Free bookstore crawl, with chocolate: San Francisco’s prize-winning sci-fi writer Charlie Jane Anders, host of the long-running Writers with Drinks collection and the organizer behind the much less frequent Bookstore and Chocolate Crawls, is certainly an enormous supporter of our native unbiased bookstores. In that capability, she is encouraging people to attend the newest incarnation, an Emergency Bookstore and Chocolate Crawl, to be held for the primary time on each side of the Bay between 1 and 4 p.m. Saturday to learn 4 bookstores which can be underneath duress. It kicks off at Medication for Nightmares at 3036 twenty fourth St. within the Mission, which sustained harm to a lot of its books from latest flooding. It strikes on to Adobe Books (simply up a block on twenty fourth), which additionally suffered related harm from the identical storm. Contributors are then urged to leap on BART on the twenty fourth and Mission station to enterprise throughout the Bay to Rockridge, to hit Pegasus Books at 5560 Faculty Ave. round 3 p.m. and transfer on to East Bay Booksellers at 6022 Faculty, the brand new location it moved to after its previous website was broken by hearth. Registration right here is on the market, however not mandatory, as a result of the occasion is free.
Conductor James Gaffigan returns to the Davies Corridor podium on Jan. Sept. 11 to steer the San Francisco symphony in a program of music by Mazzoli, Barber and Prokofiev. (Courtesy Miguel Lorenzo)
A welcome return: James Gaffigan, former affiliate conductor of the San Francisco Symphony, is again in Davies Corridor this weekend as a visitor conductor, main the orchestra in an intriguing program of music by Missy Mazzoli, Samuel Barber and Sergei Prokofiev. Gaffigan, now the music director at each the Berlin Comedian Opera and the Queen Sofia Palace of the Arts in Valencia, Spain, will open the live performance with SFS’ first efficiency of American composer Mazzoli’s “Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres),” which has been described as “a cosmic hurdy gurdy, flung into space” and options the bassoon, French horn, trumpet and trombone doubling on harmonicas. Subsequent up is the Barber Violin Concerto, the one one he ever wrote, showcasing the prodigious abilities of Ray Chen, a primary prizewinner of each the Yehudi Menuhin and the Queen Elisabeth competitions, who performs a Stradivarius instrument as soon as owned by the good Jascha Heifetz. Gaffigan brings the live performance to a detailed with Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5, thought of by most to be his biggest, written close to the tip of World Conflict II when American and Russian cooperation was at its peak and an enormous hit on each side of the Atlantic. Time journal 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.” Live performance occasions are 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and tickets, $49-$199, may be discovered at sfsymphony.org.
Hershey Felder portrays Sergei Rachmaninoff in his present in regards to the life and music of the good Russian composer onstage in Mountain View. (Courtesy Stefano DeCarli/TheatreWorks Silicon Valley)
Rachmaninoff is in the home: Hershey Felder took an uncommon path to his position as a performer spotlighting the world’s biggest composers. The Canada native labored in Los Angeles with the Steven Spielberg’s USC Shoah Basis, the place he interviewed Holocaust survivors as a part of a drive to file their private histories. A short while later, he attended the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, when he met a survivor of the Polish loss of life camp who recounted that he was ordered by the guards to whistle Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” This impressed Felder to write down a musical about Holocaust survivors with Gershwin’s music. By 1999, after interviewing a number of members of the composer’s household, Felder created a solo stage present titled “George Gershwin Alone.” 1 / 4 century later, Felder has carried out world wide in solo exhibits specializing in the music and lives of legendary classical composers. This week, he brings his twelfth and reportedly last present within the collection to TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, the place he has staged a number of productions. “Rachmaninoff and the Tsar” facilities on famed Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943), who was equally often called a virtuosic pianist. The manufacturing—with Felder taking part in the composer and performing a few of his best-known music on piano—takes place after Rachmaninoff relocated to Beverly Hills and was in failing well being, and finds the good musician almost obsessive about the reminiscence of a tragic encounter with Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II and the Tsar’s daughter, the Grand Duchess Anastasia. In contrast to Felder’s earlier exhibits, this one incorporates a second actor (Jonathan Silvestri as Tsar Nicholas II), however in any other case consists of what Felder followers have come to revere: nice music and musical storytelling. “Rachmaninoff and the Tsar” performs Friday via Feb. 9 on the Mountain View Middle for the Arts. Tickets are $34-$115; go to theatreworks.org/.
People music icon Cris Williamson performs on the Freight & Salvage in Berkeley on Jan. 11-12. (Photograph by Steve Keyser/Courtesy Cris Williamson)
A people legend weighs in: Amongst pop cultural developments of the Nineteen Seventies was so-called “women’s music,” a model of people created by feminist and lesbian artists missed by the mainstream file enterprise. Meg Christian, Margie Adam, Holly Close to, Linda Tillery and Cris Williamson addressed not simply LGBTQ and feminist points, however all kinds of social and anti-war themes. Of those artists, Williamson made one of many greatest splashes 50 years in the past with “The Changer and the Changed,” which went on to develop into one of many style’s best-selling albums and one in all best-selling unbiased file releases of all time. The truth that it was launched on a small label, Olivia Information, and options an all-female manufacturing and musical employees, additionally helped cement the album’s place in historical past. Williamson is celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the album on a tour that stops on the Freight & Salvage in Berkeley for 2 exhibits this weekend. However the people icon gained’t simply be trying backward. Williamson may also highlight the album “Ravens and the Roses,” which got here out final month. She has greater than 30 studio and dwell albums to her credit score, should you’re maintaining rating at dwelling. Williamson performs at 7 p.m. Saturday and a couple of p.m. Sunday; tickets are $54-$79. Go to thefreight.org.
L-R, Tavis Kordell and Matt Loehr star within the touring manufacturing of “Some Like It Hot,” taking part in via Jan. 26 on the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco. (Courtesy Matthew Murphy/BroadwaySF)
Taking part in dress-up: Lately, drag performers are ensconced within the American mainstream. However as soon as upon a time in America, the idea gave some folks the heebie-jeebies. It didn’t matter if the fellows doing the cross-dressing had been red-blooded males who had been simply disguising themselves to keep away from getting eviscerated by the mob. We’re speaking, in fact, in regards to the story within the 1959 basic movie comedy “Some Like it Hot” directed by Billy Wilder and starring Jack Lemon and Tony Curtis. Regardless that Lemon and Curtis’ cross-dressing was performed for laughs, and despite the fact that the movie was a business and significant success from the beginning (it obtained six Oscar nominations), it was denied approval on the time by the Movement Image Manufacturing Code, a set of Hollywood ethical tips established in 1934. The code was enacted after just a few scandals had stained Hollywood’s repute, however by the late Nineteen Fifties, an increasing number of filmmakers had begun to defy it, and in 1968, it was changed by the Movement Image Affiliation of America’s movie score system. It must be famous that “Some Like it Hot” primarily was a remake of a 1935 French movie “Fanfare of Love,” which additionally was remade in Germany in 1951 as “Fanfares of Love.” Neither generated a lot controversy. Now comes “Some Like it Hot,” the stage musical that has not generated wherever close to the form of feverish handwringing as Drag Queen Story Hour. This 2019 present, with music and lyrics by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman (the duo behind “Hairspray”) and a e book by Matthew López and Amber Ruffin, debuted on Broadway in 2022 and gained 4 Tony Awards, together with for choreography and costumes. The nationwide tour has stopped at Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco, the place it would play via Jan. 26. Tickets begin at $55.50; go to broadwaysf.com.
