Bay Area arts: 7 shows and concerts to catch this weekend
From a fabled punk band to a trashy art exhibit, there is a lot to see and do in the Bay Area this weekend and beyond.
Here’s a partial rundown.
Black Flag back in NorCal
The Black Flag lineup has changed quite a bit over the decades.
Most notably, it no longer includes one of the most iconic singers in punk rock history — the mighty Henry Rollins, who many readers best know these days for his film and television work as well as for his spoken-word performances.
The band also no longer includes Keith Morris, another incredibly iconic punk vocalist. Yet, the heart and soul of this Hermosa Beach hardcore outfit has always been guitarist-songwriter-founder Greg Ginn. And as long as he’s still in the band then Black Flag will most certainly be worth seeing in concert.
Ginn and company underscored that point during the terrific Black Flag performance at the Punk in the Park festival in Daly City last May. The whole quartet — including vocalist Mike Vallely — sounded terrific as it ran through such cool cuts as “Can’t Decide,” “Rise Above” and a cover of “Louie Louie.” But it was the chance to witness Ginn do his incredible thing on guitar that truly made the Black Flag set so special.
Fans will have the chance to witness plenty of Ginn greatness when Black Flag performs several NorCal shows in January.
Details: 7 p.m. Jan. 11 at the Santa Cruz County Veterans Memorial Building, Santa Cruz; 6:30 p.m. Jan. 12 at Brentwood Emporium; 8 p.m. Jan. 15 at Mystic Theatre, Petaluma; tickets start at $28.53; blackflagband.com.
— Jim Harrington, Staff
Trash becomes art in exhibit
Some people, notably tech CEOs and out-of-state politicians, like to complain about how dirty San Francisco is. Others embrace the trashiness — literally, in the case of a gritty new exhibit at the city’s MAG Galleries.
“Art and Fashion in the Garbage Age” assembles recent work from the Piles Collective, a group of artists who repurpose garbage and up-cycled materials sourced right here from local streets and trash piles. “We live in an age when garbage threatens our way of life,” they declare. “Countering the problems that generate the garbage is a momentous task, but also significant is the creative desire to find the detritus as a source of artistic possibilities.”
The multimedia extravaganza presents photography and sculptures of urban debris, as well as furniture design, jewelry, and elegant garments made from discarded (and hopefully washed) textiles and even a bunch of trashy zines. Show up on Jan. 25 and you’re in for a treat — a runway show at the gallery featuring models in rubbish-based clothing.
Details: Show runs through Feb. 2; MAG Galleries, 3931 18th St., San Francisco; hours are noon-7 p.m. Thursday-Friday and noon-5 p.m. Saturday-Sunday; mag-galleries.com.
— John Metcalfe, Staff
Sherald’s timeless works at SFMOMA
Nearly 50 paintings by Amy Sherald, well known for her realist portraits of Black subjects, are on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in the artist’s first mid-career survey. “Amy Sherald: American Sublime” features paintings made from 2007 to 2024, including iconic portraits of Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor, rarely seen pieces and new works created for the exhibition.
Sherald, a Georgia native living in New Jersey, has a style following in the tradition of Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper. Her portraits are grounded by 19th-century studio photography, reflecting the era’s formal, frontal presentation of figures, single-source lighting and flat backgrounds that leave few indications of time, location or context. Still, Sherald’s paintings are contemporary and prescient.
An exhibition highlight is 2022’s “For Love, and for Country,” which was inspired by the famous 1945 photograph depicting a sailor kissing a woman suspended in a back-bending posture. Sherald’s reimagined portrayal of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s “V-J-Day in Times Square” is a 10-foot-tall painting with two Black men engaged in an embrace.
Details: Through March 9; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; $23-$30; sfmoma.org.
— Lou Fancher, Bay City News Foundation
Rachmaninoff is in the house
Hershey Felder took an unusual route to his role as a performer known for spotlighting some of the world’s greatest composers. The Canada native worked for a time in Los Angeles with the Steven Spielberg Shoah Foundation interviewing Holocaust survivors as part of a drive to record their personal histories. A short time later, he attended the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, when he met a survivor of the Polish death camp, who recounted that he was ordered by the guards to whistle Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” This inspired Felder to write a musical about Holocaust survivors that incorporated Gershwin’s music, which in turn got him immersed in Gershwin and his music. By 1999, after interviewing several members of the composer’s family, Felder had created a solo stage show titled “George Gershwin Alone.”
A quarter century later, Felder has performed around the world in a series of solo shows focusing on the music and lives of legendary classical composers. This week, he brings his 12th and reportedly final show in the series to TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, where he has staged several productions.. “Rachmaninoff and the Tsar” centers on the famed Russian composer (1873-1943) who was equally known as a virtuosic pianist. The production – with Felder playing the composer and performing some of his best-known music on piano – takes place after Rachmaninoff had relocated to Beverly Hills and was in failing health, and finds the great musician nearly obsessed with the memory of a tragic encounter with Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II and the Tsar’s daughter, the Grand Duchess Anastasia. Unlike Felder’s previous shows, this one incorporates a second actor (Jonathan Silvestri as Tsar Nicholas II) but otherwise consists of what Felder fans have come to revere – great music and musical storytelling.
Details: Jan. 10 through Feb. 9 at the Mountain View Center for the Arts; $34-$115; theatreworks.org.
— Bay City News Foundation
A folk legend weighs in
One of the many pop cultural developments of the 1970s was the advent of so-called “women’s music,” a version of folk created by feminist and/or lesbian artists who felt overlooked by the mainstream record business. Artists included Meg Christian, Margie Adam, Holly Near, Linda Tillery and Cris Williamson, whose works addressed not just LGBTQ and feminist issues but a wide variety of social and anti-war themes. Of these artists, Williamson made one of the biggest splashes 50 years ago with the release of the album “The Changer and the Changed,” which went on to become one of the genre’s best-selling albums as well as one of best-selling independent record releases of all time. The fact that it was released on a small, independent label – Olivia Records – and features an all-female production and musical staff also helped cement the album’s place in history. Williamson is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the album on a tour that stops at the Freight & Salvage Coffee House in Berkeley for two shows this weekend. But the folk icon won’t just be looking backward. Williamson will also spotlight her latest album, “Ravens and the Roses,” which came out last month. She has more than 30 studio and live albums to her credit, if you’re keeping score at home.
Details: Williamson performs at 7 p.m. Jan. 11 and 2 p.m. Jan. 12; $54-$79; thefreight.org.
— Bay City News Foundation
Playing dress-up
These days, drag performers are pretty much safely ensconced in the American mainstream – unless, of course, they are doing something horrifying like teaching school kids how to read. But once upon a time in America, the whole concept gave some people the heebie-jeebies. It didn’t even matter if the guys doing the cross-dressing were red-blooded males who were just disguising themselves to avoid getting eviscerated by the mob.
We are talking, of course, about the story line from the 1959 classic film comedy “Some Like it Hot,” directed by Billy Wilder and starring Jack Lemon and Tony Curtis. Even though Lemon and Curtis’ cross-dressing was played for laughs, and even though the film was a commercial and critical success from the start (it received six Oscar nominations), it was denied approval at the time by the Motion Picture Production Code, a set of Hollywood moral guidelines that had been established in 1934. The code was enacted after a few scandals had stained Hollywood’s reputation, but by the late 1950s, more and more filmmakers had begun to defy it. In 1968, the code was replaced by the Motion Picture Association of America’s film rating system. It should be noted that “Some Like it Hot” was essentially a remake of a 1935 French film “Fanfare of Love,” which had already been remade, in Germany in 1951, as “Fanfares of Love.” Neither of those films generated much controversy.
Now comes “Some Like it Hot,” the stage musical that, as far as we can tell, has not generated anywhere near the kind of feverish hand-wringing as Drag Queen Story Hour. Where you stand on all this, of course, will no doubt influence whether you choose to see the 2019 musical with music and lyrics by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman (the duo behind “Hairspray”) and a book by Matthew López and Amber Ruffin. The show debuted on Broadway in 2022 and won four Tony Awards, including for its choreography and costumes. Now a national touring production has stopped at Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco, where it will play through Jan. 26.
Details: Tickets start at $55.50; www.broadwaysf.com.
— Bay City News Foundation
A welcome return at SF Symphony
James Gaffigan, former associate conductor of the San Francisco Symphony, is back in Davies Hall this weekend as a guest conductor, leading the orchestra in an intriguing program of music by Missy Mazzoli, Samuel Barber and Sergei Prokofiev. Gaffigan, who is now the music director at both the Berlin Comic Opera and the Queen Sofia Palace of the Arts in Valencia, Spain, will open the concert with SFS’ first performance of American composer Mazzoli’s “Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres”), which has been described as “a cosmic hurdy gurdy, flung into space” and features the bassoon, French horn, trumpet and trombone doubling on harmonicas.
Next up is the Barber Violin Concerto, the only one he ever wrote, showcasing the prodigious talents of Raymond Chen, a first prizewinner of both the Yehudi Menuhin and the Queen Elisabeth competitions who plays a Stradivarius instrument once owned by the great Jascha Heifetz. Gaffigan brings the concert to a close with Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5, considered by most to be his greatest, written near the end of WWII when American and Russian cooperation was at its height and a huge hit on both sides of the Atlantic. Time magazine once described it as “a great, brassy creation with some of the intricate efficiency and dynamic energy of a Soviet power plant and some of the pastoral lyricism of a Chekhov countryside.”
Details: 7:30 p.m. Jan. 9-11; $49-$199; sfsymphony.org.
— Bay City News Foundation