on the album, “Homeless” had been co-written and arranged by that group’s leader, Joseph Shabalala. For UnderCover’s tribute, it was rearranged by Kevin Fox, Deke Sharon, and Eric Hagmann for the wide-ranged voices at various of points of puberty, constituting Fox’s Oakland-based Pacific Boychoir. They preserved the heavenly magic and the partly Zulu lyrics of Ladysmith, and brought tears to the eyes of proud parents and others.

Guy Fox and his quartet kept the “crazy” in “Crazy Love,” rocking up a storm. But it wasn’t they who triggered the fire alarm which temporarily drove audience and musicians onto the sidewalks Saturday evening. It was, reportedly, a rabbi, “kosherizing” the premises with a blowtorch. Outdoors, the pre-Pesach spirits stayed high, even among the goyim, and the music continued in informal festival mode.
After a blessing from the fire department, everyone returned to the Kanbar, where the Trio Zincalo, with vocalist Katie Clover, evoked the Hot Club de France with their take on “That Was Your Mother.” The Midtown Social closed the show with their soul-shaking send-up of “All Around the World Or the Myth of Fingerprints,” summoning the rest of the evening’s performers to join them on stage and the audience to dance in the aisles.

afrfofunk
Afrofunk Experience. Photo by Steve Roby.

The Graceland tribute will hop across the Bay to the Freight & Salvage this coming weekend, Sat/19 and Sun/20, performances added after the JCCSF shows quickly sold out. There’s also a recorded album of the tribute, mixed and mastered by Faultline Studios’ Yosh! (an UnderCover co-presenter) — but for any vital fan of Paul Simon and the vast menagerie of Bay Area talent, seeing this live is highly recommended.

Ed note: San Francisco journalist Jeff Kaliss, author of I Want to Take You Higher: The Life and Times of Sly & the Family Stone, has been a fan of UnderCover since consulting on their Sly tribute show in January.

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