How to spend the last weekend of April in SF
We wish there were more hours in the weekend to attend all of these events.
Here's what to do.
Friday
🍿 Sundown cinema: Tune in for a free outdoor screening of " The Fog," a 1980 horror classic based in Northern California.
Starts at 8pm at the Presidio Civil War Parade Ground. RSVP required.
Saturday
🐶 DogFest: The proceeds of this event, which features a doggy show, silent auction, food trucks, carnival-style games and pup adoption zone, helps raise funds for McKinley Elementary.
11am-4pm at Duboce Park.
🎥 " Last Dance at the Sundance Stompede:" The San Francisco Dance Film Festival is showcasing the premiere of a new documentary based in the city that explores the queer country-western dancing scene.
Doors open at 6pm at the Brava Theater at 2781 24th Street. Tickets start at $30.
🎵 Pickin on the Polk: This all-day outdoor jazz and bluegrass block party takes place on Polk Street between California and Broadway.
Noon-10pm.
10am- 5pm at the Rockridge Bart Parking Lot at 5660 College Ave in Oakland.
Sunday
🧺 Community Picnic: This event celebrates the five-year anniversary of JFK Promenade closing to cars, with lawn activities, a drag story hour, games and prizes.
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San Francisco Chronicle
2 days ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Rarely performed Sondheim musical speaks volumes in our tariff era
To feel the scourge of imperialism, listen to a song that doesn't dictate feeling at all. In the musical 'Pacific Overtures,' an unlikely governor in Japan ticks off the Western imports that have wormed their way into his life since Americans forced open his country to trade in 1853. 'It's called a bowler hat,' Kayama (Nick Nakashima) sings in Kunoichi Productions' show, his eyes wary yet curious as he regards the foreign object. Two verses later: 'It's called a pocket watch.' Before long, the samurai is looking for his own bowler hat, drinking too much white wine and replacing his sword with a pistol. Stephen Sondheim's lyrics stay light and jagged, and his music sounds like waves heaving back and forth, thrashing the passage of time. Suddenly, a way of life is gone, a man transformed, and all it took was a song. That's one of the finest moments in the rarely performed show, which opened Friday, May 30, at Brava Theater. Another comes shortly before, when nobles warn Lord Abe (Lawrence-Michael C. Arias) about the growing population of Westerners in their midst. Their method is to have a storyteller deliver a fable, in the ritualized style of traditional Japanese theater, about a young king on a hunting party who thinks he's encountering a tiger, only to be confronted by a pack of beastly men. Herein, actor Ryan Marchand glides about the stage in swooshing steps, sweeping his arms in surgically precise arcs. In a drawn-out chant, his voice mines the lower depths of his body cavity, resounding like a hollow redwood, and ratchets up in pitch to transport the whole stage to some kind of liminal space, like we're listening to an emissary from the beyond. His hyper-focused gaze practically has physical force. It's as if he pictures very specifically all the long-term ramifications of opening borders to the West, and he's holding you in place till you see it, too. The show isn't an easy one, though. Often, Sondheim's score doesn't ingratiate itself with the ear. If you're not well schooled in dissonant music, it can be difficult to pick out what distinguishes his chords from a random mashing of fist against keys. And while Nick Ishimaru's direction contains some flashes of genius, including othering the infringing Americans as caricatures by costuming them in garish masks, staging feels incomplete. When Kayama and his wife Tamate (Sarah Jiang) fret about his impossible-seeming mission to keep the Americans offshore, lest they taint sacred Japanese soil, it's as if the actors haven't been told to either move or stay still, so they hover in an unsatisfying in-between state. Singers muddle their pick-ups and cut-offs. Breath support staggers, the musical equivalent of water instead of soup. In the repetitive song 'Someone in a Tree,' the actors fail to justify why one character, recalling his observation of the first meeting of the Japanese and Americans, sings that he was 'younger then' six times. Sitting in the audience, you start to dream up possibilities. Maybe he's senile. Maybe he's overexcited or fond of hearing his own voice. Maybe his listener would be indulgent at first, since she yearns to hear his tale, only to grow confused, then impatient, then exasperated. But the actors don't explore these possibilities or any other, probably better ones. Each iteration feels the same. Still, in our own era of tariffs and isolationism frankensteined to would-be imperialism (see Greenland, Canada and the Gulf of Mexico), the 1976 musical makes for a provocative revisit. Closed borders relegate the rest of the world to 'somewhere out there.' Open borders sully or sever connection with heritage. But history, 'Pacific Overtures' suggests, tends to move only in one direction. You can't put the genie back in the bottle, so open with care.
San Francisco Chronicle
5 days ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
This San Francisco director is reimagining Sondheim's ‘Pacific Overtures' with a Japanese perspective
Nick Ishimaru is used to speaking up and speaking out. Before a 2023 San Francisco Opera performance of ' Madame Butterfly,' the San Francisco theater producer and director was invited to a pre-opera talk at the War Memorial Opera House where he praised the Puccini masterpiece on aesthetic levels but called out the cultural inaccuracies and controversies inherent to the 1904 work. Audience members expecting a dressy night out at the opera didn't respond well to the contextual breakdown, which included his assessment that Puccini equated geishas — who are trained entertainers and performing artists — as sex workers. 'To say I was not kind about 'Madame Butterfly' would be an understatement,' Ishimaru told the Chronicle on a video call from his home near Dolores Park. 'I've never felt more threatened in a physical space than I did when I finished that talk.' Since then, Ishimaru and his Kunoichi Productions team have had a different Japan-set story in their sights: John Weidman and Stephen Sondheim's 'Pacific Overtures.' The musical, which begins performances Friday, May 30, at Brava Theater, is set during an historic moment in the 19th century when American ships led by Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in Tokyo Bay and forcibly opened Japan to foreign trade and the outside world. 'It's a foundational moment in Japanese history that Americans basically know nothing about,' Ishimaru said. 'Pacific Overtures' is built around an unlikely friendship between a samurai named Kayama and an Americanized fisherman named Manjiro. Despite Sondheim's Broadway chops ('Sweeney Todd,' among others), this work is rarely revived. Its script is challenging and has a nonlinear story that involves a subject that, at best, appears as a footnote in American history textbooks. But Ishimaru, a fourth-generation Japanese American, is uniquely qualified to give the original a 2025 remix. He's trained in multiple disciplines of American and Japanese theater. He served as artistic director of San Francisco's Theatre of Yugen, which continues the Japanese tradition of Noh drama and Kyogen comedy, from 2016 to 2019. He's also well-versed in that historic 1853 moment of gunboat diplomacy between the U.S. and Japan, studying it extensively when working on his master's in drama at San Francisco State University. 'That's what I cling to as a Japanese American and why I want to tell this particular story,' he said. 'It's really the first time America and Japan interact, and it's something all generations of Japanese Americans have in common.' The original 1976 Broadway cast featured Japanese American actors Mako, Sab Shimono and even a pre-'Sixteen Candles' Gedde Watanabe. The 2025 Brava Theater revival features a diverse cast that takes a fresh approach, with input from classically trained kabuki artist Bandō Hirohichirō. But while it's informed by and written with traditional kabuki aesthetics, Ishimaru stresses the production is not a traditional performance. The singers aren't all male or male-identifying, a kabuki prerequisite. His 'Pacific Overtures' also shifts Weidman and Sondheim's lens to one that prioritizes the Japanese perspective. The U.S. delegation wears masks, which gives them an alien-like feel, while the Japanese do not, allowing them to express more natural emotions like ambivalence rather than certainty. These changes reflect a sensitivity in ways that 'Madame Butterfly' does not, giving Japanese characters more humanity and depth. 'To me, the show is about how we navigate our relationship to our ancestry and understanding of our own selves,' said Ishimaru. Music Director Diana Lee, who lives in Berkeley and whose recent credits include 'Rent' at Hillbarn Theatre in Foster City and 'The Scottsboro Boys' at 42nd Street Moon in San Francisco, pulled from her Rolodex to assemble a tight seven-piece orchestra with keyboards, violin, cello, French horn, reeds, percussion and a Japanese koto. 'A lot of musicians really wanted to play this show,' said Lee, who noted many reached out to her as word spread about the revised production. 'It's a new experience to see another work from the Sondheim canon that's rarely done.' For the show-stopping number 'Someone in a Tree,' which is widely known as Sondheim's favorite from all of his musicals, Ishimaru merges the original three-member dialogue — a conversation between a man, his younger self and another witness describing the negotiations between the Japanese and Americans — into one perspective. Ishimaru explains that it allows the piece to come to life. 'We let the music, which is the most glorious song in the show, carry the imagery,' Ishimaru explained, noting that that approach allows the piece to come to life. With its themes of imperialism and the fall of an empire, Ishimaru believes 'Pacific Overtures' feels even more relevant now than when it came out in 1976. 'Next,' a number that describes environmental catastrophe, is a prime example. 'Never mind a small disaster/ Who's the stronger, who's the faster?' goes the chorus. 'It's scary how relevant the lyrics of that particular number are to today and how much that trajectory just lands now,' said Ishimaru. 'I know many people here in San Francisco are concerned about the collapse of our own nation and the end of the American experiment. Did we drive ourselves here by unchecked capitalism? Is oligarchy what we're facing? Is the threat that America presented to Japan in 1853 ultimately coming home to roost, not just in Japan, but here in the States?
Axios
24-04-2025
- Axios
How to spend the last weekend of April in SF
We wish there were more hours in the weekend to attend all of these events. Here's what to do. Friday 🍿 Sundown cinema: Tune in for a free outdoor screening of " The Fog," a 1980 horror classic based in Northern California. Starts at 8pm at the Presidio Civil War Parade Ground. RSVP required. Saturday 🐶 DogFest: The proceeds of this event, which features a doggy show, silent auction, food trucks, carnival-style games and pup adoption zone, helps raise funds for McKinley Elementary. 11am-4pm at Duboce Park. 🎥 " Last Dance at the Sundance Stompede:" The San Francisco Dance Film Festival is showcasing the premiere of a new documentary based in the city that explores the queer country-western dancing scene. Doors open at 6pm at the Brava Theater at 2781 24th Street. Tickets start at $30. 🎵 Pickin on the Polk: This all-day outdoor jazz and bluegrass block party takes place on Polk Street between California and Broadway. Noon-10pm. 10am- 5pm at the Rockridge Bart Parking Lot at 5660 College Ave in Oakland. Sunday 🧺 Community Picnic: This event celebrates the five-year anniversary of JFK Promenade closing to cars, with lawn activities, a drag story hour, games and prizes.
