Sala: Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts, San Francisco

The Bernstein operetta is a sassy summation of Voltaire’s classic in this alluring production by The Lamplighters. 

The luminous Wendy Whelan and choreographers Alejandro Cerrudo, Joshua Beamish, Kyle Abraham, and Brian Brooks kick off the American tour of a revamped Restless Creature, presented here by San Francisco Performances. 

Opera Parallèle combines Kurt Weill's Mahagonny Songspiel and Francis Poulenc's Les Mamelles de Tirésias in a riotous opera-within-an-opera production.

Carla Escoda reviews Profligate Iniquities, The Slow Rise of a Rigid Man, and Nevabawarldapece, by Robert Moses, in the 19th home season of Robert Moses' Kin at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

“Timber”, the word, conjures images of trees falling in the wilderness as lumberjacks yell out, of fragrant wood crackling in a fireplace, and of stacks of lumber waiting to be crafted into furniture by carpenters’ rough hands. Michael Gordon’s 2010 work Timber is just as evocative.

This fall, Alonzo King puts his sleek, sinuous stamp on Bach’s Double Violin Concerto, with witty nods to predecessors George Balanchine and Paul Taylor who, in 1941 and 1975 respectively, created two towering classics of dance to the same piece of music.

I’ve been humming bits of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring ever since my first encounter with it in my impressionable teens. It stuck in my head, along with the Led Zeppelin anthems. So when the lights went up on Bill T.

When I first saw Jean Cocteau’s 1946 cinematic masterpiece La Belle et la Bête on DVD several years ago, its visual storytelling made such a strong impression that a few of its images became unforgettably burned into my memory: disembodied hands grasping candles, statues that blinked, and the Beast himself, a giant kitty-cat who was more pathetic and sad than terrifying.