At the corner of 11th and Folsom Streets, a nightclub with one of the stranger, checkered histories in San Francisco has been revived with its original name, The Oasis. As the press materials note, "The Oasis has been a bathhouse, S&M leather bar, a private sex club for a magazine, a discotheque and a Latin salsa club. The club featured a large swimming pool and a retractable roof for many years. The pool may be gone, but the legacy remains!"
Though it was never a personal hangout, I have probably visited the place during all of its incarnations over the decades, and its current revival as a combination nightclub, drag performance space, and dance hall strikes me as the liveliest and most charming version of all.
The performance space is being inaugurated with a revival of Shit & Champagne, written/starring/co-directed by D'arcy Drollinger above, a towering drag queen with Las Vegas showgirl legs perched on stiletto heels who can kick villains in the head with perfect vertical extensions.
The two-hour, two-act play is certainly ambitious, packing in enough plot, characters, costume and wig changes, not to mention choreographed high heeled kung fu fights to stuff a half dozen 1970s blaxploitation action movies. One of those seminal films was undoubtedly Cleopatra Jones, which featured Shelley Winters as a heroin lord who tries to destroy Tamara Dobson, the 6'2" super agent. In Shit & Champagne, the criminal mastermind is the boss woman of Mal-Wart, played with deadpan brilliance by Matthew Martin in a scary pantsuit, aided by the hardworking, amusing James Arthur M. and Adam Roy as her henchmen, two of many roles they undertake.
The script is relentlessly scatalogical, silly, and raunchy in equal measure and won't be everyone's cup of tea (my date for the evening was seriously unamused), but I enjoyed the entire evening. From the sordid looking pole dancers warming up the crowd to the political references where drug-addicted, Mal-Wart half-price hookers are being sent out as call girls to Mayor Ed Lee and Mark Zuckerberg, it was transgressively funny. (Drollinger and Steven LeMay are pictured above, an infiltrator with a Consumer Capitalism true believer.)
Gender throughout is fluid, with women and men playing both sexes, which can become pleasantly, disturbingly confounding.
A special shout-out goes to Nancy French above as a stripper emcee who has a new look of contempt, boredom and disgust every time she appears onstage, a cumulative joke that gets funnier as it goes along.
The great lighting and sound design are by Michael Blythe, and the endlessly inventive costumes are from Tria Connell.
The audience on Saturday night spanned all ages and genders, and they were lively and appreciative. Seeing a 1970s spoof in what was once a seedy 1970s sex club performed by and for young people 40 years after the fact felt like a world coming full circle. The show is only being performed four more weekends through February 14th, Thursday through Saturday at 7PM, and it already feels legendary. Click here to buy tickets.
Who could have predicted that the hottest tickets in San Francisco right now would be for musicians from the San Francisco Symphony playing in what is essentially a pop-up nightclub at the back of Davies Symphony Hall? After a successful premiere last month, SoundBox sold out its second outing this Friday and Saturday night, even though just about nobody in the audience knew what they were going to be hearing ahead of time.
The program started with a chamber string orchestra playing the final two movements of John Adams' Shaker Loops from 1978 in a taut, expert performance conducted by the young Joshua Gersen who looked like he was about to break into an ecstatic Shaker dance himself during the piece. Pictured above are violist Katie Kadarauch with cellists Margaret Tait and Amos Yang.
This was followed by a self-deprecating introduction by Symphony violinist and composer Mark Volkert above. The chamber orchestra was enhanced with woodwinds and percussion for two short movements from his 1987 Serenade, which sounded a lot like Stravinsky at his sprightliest.
Half the musicians then trooped through the audience with their instruments to a separate stage with a harpsichord on it for Heinrich Biber's, Batalia from 1673. The 13-minute compressed masterpiece depicts everything from a tavern where each instrument plays its own drinking song at the same time (250 years before Charles Ives) to a battle march and a final lament for a wounded soldier. Never having heard the piece before, it was an unexpected treat and the theatrical presentation was perfectly apt.
However, the otherwise fine projections all evening by Adam Larsen were a bit heavyhanded in Batalia, and in the future I would suggest putting any text on the top half of the screen because nobody in the audience could read the names of the various movements at the bottom because the performers were standing in front of them.
Part of the fun of SoundBox's intermissions are that you can wander the room and try to pick out people you know or want to know without having to exit into a lobby. After the first intermission, cellist Amos Yang gave a native-born San Francisco introduction to himself and played three movements from J.S. Bach's Suite #1 for Unaccompanied Cello along with a jolly piece called Julie-O by Turtle String Quartet cellist Mark Summer.
Tenor Nicholas Phan, who moved to San Francisco a couple of months ago, is a noted Benjamin Britten interpreter, and his singing of a quintet of songs from the 1939 Les Illuminations was so good that I wish they had programmed the entire song cycle. Phan is holding his finger up in the photo above because there was tumultous applause with one movement still left in the performance. The string orchestra conducted by Gersen below was also sensationally good in the Britten and made me wish his music was more of a Symphony staple.
One major caveat: Since there were no programs, and most people in the audience didn't speak French or have the poetry of Rimbaud memorized, it would have helped to have the French and English text projected on one of the screens during the performance. They don't need to follow along supertitle style, but a simple projection of each poem that people could either scan, study or ignore would enrich the experience immeasurably.
After another intermission, the evening ended with Darius Milhaud's 1919 Le Boeuf Sur Le Toit (The Cow on The Roof), a fractured deconstruction of Brazilian and Portuguese dance tunes that was enormously fun to hear, and if the smile on cellist Margaret Tait's face above was any indication, also fun to play. The next SoundBox performances will be in February and if you go to the corner of Hayes and Franklin tonight between 9 and 11, you can buy advance $25 tickets for those performances which will probably sell out too. Otherwise, click here for the SoundBox website.
The San Francisco Symphony winter season in Davies Hall starts with a strange, remarkable looking concert where John Adams, Elvis Costello, and Malcom McDowell are finally together at last. In truth, composer Adams is conducting his 1982 Grand Pianola Music, a modern masterpiece for two pianos, chamber orchestra of brass and percussion and a trio of female singers intoning wordless music. The second half of the program is Stravinsky's chamber theater piece for seven instruments and three actors, L'Histoire du Soldat. Elvis Costello is the Narrator, Malcolm McDowell (of If... and O Lucky Man! and A Clockwork Orange and decades of Hollywood crap) is The Devil, and Tilson Thomas conducts. This is the concert you need to go to this winter, if no other, just to say that you were there. Performances are from January 16-18.
The ancient former SF Symphony music director Herbert Blomstedt arrives for two weeks, from February 12th to the 21st. The first week's program has Mozart's Piano Concerto #19 with Peter Serkin as the soloist and the Sibelius Second Symphony. Peter Serkin, like his father Rudolf, is a god in Mozart and should not be missed. I've heard the Sibelius one too many times live recently at the Symphony, but this music is a specialty of Blomstedt's and it should be wonderful to hear him conduct the orchestra in it. The second week he conducts Brahms' German Requiem, a piece I don't care for at all, but because he's conducting it and the baritone Christian Gerhaher is a soloist, the performance is another must-hear.
March 5-7 has the British composer Thomas Ades (above right) conducting short pieces by Ives, Milhaud, and Sibelius, followed by his own composition, In Seven Days, with soprano soloist Dawn Upshaw (above left). I'm not a big fan of Ades' music, which is probably my own limitation, but have long considered Dawn Upshaw a musical goddess who can do no wrong.
Finally, the omnivorous Jeremy Denk is touring with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields chamber orchestra as conductor/pianist on March 15th and 16th, playing four Bach keyboard concertos over two evenings, along with music by Suk, Dvorak, and Stravinsky. It could be really good.
