
San Francisco approves Grateful Dead 60th anniversary concerts at Golden Gate Park
Thousands of Deadheads are expected to descend on Golden Gate Park this summer now that the San Francisco Recreation and Park Commission approved a three-day concert to mark the 60th anniversary of the Grateful Dead.
The event will feature surviving members Bob Weir and Mickey Hart playing along with Dead & Company, their ensemble of musician friends — guitarist John Mayer, bassist Oteil Burbridge, pianist Jeff Chimenti and drummer Jay Lane — at the Polo Fields on Aug. 1-3.
A spokesperson from the agency said the commission voted yes at its meeting on Thursday, May 15.
It's official! @deadandcompany will perform 3 concerts at Golden Gate Park's Polo Fields on August 1, 2 & 3, commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Grateful Dead. Mayor @DanielLurie announced the proposal on Monday, which was approved by the Rec & Park Commission today. pic.twitter.com/KPVjHCNsu0
— San Francisco Recreation and Park Department (@RecParkSF) May 15, 2025
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie, who championed the proposal, emphasized the city's deep connection to the Grateful Dead.
'What better way to celebrate?' Lurie said in a social media post earlier this week. 'We'll see you out here.'
The outdoor concerts will be organized by Another Planet Entertainment, in collaboration with Live Nation and the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department.
The event is expected to draw up to 60,000 people per day
Lurie anticipates the concerts will generate millions in economic activity, benefiting San Francisco's hotels, restaurants, and small businesses. A similar Dead & Company show in 2023 at Oracle Park contributed $31 million to the local economy.
This summer's performances will commemorate the Grateful Dead's 1965 debut as the Warlocks. The event will also mark the first local performances since the death of bassist Phil Lesh in October 2024.
Phil Ginsburg, general manager of the Recreation and Park Department, called the concert a 'powerful tribute' to both the Grateful Dead's legacy and the park's cultural history.
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Los Angeles Times
8 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
A Black reimagining of ‘The Great Gatsby' spotlights a hidden L.A. history
In 2022, Kyra Davis Lurie heard a story on KCRW's 'Curbed Los Angeles' about the residents of South L.A.'s West Adams Heights, nicknamed Sugar Hill after a community of wealthy Black Harlemites. Learning about the sumptuous soirees Academy Award-winning actor Hattie McDaniel hosted in her Sugar Hill mansion, Lurie realized there was a hidden Black history waiting for her to unearth. But how she created the enthralling historical novel 'The Great Mann' is a story that owes as much to Lurie's ability to reinvent herself as it does to F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby,' the iconic 20th century critique of the American dream, which provided a touchstone for the novel. Lurie, 52, grew up in Santa Cruz, far from the neighborhood where McDaniel, Louise Beavers, Ethel Waters and other striving Black actors and business pioneers depicted in 'The Great Mann' lived. While she visited family regularly in L.A., Lurie stayed up north, where she penned the light-hearted 2005 book 'Sex, Murder and a Double Latte.' She quickly followed it with two more mysteries. Encouraged by her success, Lurie struck out for L.A. to pursue her dream of getting into a TV writers room. The 2007 writers' strike deferred that goal, so Lurie pivoted to write three erotic novels which, she reveals, were 'critiques of capitalism wrapped in a romance novel.' By the time she heard about Sugar Hill and its famous inhabitants, Lurie was ready to take on a more nuanced challenge. But many literary agents weren't receptive to her change of genre. 'It was as if Marlon James had gone from writing comic books to 'A [Brief] History of Seven Killings,'' she says, name-checking the famous Jamaican writer and his Man Booker Prize-winning novel. But as Lurie continued researching the neighborhood and its history, she knew she had to tell its story, even if using 'The Great Gatsby' as her North Star proved problematic. 'I'm a huge Fitzgerald fan,' Lurie says, 'even though there was a line in that book that always bothered me.' She's referring to Nick Carraway's reference to 'two bucks and a girl' upon seeing three wealthy Black people passing by in a white-chauffeured limousine. 'While it was probably used to get a laugh in 1925, it was demeaning,' Lurie says of the scene. 'In the wake of the Red Summer of 1919 [when a record number of race riots and lynchings of Black Americans occurred in the U.S.] and the destruction of Black Wall Street in the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot, Fitzgerald's language says a lot about America's cultural climate at the time.' Was it subversive to use Fitzerald's most famous novel to frame the story of a vibrant Black enclave whose prosperity rivaled that of Jay Gatsby and his ilk? Absolutely, Lurie says, adding, 'Through a Black reimagining of 'The Great Gatsby,' I tried to marry a family's story with a little-known part of L.A. history.' The family story is told through the lens of Charlie Trammell III, a World War II veteran emotionally scarred by the violence he witnessed on the battlefield and at home in Jim Crow Virginia. Charlie arrives in L.A. looking for a fresh start and to reconnect with his cousin Margie, with whom he shares pivotal childhood experiences. But Margie, who now goes by the more exotic Marguerite, has shaken off the past and married Terrance Lewis, a vice president at Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Co. The Lewises live with their son in Sugar Hill, along with McDaniel, Beavers and Norman O. Houston, the real-life co-founder and president of Golden State Mutual. Soon Charlie is swept into the world of L.A.'s wealthy Black elite, a mix of real Angelenos like John and Vada Somerville, pioneering Black dentists and founders of Central Avenue's famed Dunbar Hotel; singers-actors Waters and Lena Horne; and fictional characters including James Mann, the mysterious Black businessman recently arrived in Sugar Hill who hosts lavish parties unlike anything Charlie's ever seen: 'The air is flavored with flowery perfumes and earthy cigars. All around me diamonds glitter from brown earlobes, gold watches flash against brown wrists. The only things white are the walls.' Mann befriends Charlie, treating the recently discharged veteran to his first hand-tailored suit and fine wine, but soon embroils him in his quest to reunite with Marguerite, the love of his life since the two met some 10 years before when they both lived in the South. Like Fitzgerald's classic juxtaposition of West Egg and East Egg in 'Gatsby,' 'The Great Mann' is about new money versus old — interlopers like Mann and the entertainers versus businesspeople like Houston and the Somervilles. But Lurie 'tried not to invent flaws' in her historical figures by doing her homework, sourcing accounts in Black newspapers, biographies and even letters between Houston and NAACP leader Walter White to depict these frictions. 'The Great Mann' is also about people reinventing themselves amid the realities and contradictions of the time. Like Black actors who played maids but employed Black 'help' in real life. Or the controversy over the stereotypically demeaning roles Black actors depicted. Chief among them was Delilah Johnson, the subservient Black maid portrayed by Beavers in the 1934 film 'Imitation of Life.' It's a debate that's introduced in 'The Great Mann' when Marguerite and Terrance tell Charlie that Beavers' home, where he will be staying and which is much grander than theirs, is paid for 'with Black shame.' Also addressed in the novel are touchier subjects like White's advocacy for the lighter-skinned Horne to get roles over her darker-skinned colleagues like McDaniel or Beavers. But the engine that fires up the plot of 'The Great Mann,' and which sets it apart from 'Gatsby,' is the battle Black creatives and business owners faced to hold onto their properties. A clause placed in thousands of L.A. property deeds in 1902 restricted housing covenants at the time West Adams Heights and many other L.A. County communities were developed, prohibiting homes from being sold to anyone 'other than the white or Caucasian race.' But some white sellers sold property to Black buyers anyway, who then had to fight white groups — like the West Adams Heights Improvement Assn. — to prevent eviction from their own homes. To say how Sugar Hill's Black residents fared in court would spoil the enjoyment of this suspenseful tale, which has put Lurie on a new path in writing historical fiction. She has another project percolating, but for now, she's just grateful to have found her niche. 'It's been a journey,' she says of the twists and turns of her writing life, 'but writing about historical Black lives feels like home to me, what I was meant to do.' Lurie will be discussing 'The Great Mann' at Vroman's Bookstore at 7 p.m. June 10; Diesel, a Bookstore at 6:30 p.m. June 11; and Chevalier's Books at 6:30 p.m. June 19.


Boston Globe
8 hours ago
- Boston Globe
On Broadway, death does not take a holiday
Advertisement Images of theater and death are entwined in the opening lines of 'My Way,' which became a signature song for Frank Sinatra, with its karaoke-ready opening lines: 'And now, the end is near/ And so I face the final curtain…' The fact that so many current Broadway shows are taking a peek behind that curtain could be nothing more than coincidence, a case of a bunch of death-themed shows making their way through the developmental pipeline and arriving on Broadway at the same time, though it's an unusually large number. Or perhaps the current prevalence of death-as-leitmotif on Broadway stages represents a theatrical response to the COVID-19 pandemic that shut down playhouses for 18 months and forced millions to confront their own mortality while, not so incidentally, causing the deaths of more than a million people in the United States. Advertisement Or maybe it's yet another illustration of the baby boom generation's market power. More than 70 million strong, and now in their 60s and 70s, boomers form the core of the theater audience. They have always sought nontraditional approaches to music, marriage, fashion, parenting, careers — and now, perhaps, death? Are they counting on theater to provide them with a way to think about what is not an abstract matter anymore — and, in some cases, even enable them to laugh at what they most fear? Whatever the reason(s), The cast of "Death Becomes Her." Matthew Murphy Consider the bonkers musical spectacle that is 'Death Becomes Her' (10 nominations, including one for best musical). Directed and choreographed by Christopher Gattelli, this stage adaptation is superior to the 1992 Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn movie that inspired it. In a nation obsessed with youth, frenemies Madeline Ashton ( Advertisement In the raucous, darkly comedic musical 'Dead Outlaw,' which is inspired by a true story and earned seven nominations, death serves less as an ending than a context. 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You sit in the audience, sometimes ignoring the other actors onstage as you search for a sign that Durand is breathing. That sign never comes. In the entrancing 'Maybe Happy Ending' (10 nominations ), Oliver (Darren Criss), a helper robot in South Korea, begins to develop human feelings for another robot, Claire (Helen J. Shen). He enlists her in his search for his kindly former owner, only to discover the heartbreaking downside of being immortal — when someone you love is not. Jon Michael Hill, left, and Harry Lennix in "Purpose." Marc J. Franklin, 2025 In Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's 'Purpose' (six nominations), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama last month, Solomon 'Sonny' Jasper (Harry Lennix), preacher, civil rights legend, and the patriarch of a prominent Black family, is cold and remote until the sudden death of his bee colony brings out his vulnerable humanity. 'I really loved those bees,' Sonny says somberly. Advertisement In 'Buena Vista Social Club' (10 nominations), Omara, a famous Cuban singer played with magisterial command by Natalie Venetia Belcon, resists the entreaties of a record producer that she resume her career — a career she abandoned six years earlier when her estranged but beloved sister died. That sister fled to the United States after Fidel Castro took over in Cuba; Omara remained. Issues of morality as well as mortality surface in 'Operation Mincemeat' (four nominations), a musical comedy based on real events in World War II. British intelligence operatives plant false documents on a dead body and place him on a beach to mislead Nazi Germany about the invasion plans of the Allies. (Among the operatives is a chap named Ian Fleming, who is hard at work on a novel about a fellow named James Bond.) One of the operatives jokingly refers to 'a Trojan corpse,' but at another point in the musical, the tone shifts into a much more somber key as the operatives question what they are doing — exploiting the death of a fellow human being, and treating him as an object, a chess piece. 'Have we done a bad thing?,' one of them asks. In 'Sunset Boulevard' (seven nominations), faded silent-movie star Norman Desmond (Nicole Scherzinger, earning a Tony nomination in her Broadway debut), mad with jealousy, fatally shoots her lover, screenwriter Joe Gillis (Tony nominee Tom Francis). Advertisement In 'Oh, Mary!' (five nominations), one of the most famous deaths in American history is — let's say reimagined : its cause, its perpetrator, the whole thing. The comic genius Cole Escola has concocted a fever dream of a show about a bibulous Mary Todd Lincoln (Escola) and a gay Abraham Lincoln (Conrad Ricamora). ('Oh, Mary!' is nominated for best play and Escola is nominated for best actor in a play.) Mary is determined to resume her career in cabaret; as part of that effort, she hires an acting coach named … John Wilkes Booth (James Scully). Matters proceed from there, in an unexpected way. The musical 'Floyd Collins' (six nominations) is about the death of cave explorer Floyd Collins, played by Tony nominee Jeremy Jordan. The nation was transfixed by the ultimately unsuccessful operation to rescue Collins when he was trapped underground by a fallen boulder in a Kentucky cave in 1925. Half a dozen characters die by suicide, murder, or accident in the stage adaptation of Oscar Wilde's 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' (six nominations, including one for star Sarah Snook of 'Succession,' who plays all 26 roles in the one-woman show). The body count is often high with Shakespeare, but the Tony count added up to zero for the high-profile Broadway production of 'Othello,' with Denzel Washington in the title role and Jake Gyllenhaal playing the treacherous Iago. It received not a single Tony nomination. Also shut out by Tony voters was 'Redwood,' in which a New York gallerist played by Idina Menzel ('Wicked'), locked in deep mourning for her son who died of a drug overdose, leaves her wife and takes a cross-country trip that lands her in the redwood forests of Northern California. There, she finds a kind of community and a chance to begin to heal. Advertisement Everyone is still alive, at least physically, at the end of 'Glengarry Glen Ross,' the revival of David Mamet's 1984 drama about real estate salesmen and fraudsters. But death can take many forms. The salesmen are dead inside, none more so than the one we care about the most, Shelley Levene, portrayed as a man pushed over the edge of desperation by Tony nominee Bob Odenkirk, of 'Better Call Saul.' Death has always had a place in the dramatic literature and on the stage. It's there in the title of one of the greatest of all American plays: 'Death of a Salesman.' Dead bodies serve as ingredients for meat pies in Stephen Sondheim's masterwork, 'Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.' After young Eurydice descends to the Underworld in 'Hadestown,' a musical by Vermont native Anaïs Mitchell, her lover Orpheus heads down after her in hopes of rescuing her. Winner of eight Tony Awards in 2019, 'Hadestown' is still going strong after nearly 2,000 performances. For further evidence of Broadway's ongoing fascination with death, look no further than Tuesday's announcement that 'Beetlejuice the Musical' will be revived for a second time this fall, just six years after it premiered. In its deranged way, 'Beetlejuice' explores the line between life and death. Near the start of the show, the mischief-making ghost of the title jovially serenades the audience with 'The Whole Being Dead Thing': 'Welcome to a show about death/ You're gonna be fine/ On the other side/ Die!/ You're all gonna die!/ I'll be your guide/ To the other side/ Though in full disclosure/ It's a show about death.' Um, Mr. Beetlejuice, sir? Make that another show about death. Don Aucoin can be reached at
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
‘Shark in the pond!' Rhode Island boaters experience incredible ‘Jaws' moment
A customer at a Rhode Island restaurant this week captured an extraordinary scene on video as a giant shark surfaced behind boaters in Great Salt Pond. In the footage, as the shark's fins slice through the water, a woman exclaims, 'There's a shark in the pond!' As noted by the Atlantic Shark Institute, the sighting was 'reminiscent of a scene from 'Jaws' on the 50th anniversary of the film.' It's clear that this was a massive shark, but the ASI was quick to correct false theories in explaining that it was a harmless basking shark, not a potentially dangerous great white. The ASI explained in a separate post: 'Here is the culprit that got almost 14 million views, thousands of comments, and was thought to be about 10 different species of shark for its unique and eye catching visit to a pond in Block Island, RI this week! 'The species, which many guessed accurately, was a basking shark, the second largest fish in the world.' The basking shark was estimated to measure about 20 feet. The footage was captured by Jen Seebeck from Dead Eye Dick's restaurant. This article originally appeared on For The Win: 'Shark in the pond!' Rhode Island boaters experience 'Jaws' moment