Now through Sunday, Jul. 3: San Francisco Opera presents Carmen at War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco
Bad boy Spanish director Calixto Bieito helms this gritty, hyper-sexualized take on Georges Bizet’s famous opera about a soldier who unravels when he falls in love with a wily gypsy woman. Not your great aunt’s version of Carmen.
Tuesday, Jun. 21: Garden of Memory, Chapel of the Chimes, Oakland
One of the best-kept, long-running live music secrets of the East Bay, this annual, midsummer night event invites audience members to wander round a historic funerary chapel encountering a range of weird and wonderful experimental musicians and sound artists at play.
Now through July 23: Laura Owens: 10 Paintings, Wattis Institute, San Francisco
LA-based artist Laura Owens explores the concept of the painted canvas in a playful, thought-provoking way: she has hidden 10 paintings behind elaborate, handmade wallpaper forcing us to wonder whether the true art is hidden or staring us right in the face.
Now through Jun. 19: Mountain Play presents West Side Story, Sidney B. Cushing Amphitheater, Mount Tamalpais State Park, Marin
Mount Tam provides a stunning backdrop for this lively production of the classic 1957 musical from Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents and Jerome Robbins based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The show has been produced just once before in Mountain Play’s 103-year history.
Thursday, Jun. 16 – Sunday, Jun. 19: Bandaloop and The Village Impacts present #SFPublic Canvas, Hastings School of Law building exterior, San Francisco
This large scale public performance project combines vertical dance, projection mapping, and crowd-sourced content on a big wall outside the Hastings Law School. Two years in the making, the work chronicles the changing face of the mid-Market and Tenderloin neighborhoods and includes contributions from aerial dance troupe Bandaloop, animator Gmunk, teen poets from Youth Speaks and neighborhood residents.