Datebook is the San Francisco Chronicle’s guide to arts & entertainment in the Bay Area, combining award-winning news with a curated events calendar.

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 like performances ...

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.

Oct 20, 2024 · Review: S.F. Opera taps into the transcendent power of ‘Tristan and Isolde’ Richard Wagner’s epic of love and death comes to glorious life in a dramatically sung production led by Music Director Eun Sun Kim.

Mar 2, 2024 · Ahead of this year’s 96th Academy Awards, I’d like to revisit one of my favorite moments in the show’s history that is often ranked as one of its biggest flops.It’s a musical number so kooky and surreal that it had to have a San Francisco connection. The moment became so famous that the 1989 broadcast is often referred to as the “Snow White Oscars.”

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.

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 there I see the whole ...

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 cancer, withdrew in December to conserve ...

Dec 19, 2024 · ‘The Lehman Trilogy’ If more plays were this visionary, well-resourced and relevant, theater would be in a much better place in this country. Ben Power’s adaptation of Stefano Massini’s three-part epic, which toured to American Conservatory Theater, mined aching poetry, novelistic detail and piquant characters from the rise and fall of the Lehman Bros. firm; it also seemed to encompass ...

Oct 18, 2024 · The Southern Reach Trilogy was a huge success for VanderMeer. But it also, and purposefully so, left many questions unanswered. That is where “Absolution” comes in: It acts first and foremost as a stand-alone, but also as a new way to enter the trilogy.