Cy Musiker and David Wiegand share their picks for great events around the Bay Area this week.
Dec. 1 & 2: The Milk Carton Kids are Joey Ryan and Kenneth Pattengale, neo-folkies from SoCal who sing gorgeously sad songs about lost dreams in close harmony. They sound like early Simon and Garfunkel, and banter like the Smothers Brothers. It’s a winning combination. Details here on their shows at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater in San Francisco, and then the Uptown Theater in Napa.
Nov. 29: Orrin Keepnews was among the elite of jazz record producers, and he worked for many years reissuing dozens of terrific albums for Fantasy Records in Berkeley. He died last March and two of his favorite recording stars — Mike Greensill and his wife, singer Wesla Whitfield — are organizing a memorial concert for him at Yoshi’s in Oakland, featuring Berkeley’s Dave Ellis and others, with proceeds going to the Orrin Keepnews Scholarship Fund at the California Jazz Conservatory. Greensill says, “He had impeccable taste, and he knew when something was right or not.” Details here
Opening Dec. 1 (through Dec. 27): Yes, it’s a musical about a serial killer, but A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder is more Gilbert and Sullivan than Sweeney Todd. This 2014 Tony Award winner is a romp about a young man bumping off rivals for an Earlship (or is that Earldom) and trying to decide who holds the key to his heart: his mistress or his fiancée? Details here:
Now through Dec. 20: Handle with Care is a rare show on Bay Area stages, bilingual in English and Hebrew. It’s a comedy about what happens when a delivery service loses the body of a recently deceased Israeli grandmother, resulting in a cute meet-up between the Israeli granddaughter and a Jewish-American guy who happens to love Easter. Details here:
