Datebook | San Francisco Arts & Entertainment Guide
Datebook is the San Francisco Chronicle’s guide to arts & entertainment in the Bay Area, combining award-winning news with a curated events calendar.
Where to enjoy Handel’s ‘Messiah’ this holiday season
Nov 27, 2024 · Editor's note: This story has been updated with concerts for the 2024 season. Every year around December, the same set of cultural rituals gets repeated, depending on your performing art of choice. For ballet fans it’s “The Nutcracker” that marks the holiday season, for theatergoers it’s “A Christmas Carol,” and for classical music lovers, nothing says Christmas …
Review: ‘Wicked’ is the best movie musical in years | Datebook
Nov 19, 2024 · The marketing of “Wicked” has been so obnoxious for so long — since stars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande were everywhere at the Summer Olympics — that you wondered if the movie could possibly live up to the hype.
Bay Area actress Connie Nielsen back in ancient Rome in
Nov 18, 2024 · Every day, Connie Nielsen is reminded why she’s stayed in the Bay Area for more than two decades, and why she has no plans to leave. “I look out the window, there’s a view of the Golden Gate Bridge and the entire bay — Angel Island, downtown,” the star of the new blockbuster “Gladiator II” told the Chronicle. “Then I walk my dog up the top of the hill, and …
Andrea Bocelli on his new album, film and 30 years of making …
Nov 5, 2024 · Andrea Bocelli on his new album, film and 30 years of making music: ‘I like to think to the future’ Bocelli says that his first day onstage feels like yesterday, and that he is grateful to have earned the affection of a global, cross-generational audience.
This ‘Angels in America’ is the theatrical medicine you need
Oct 14, 2024 · Belize is asking Louis (Dean Linnard) to say the kaddish — the Jewish prayer for the dead — for AIDS sufferer Roy Cohn (Victor Talmadge). Few could hate Roy, his wrongs and his politics more than Louis does, and Louis, an “intensely secular …
Review: Robert Eggers’ ‘Nosferatu’ remake is a Gothic ... - Datebook
Dec 18, 2024 · Eggers takes the German approach. It is nearly impossible to start watching an Eggers film — “The Lighthouse” (2019) or the Viking tale “The Northman” (2022), for example — and not think, “This isn’t going to end well.” “Nosferatu” stars Nicholas Hoult — in his third notable performance in two months after “Juror #2” and “The Order” — and Lily-Rose Depp ...
Review: ‘Carmen’ returns to S.F. Opera with a top-drawer cast
Nov 17, 2024 · Mezzo-soprano Eve-Maud Hubeaux, making her U.S. debut in the title role, is a tremendously inventive actor, both vocally and physically. Though her instrument is a shade less full and warm than ideal for the part, she compensated with an array of vocal colors on Saturday.
Review: Conductor Dalia Stasevska stirs up drama in a heroic S.F ...
Jan 19, 2024 · Stasevska, the Ukrainian-born conductor who leads the Lahti Symphony Orchestra in Finland, wasn’t originally supposed to be here at all. The program, which also featured the Symphony debut of South Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho, had been scheduled for Music Director Laureate Michael Tilson Thomas.. But Thomas, diagnosed in 2021 with an aggressive brain …
The hidden struggles behind S.F. Opera’s ‘Tristan and Isolde’
Oct 16, 2024 · Richard Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde” is well known for the challenges it presents for singers, particularly those in the title roles. In any generation, only a few dramatic sopranos and heldentenors have had the right voice types and sheer stamina for this long and complex opera about doomed lovers.