By the end of this week, San Francisco culture vultures will have their own special mode of transportation to help them get around the city.Starting on September 20, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency's CultureBus will transport people to and from many of the city's main cultural institutions. For a flat fare of $7 for adults and $5 for seniors, youths and people with disabilities, the entirely new bus route (route 74X) gives customers unlimited access to CultureBus for the day.The bus runs between downtown San Francisco to … [Read more...]

As I strolled through downtown San Francisco yesterday afternoon, I couldn't help but wonder if all the tower blocks, traffic, stores, roads and other signs of "civilized" life would exist if we didn't have clocks -- if we didn't have a system for regulating this slippery notion known as time. If human beings had only nature's cycles upon which to count to figure out what to do when, would the economy as we know it not exist? Maybe so, because without clocks, the concepts of past and future would cease to be meaningful in the same way. Maybe … [Read more...]

Caught a trio of shows at the San Francisco Fringe Festival the other night. All of them very different, all of them with their hearts in the right place, and all of them, despite being only an hour or less in length, leaving me feeling like they could have been 15 minutes shorter.The first was a moving and often compelling musical by Carrie Baum entitled Exit Sign: A Rock Opera. The production deals with Baum's relationship with her father and how she copes with his untimely death. From a musicianship perspective, Exit Sign is wonderful: … [Read more...]

When I see my name on a press release, it's usually at the tail-end of a quote that a theatre company has pulled from one of my reviews about its work. I'll come across lines like "'Very Good!' -- Chloe Veltman, SF Weekly" and sigh, knowing full well that the phrase pulled from my review is missing the word "not" at the front of it.Yesterday, however, my name appeared on the publicity materials advertising a company's new show in an entirely different context: For the first time in my life -- at least to my knowledge -- a piece of my writing … [Read more...]

Playwright Itamar Moses' new drama, Yellowjackets is unusual: It's a piece of issues-based educational theatre with a cast of young actors that breaks out of the high school drama or ethics class mould and finds a home on the professional stage.The issues that the play deals with -- racial and class tensions within an American high school, specifically the playwright's alma mater, Berkeley High -- would seem like perfect fodder for a high school drama or ethics class. One can imagine students working with their teachers in the classroom to … [Read more...]

When most people think of China's Ming Dynasty, priceless vases come to mind. There are certainly plenty of gorgeous ceramics on display at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum right now. But it wasn't the display cases full of beautifully preserved, very old china that caught my eye when I visited the museum's Power & Glory: Court Arts of China's Ming Dynasty exhibition last week. I was most knocked out by a couple of hanging scrolls.What I loved most about these two works of art is the relationship between the image and the story behind each … [Read more...]

Over the past couple of days in Los Angeles, I was reminded once again of just how completely different the business of telling stories on stage is to attempting the same on screen.LA Opera gave two first-time opera directors -- Woody Allen and David Cronenberg -- the chance to apply their seasoned filmmaking skills to a pair of opera productions, both of which opened over the weekend at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles. Allen mostly got away unscathed with his staging of Puccini's Gianni Schicchi, but Cronenberg's … [Read more...]

Yesterday evening at the San Francisco Fringe, I saw two theatre productions on a boy-meets-girl theme. But despite the similarity of the shows' subject matter, I've rarely had two more extreme experiences in a single evening's theatre-going to date.The first show, Moon Fable, was a sweet and ardently sincere homage to young love produced by a company called SideCar Theatre. The second, Peg-Ass-Us, created by the New York company Pack of Others, was a graphic, no-holes-barred panegyric to heterosexual anal sex.Moon Fable tells the story of a … [Read more...]

I stopped taking Woody Allen seriously as a film director around 1995. After Mighty Aphrodite, Allen's films seemed to taper off, becoming mawkish parodies of themselves.So it was against my better judgment that I found myself sitting in my local movie theater the other evening watching the director's latest film, Vicky Christina Barcelona. I decided to see VCB on the basis of several personal recommendations and a handful of positive reviews. I'm really glad I went.Romantic relationships have been a central theme in Allen's work throughout the … [Read more...]

The San Francisco Fringe festival starts today. Every year, when it comes to Fringe time here in this city, I spend hours trying to figure out what shows to see. I never had this problem in Edinburgh: The Scotsman would simply give me a list of shows to review which pretty much kept me busy from 9am till 2am every day for a month. If I managed to find an hour to go and see a production which wasn't on my roster, I was lucky.The San Francisco Fringe isn't nearly as big as its Edinburgh equivalent, but here, I'm my own boss: I can see whatever I … [Read more...]