The Redevelopment block between 3rd, 4th, Mission and Howard is a mostly failed attempt to create welcoming public space on top of the cavernous underground Moscone Convention Center, with the ugly Metreon complex anchoring one corner and the Yerba Buena Arts Center holding up another.
The most successful space is the large lawn in the middle where the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival offers free outdoor programs all summer...
...with "picnics welcome, no pets please."
The programs range from dance troupes, poetry readings, theatre and music concerts, with a heavy emphasis on various ethnic niches.
On Saturday afternoon, it was AfroSolo's annual Jazz in the Gardens concert.
According to the AfroSolo Arts Festival website, the organization is dedicated to "a celebration of African American artists giving voice to the Black experience."
Interestingly, you didn't necessarily have to be Black to be part of the celebration.
The group I saw was the Ranzel Merritt Quartet...
...with the 18-year-old Oakland phenom, saxophonist Ranzel Merritt above, leading the troupe in a very pleasant set of music.
Coming up in the next couple of weeks is a Middle-Eastern music group called The Dunes on Thursday from 12:30 to 1:30; a Filipino music, dance, crafts, and food festival all weekend long on the 13th and 14th from 11 to 5; a Gertrude Stein poetry reading on Tuesday the 16th from 12:30 to 1:30; Teatro Zinzanni's Orchestra on Thursday the 18th from 12:30 to 1:30; a Brazilian music concert on Saturday the 20th from 1 to 3; and finally, if you are foolish enough not to buy tickets ahead of time for "Four Saints in Three Acts" at the Novellus Theatre next door, you can see the SF Mime Troupe's latest effort at 1:30 PM on Sunday the 21st.;
San Francisco Opera's Merola summer training program is presenting Rossini's "Barber of Seville" at Herbst Theatre with two separate casts in four total performances, ending tomorrow on Sunday afternoon. The press was strongly encouraged to attend Thursday and Friday evening's performances so they could write about all the student singers, but I was busy rehearsing for the upcoming production of "Four Saints in Three Acts," and wasn't able to make it to the opening.
That turned out for the best since "Barber of Seville" is an opera that has become boring through repetition for me, and the production design was literally painful to look at, with a full wall of green glitter tinsel replaced at times by a wall of gold glitter tinsel, a decorating scheme that wouldn't be out of place in an Eastern European brothel. The singers were mostly wonderful and rose above the production, including Mark Diamond as Figaro in the first photo and Renee Rapier as Rosina above.
There were however music writers with infinitely more dedication and stamina than myself who saw both casts on Thursday and Friday evening, including Axel Feldheim above who warned me cryptically at the beginning of the evening that looking at the stage might be "painful," but that he loved the opera and some of the performances. Click here for an account of the first cast and here for the second cast.
Charlise the Opera Tattler also wrote about Thursday and Friday as did the Beast in the Jungle.
Cedric Westphal above was also a Barber completist, and though his thoughts on the two casts haven't been posted yet at SFist, the review by Janos Gereben, the fastest deadline writer in the West and quite possibly the East is up already at San Francisco Classical Voice. The consensus seems to be that both casts were unusually strong, and views about the production varied according to taste. (Production photos by Kristen Loken.)
Episode 18 of my public access television show, "FotoTales," detailing the world exactly ten years ago is scheduled for broadcast this evening on Channel 29 at 7:30 PM.
You probably shouldn't make any plans around that announcement, however, because the Bay Area Video Coalition, which is currently in charge of San Francisco's public access station, is stunningly inept. "FotoTales" has 52 weekly episodes mirroring a year, they are each numbered, the station has a schedule, and yet they still can't seem to figure out what goes on when correctly. Episode 16, for instance, just ran two weeks in a row because nobody bothered to change it to Episode 17.
In any case, you can check out Episode 18 online by clicking here. It's a particularly lively installment, with David Byrne at the Warfield Theatre, a dog protest at Civic Center, and plenty of long walks in Marin County and up Polk Street. And maybe the broadcast this evening will even be correct.
Update: They played Episode 16 again for the third straight time. This is starting to get embarrassing.
On Patricia's Green in Hayes Valley Saturday afternoon, a group of capoeira students formed a circle called a "Roda"...
...and began singing, clapping and playing instruments...
...while a pair of men began the Brazilian mixture of martial arts, gymnastics and dancing that is called Capoeira.
From the logos on their T-shirts, the group seemed to be part of a school South of Market where Professor Mico above teaches the Maculele version of the art. He was leading the call-and-response of the singing and playing the single-string and gourd instrument called the berimbau.
Capoeira started as a self-defense mechanism in the 16th century among African slaves in Brazil, and was outlawed in the late 19th century when slavery was finally ended in that country, partly because the authorities felt ill-equipped to deal with well-trained martial artists.
There has been a huge resurgence in the second half of the 20th century, with schools popping up all over the world. In Brazil, meanwhile, "Capoeira is officially considered an intangible cultural heritage of Brazil," and students from around the globe travel to that country for instruction.
