Freebie of the week: Singing, especially in a communal situation, can do an awful lot to lift one’s spirits. We’re betting spirits will be pretty darned high on Thursday when Oakland band Shipwrecked Shanty returns to Slainte Pub, 131 Broadway, in Oakland, for rip snorting evening of “Shantyoke.”
The term, of course, plays off “karaoke,” and the idea is the same. Participants sing along to Shipwrecked Shanty’s impressive catalogue of working-class maritime songs, with lyrics provided. Admission is free, but tips are appreciated, and patrons will have to pay for their grog. Shipwrecked Shanty’s members have been performing sea shanties for years, but the band truly jelled during the COVID shutdown, when members started a series of impromptu performances on the porch of a shuttered beloved bar.
Thursday’s Shantyoke is timed, of course, to St. Patrick’s Day (on March 17), and the fact that now seems like a perfect time to boisterously bellow sea shanties with like-minded fun-lovers. The merriment continues Saturday when Slainte Pub hosts a St. Patrick’s Day-themed block party 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., with more live music and lots to eat and drink.
More information is at slainteoakland.com or www.shipwreckedshanty.com.
New beginnings: “Primary Trust,” a drama by Eboni Booth, became the toast of Broadway when it opened in 2023, reminding everyone that a play that seems small in every way can have a big impact. Now Bay Area theater fans can find out why, as the show that won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for drama has opened its first Bay Area run at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley.
The play centers on a man named Kenneth who lives near Rochester, N.Y., and has a pleasant-enough life: By day he works at a bookstore in his suburban town, by night, he sips Mai Tais with his best bud Bert at a local bar. That gets upended one day when Kenneth loses his job. And as often happens in such situations, a bad thing happening can shine a light on other not-so-good things that people have not been addressing. “Primary Trust” is about Kenneth’s journey back to something approaching normalcy; the title is drawn from a financial institution at which Kenneth might find a new job.
Directed by Bay Area theater mainstay Jeffrey Lo, and starring William Thomas Hodgson as Kenneth, “Primary Trust” plays at the Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto, through March 29. Tickets are $34-$115 at theatreworks.org/.
Pieces of Pablo: Pablo Francisco is the quintessential touring stand-up comedian. He’s quick on his feet, works an audience well, looks like he is having a blast and his jokes are clever without making audiences work too hard. And he does impressions. Some of his favorites include Jackie Chan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gary Busey, Danny Glover, Ozzy Osbourne, Celine Dion and many, many more.
The Tucson-born entertainer first came to prominence as a featured player on the long-running comedy show “MADtv.” He’s since done TV comedy specials, released albums and DVDs and toured with Carlos Mencia and Freddy Soto as part of the “Three Amigos” comedy show. Later this year, he’ll be featured on MTV’s show about standup comedy, “Acting Out.” He’s also prepping a new one-hour comedy special titled “Here We Go Again. ” Comedy fans can expect Francisco to be armed with new material when he pulls into Tommy T’s comedy club in Pleasanton for a weekend stint.
Performances are 7:30 and 9:45 p.m. Friday, 7 and 9:45 p.m. Saturday and 7 p.m. Sunday. Tickets are $30-$45 at tommyts.com.
Local lights shining: New Century Chamber Orchestra, under the guidance of music director and concertmaster Daniel Hope, presents a program titled “Luminaries” this weekend that casts two contemporary San Francisco composers in a bright spotlight.
The concerts — three of them — open with Jake Heggie’s “Overture,” which was commissioned by NCCO in 2023 in observance of the ensemble’s 30th anniversary and is receiving its first public performances at these events. Also on the program is “Bubble Chamber,” another commissioned work, this one in honor of local philanthropist and composer Gordon Getty, from Nathaniel Stookey, a violinist and violist who has been composing steadily and with great success for nearly four decades since he was first asked to write a piece for the San Francisco Symphony at age 17.
The two other works in the lineup are the Violin Concerto in A Major by Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, a rather amazing 18th-century figure who was an expert swordsman, a French Revolution fighter and a leading abolitionist in addition to being a fantastic violinist; and Tchaikovsky’s much loved “Souvenir de Florence.”
Performance times are 7:30 p.m. Friday at Berkeley’s First Church UCC, 2 p.m. Saturday at the Presidio Theatre in San Francisco’s Presidio and 3 p.m. Sunday at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Belvedere/Tiburon. Find tickets, $35-$80, at ncco.org.
A multimedia spectacle: In a rather astonishing blend of art forms — opera, film, live enactments and video projections, Opera Paralléle brings back its highly praised reworking of composer Philip Glass’ own reworking of Jean Cocteau’s mesmerizing, 1946 surrealistic film “La Belle et La Bête” to Zellerbach Hall on the UC Berkeley campus this weekend as a part of the Cal Performances season lineup.
Glass’ 1994 replacement of the film’s score transformed the original dialogue into a libretto; Opera Paralléle’s 2022 enhancements mixed in some new film and added live action, with the singers sometimes acting in tandem with the original film characters and sometimes on their own. What has remained the same in all three versions is the time-honored romantic fantasy that poses questions about the nature of true beauty. Baritone Hadleigh Adams reprises his role as the Beast/Le Prince/Avenant from the 2022 premiere, and Korean soprano Chea Kang is La Belle.
Performances take place at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and ticket holders are invited to a preperformance panel discussion at 7 p.m. on the first night. Tickets, $55 to $134, are available at both calperformances.org and operaparallele.org.
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