Bay Area arts: 8 great live shows to see this week

As the holiday season hits its stride, there are a ton of great shows and performances to see in the Bay Area this week. Here is a partial rundown.

Kitka’s holiday nod to Ukraine

The powerful Bay Area-based Eastern European women’s chorus Kitka – eight women who can easily make themselves sound like double that contingent – traditionally launches a “Wintersongs” tour around this time.

This year, however, they are focusing on Ukrainian music in particular, both sacred and secular, to heighten our consciousness and raise needed funds for several organizations committed to addressing the humanitarian crises in that war-torn country fighting so valiantly to maintain its independence. The theme of this year’s program, “Shchedry Vechir,” is a Ukrainian phrase that translates to “a generous evening” and the women of the chorus are exemplifying that spirit and hoping to provoke it in others. The tour begins at 8 p.m. Dec. 9 in St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Belvedere, stopping next at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Sacramento at 8 p.m. Dec. 10 and Menlo Park’s St. Bede’s Episcopal Church at 4 p.m. Dec. 11. Other shows are 8 p.m. Dec. 16-17 in St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Oakland and 4 p.m. Dec. 18 at the Old First Presbyterian Church in San Francisco.

Details: $25-$50; www.kitka.org.

— Bay Area News Foundation

Classical picks: Oakland Symphony; ‘Peter and the Wolf’

Here are three holiday concerts classical music fans should know about.

Breaking Bread with EWF: Started by the late Michael Morgan more than 20 years ago, the Oakland Symphony’s annual holiday concert, “Let Us Break Bread Together,” is a long and joyful tradition. This year’s event, celebrating the music of award-winning soul band Earth, Wind & Fire, promises another program to remember. Lenny Wee, arranger for the Grammy Awards and Kennedy Center Honors, conducts the program, which features the Oakland Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in a variety of EWF songs, holiday favorites, and more. With special guests pianist Kev Choice, R&B vocal group The Best Intentions, and klezmer band Kugelplex, it’s bound to be a good time for all.

Details: 4 p.m. Sunday; Paramount Theatre, Oakland; $15-$65; www.oaklandsymphony.org.

“Carols in the California”: The Symphony San Jose Chorale sings its annual program of classic carols in the beautiful California Theatre.

Details: 7 p.m. Saturday; California Theatre, San Jose; $26-$36; symphonysanjose.org.

“Peter and the Wolf”: Author, activist, TV personality and stand-up comic W. Kamau Bell is the narrator for Prokofiev’s beloved “Peter and the Wolf,” featuring the Daniel Stewart-conducted  San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra.

Details: 2 p.m. Sunday; Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco; $10-$25; www.sfsymphony.org.

— Georgia Rowe, Correspondent

A Wobbly World lands in Melo Park

Acoustic guitarist Freddy Clarke has been thinking globally but playing locally in recent months. The Menlo Park musical explorer has been holding down a weekly gig at the Park James Hotel, where he’s joined by various members of his sprawling world fusion band Wobbly World. But on Wednesday he convenes his entire United Nations General Assembly of a musical outfit at the Guild Theater in Menlo Park.

Describing the group’s sound as world music is accurate but entirely unsatisfying. Over the course of some two decades Clarke has expanded on his love of flamenco with an international cast of players, drawing particularly from Cuba with bassist Ernesto Mazar, conguero and vocalist Erick Barberia, and vocalist Yeny Valdes. South American cadences come by way of Bolivian charango master Eddy Navia and Peruvian pianist Erick Peralta. Lebanese vocalist and violinist Georges Lammam, Moroccan multi-instrumentalist Bouchaib Abdelhadi, and Jordanian-raised keyboardist Khader Keileh bring an array of influences from the Arab world. Add in Mumbai-born beatboxer Arun Saigal, jazz drummer Colin Douglas, Charles Moselle on woodwinds and beatboxing, and Saigon-born Nhut Bui on the one-string Vietnamese dan bau and you get a musical world that positively elastic.

Details: 8 p.m. Dec. 14; $25-$40; guildtheatre.com

— By Andrew Gilbert

He’s not just horsing around

Jim Irsay is best known as the very wealthy businessman who owns and runs the Indianapolis Colts pro football team, but his dabblings in music and popular culture are arguably a lot more interesting. That is, of course, unless you are a Colts fan, in which case you probably hate the guy because the team is in the midst of an awful season and last weekend lost to the Dallas Cowboys by 35 points. But if Irsay has failed to surround himself with sufficiently talented football players this season, he has succeeded over the years at surrounding himself with an impressive cache of music, art, history and literary memorabilia.

It’s known collectively as the Jim Irsay Collection (catchy title, eh?), and a big portion of it will be on display for one night this weekend in San Francisco, in an event that also includes a concert by Irsay and his band and a trio of A-List rock stars. If you haven’t guessed by now, Irsay is a music geek and his touring collection includes iconic guitars once owned by Prince, Jerry Garcia, Eric Clapton, Janis Joplin, David Gilmour, Kurt Cobain and, perhaps most impressively, Bob Dylan, as we are talking about the electric Fender Stratocaster he plugged in when he played the 1965 Newport Folk Festival and horrified legions of folk music purists. Other items in the collection include lyric sheets compiled by Paul McCartney when he was working on “Hey Jude”; the drum set Ringo Starr used when the Beatles played on the “Ed Sullivan Show”; An original reward poster for John Wilkes Booth issued the morning after President Lincoln’s assassination; author Jack Kerouac’s famed 119-foot paper scroll on which he wrote “On the Road”; and much more. Meanwhile, Irsay and his band will perform with guest stars including Ann Wilson, John Fogerty and Buddy Guy.

Details: 6-10 p.m. Dec. 10 at Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco; admission is free but tickets are required; www.eventbrite.com (search for “Bill Irsay”).

Hitchcock for the holidays

The Bay Area annually serves up an impressive array of holiday shows, ranging from sublime to silly to even spooky. And this weekend offers a production that is very much in that last category. We’re talking about PlayGround’s self-described “twisted” seasonal show, “A Very Hitchcock Christmas,” running Saturday and Sunday at the Potrero Stage in San Francisco. The show is a collection of short works by Bay Area playwrights inspired by Alfred Hitchcock movies. Included in the mix is Jeffrey Lo’s “Stranger on a Holiday Train” (inspired by “Strangers on a Train”); Marissa Skudlarek’s “The Sugarplum Trap,” (inspired by “Notorious”); Cleavon Smith’s “The Story of Black Santa” (inspired by “Vertigo”); Alexis Standridge “A Window-ful Christmas” (inspired by “Rear Window”), Eteya Trinidad’s “Christmas at Manderley” (inspired by “Rebecca”); and Maury Zeff’s “North by North Pole” (inspired by “North by Northwest”). PlayGround is an outfit dedicated to developing new plays and providing a forum for emerging Bay Area playwrights to stage their works. “A Very Hitchcock Christmas” is the latest event for the group that, since founding 28 years ago, has showcased more than 300 playwrights and staged about 1,000 new short works.

Details: 7 p.m. both nights at Potrero Stage, 1695 18th St., San Francisco; free but reservations are strongly recommended; show will also be live-streamed and available On Demand through New Year’s Day; https://playground-sf.org/hitchcockchristmas.

— Bay Area News Foundation

Camille A. Browne — Part 3

It was five years ago the acclaimed dancer, choreographer and director Camille A. Browne thrilled a Berkeley audience with “BLACK GIRL: Linguistic Play,” the second part of her trilogy of dances exploring African American art and identity.

Since then, Browne, who also leads the New York-based Camille A. Browne and Dancers company, has been busy making history. In 2019, she became the first Black woman to direct and choreograph a Broadway production with a revival of “for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf” for the Public Theater. And last year, she became the first Black woman ever to direct a production for the New York’s Metropolitan Opera, with Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up In My Bones.”

Of course, the two milestones are just a reflection of Brown’s status as one the dance/theater world’s most relentlessly creative forces, having also worked in one capacity or another on such high-profile works as “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” and “Porgy and Bess.”

Now she’s returning to Berkeley with her company to present the third installment of her trilogy, “ink.” The one-hour work featuring Brown and six other dancers includes elements African-American social dance, tap, jazz, modern, and hip-hop and explores such themes as self-empowerment, Black love, brotherhood, and resilience. The production features live accompaniment by a musical/percussion quartet.

Details: Presented by Cal Performances; 7:30 p.m. Dec. 14-15; 8 p.m. Dec. 16; Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Berkeley; $34-$68; calperformances.org.

— Randy McMullen, Staff