Dance community grieves for Smuin

Michael Smuin: 1938-2007

The moment was surreal, by all accounts. One minute, the dancers of Smuin Ballet were in high spirits, finishing a quick allegro combination in company class with artistic director Michael Smuin—he was even poking fun at his own choreographic invention. And then, in a flash, he was on the ground and they were struggling in vain to save him.

Throughout the afternoon, as word rippled through the dance community, there was shock at the death of Smuin, who was 68, to an apparent heart attack. In many ways it still seems laughably strange to imagine the Bay Area’s dance landscape without his charismatic, larger-than-life presence. A vital, lively force, Smuin made a buoyant and outspoken ambassador for dance as dancer, director and choreographer, and he had an undeniable impact on how ballet was and is perceived, both locally and internationally.

“It’s a profound loss for all of us, and a personal loss for me that’s indescribable,” said Celia Fushille Burke, who has been Smuin Ballet’s associate director, and now steps into the gap left by his passing. “The outpouring of love has been amazing. I’ve had calls and emails from all over the world. He was very well-loved.”

By chance-- or as some might say, with Smuin’s impeccable sense of timing and showmanship-- the Bay Area’s dance community was already scheduled to gather Monday night for the 2007 Isadora Duncan Dance Awards. Onstage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Amy Seiwert, along with five other Smuin Ballet dancers appeared to announce his passing and ask for a moment of silence to remember him.

But it was later at the Izzie Awards, during John Kloss’ freewheeling tap performance, that I had a moment of bittersweet memory. Smuin, more than any other major choreographer of the Bay Area’s scene, had a way of capturing the infectious joyousness of dance. And surely somewhere he had to be smiling, because more than any other ballet choreographer he understood the appeal of a good-looking guy dancing and humming along to his own inner music.

Like so many of his generation the Montana-born Smuin fell in love with ballet through the Ballets Russes. Spotted by San Francisco Ballet director Lew Christensen at the age of 15, he joined the company in 1953. It was at SFB that he would meet and marry fellow dancer Paula Tracy, with whom he had a son, Shane. And in 1973, he returned to co-direct the company with Christensen, overseeing the PBS broadcasts of his “Romeo and Juliet” and “The Tempest,” both of which won Emmy awards.

A gifted character dancer and ebullient raconteur, Michael Smuin brought his zest for telling a story as well as a mischievous sense of humor to his choreography. From his 1968 “Pulcinella Variations” to last year’s zesty “Obrigado, Brazil” Smuin’s ballets were wonderful fun. If they didn’t leave a mark with the intellectual crowd, nevertheless, you couldn’t deny that his were well-made, and entertaining dances. His fault, if it could be called that, was that he was always so eager to give that sometimes he went over the top.

Serious ballets like “Medea” highlighted the dancers’ dramatic abilities, but even small vignettes such as “The Last Song” in his Elton John-inspired “Come Dance Me a Song” offered a special poignancy. Smuin’s romantic adagios, particularly his pas de deux such as “Romanze” or “Bouquet,” remain achingly beautiful. Balletomanes who came of age in the 70s have searing memories of American Ballet Theatre stars Cynthia Gregory and Ivan Nagy in “Eternal Idol,” or Diana Weber being swept off her feet by Jim Sohm in “Romeo and Juliet.”

“He was the turning point for San Francisco Ballet,” says former SFB principal dancer Evelyn Cisneros, who joined the ballet under his direction in 1976 and retired in 1999.

Reached by phone in Southern California, Cisneros recalled Smuin as “a gifted and artistic presence. He was the beginning of a new era for the company and he helped bring it back to international status through his commitment and determination and energy.”

And yet, he never forgot the small things, or forgot what his dancers brought to his work. As a young apprentice, one of Cisneros’ earliest memories of Smuin was from the morning after the premiere of “Songs of Mahler.”

“He came into the studio before class and he went to each of the women who had been in the ballet and gave each one a flower,” she recalls, “and it so touched me to watch that.”

Unlike the stereotypical ballet director, Smuin loved for his dancers to have a life outside of the studio-- to have families and their own projects.

“One thing that set Michael apart from all the others was the love that he has for the individual,” Cisneros said emphatically, “He never saw a dancer as someone to mold – he wanted you to be the person you were. I think that’s why dancers loved working with him, you felt artistically enriched because he asked you to bring who you were to the dancing.”

After his infamous parting of ways with San Francisco Ballet in 1985, the endlessly energetic Smuin picked his dancing shoes up and moved onto a wide variety of projects, including his 1988 Tony Award-winning version of “Anything Goes” on Broadway.

“If there’s one thing he taught me,” Cisneros says, paraphrasing Ralph Waldo Emerson, “It’s this: It’s not what is before us, or behind us, but what is within us that matters.”

In 1994, he founded his own fledgling company --Smuin Ballets/SF, later Smuin Ballet – and created new work at a prolific pace, usually two or three ballets a year.
With a brazenly theatrical flair and canny professional instincts, he coaxed in audience members who had never before even considered going to a show that had the word “ballet” attached to it. Ever the entertainer, Smuin put his dancers into new unexpected places—dancing the national anthem at a Giants game in PacBell Park, slithering through the remixed cantina scene in “Star Wars,” at the Macy’s Passport benefit.

There were no stick-figure ballerinas for his company, where the women are sexy and the men bold. The stories he wove through his dances were about real people, and starred real people. It was a winning formula that appealed to audiences who made the company arguably the most consistently popular small dance troupe in the Bay Area.

As with any loss of this kind, the road ahead for Smuin Ballet is difficult to imagine without its charismatic founder and auteur. Nevertheless, Smuin was nothing if not the consummate theater professional, and the organization he built will have no trouble standing on its own legs with Fushille-Burke and newly-arrived Managing Director Dwight Hutton, at the helm.

On Tuesday morning, at the insistence of the dancers, there was company class-- as there is every day --at 9:30 a.m. Fushille-Burke, who was out of town on Monday, flew back that night to be with the company. “We will go on,” she said early Tuesday. “That’s what Michael would want and that’s what he did want.”

Smuin’s final work-- set to the Scherzo of Franz Schubert’s Great C Major Symphony-- was mainly completed, and the company will premiere it during their May seasons at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and at the Lesher Center among other venues. Smuin Ballet still plans to tour to the Joyce Theater in New York in August.
And yet, even as they move forward, one can’t help but feel the hole left behind by the buoyant, forthright presence of the man who so loved dance, but even more, so loved to bring dance to anyone and everyone.

This article first appeared in the Contra Costa Times.

KQED Profile: Janice Garrett

Since its founding in 2001, the San Francisco-based Janice Garrett and Dancers has rapidly become one of the most respected small modern dance troupes in the Bay Area. Much of its success derives from the lively, athletic dances of Garrett herself, whose choreography is notable for as much for its craftsmanship as for its dazzling speed, musical clarity and wit.

Garrett came to dance relatively late, at the age of 23, after she had already graduated with a B.S. in mathematics from Stanford. She subsequently studied dance at Mills College, and in 1980 moved to New York. It was there that she would join the modern dance company of Dan Wagoner, an alumnus of the Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor companies.

After ten years in New York, Garrett returned to the Bay Area, although she continued to work extensively in Europe, choreographing pieces for the Scottish Dance Theatre, London Contemporary's 4D Performance Group, London Contemporary Dance School and at the School for Modern Dance in Denmark. At the London Contemporary Dance Theater, she collaborated with British director and choreographer Jonathan Lunn on a range of productions and built a reputation for whimsical, kinetic dances.

Read more on the KQED Spark website.

At City College, you can dance if you want to

Affordable, little-known program celebrates its 70th anniversary

"Do you want to dance with me?" a young man in a bright orange T-shirt asks as salsa music blasts through the air. "Or are you a tango?"

Taken aback, I stammer that I'm just here to observe a few dance classes -- although ... the temptation to join the fun out on the floor lingers. Surely, no one would notice one extra student?

Read on the Chronicle site.

San Francisco Ballet: Concordia, Symphony in C, On Common Ground

San Francisco Ballet continued its venerable tradition of commissioning unusual works from young choreographers-before-they-were-stars with the premiere of Matjash Mrozewski’s “Concordia” on Program 7, which opened last week at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco.

Set in a dark, vast space, “Concordia” gives the impression of a binary-star system, in which the neoclassical -- Kristin Long in Christopher Read’s smoky tutu with a prim collared tunic -- and the contemporary -- Muriel Maffre, in the same outfit, sans tutu skirt-- orbit each other uneasily. Joined by their partners, Gennadi Nedvigin and Pierre-Francois Vilanoba respectively, they etch out vaguely confrontational but largely abstracted encounters in tensile, twisting poses and snaking limbs.

Under the idiosyncratic thrum of Matthew Hindson’s music – an alternately romantic and perplexing score, which seemed to be a far stretch for the San Francisco Ballet’s Orchestra under the baton of Martin West -- a quartet of edgy interlopers--Joanna Mednick, Courtney Wright, Jaime Garcia Castilla and James Sofranko—punctuate the transitions from one couple to the other.

Structurally speaking, Mrozewski’s style is not unlike that of fellow Canadian James Kudelka, with a bit of the punchy speed and flash-forward poses of the works of LaLaLa Human Steps’ Edouard Locke. But while his assemblage of steps shows promise and his groupings and intermeshing of trios and quartets of dancers are interesting, on the whole the piece doesn’t manage to make a memorable impact.

It’s a bit unfair that he comes at the end of a season that’s seen the return of William Forsythe’s “Artifact” and the premiere of Wayne McGregor’s startling “Eden/Eden.” “Concordia” simply doesn’t come across with the conceptual richness, or texture of either McGregor’s or Forsythe’s pieces. Still, as an effort from a young choreographer, it looks like a respectable stepping stone on the way to even bigger ideas.

More revelatory was George Balanchine’s “Symphony in C” – a powerhouse which comes disguised as a pretty ballet with lovely white tutus and glittering tiaras, and was notable on opening night for the number of debuts in its eight principal roles. A work of exquisite beauty, set to the music of the same title by Georges Bizet, “Symphony in C” is a true test of a company’s mettle – from corps de ballet to principal-- since its technical challenges offer no place to hide. Either you can do it with style or you can’t do it at all.

It was a tough night for the corps de ballet, which largely lacked the expansiveness that the Balanchine choreography and Bizet music begs for. In the first two movements particularly, they seemed ragged and sluggish, as if they hoped that at a slower pace no one would notice that feet were not pointing and arabesques were wobbly.

Nevertheless, leading the first movement, the rock-solid Vanessa Zahorian brought a soubrette’s charm to her pas de deux with Gonzalo Garcia, whose announcement that he plans to depart the company at the end of this season has made his every appearance on stage a bittersweet occasion.

In the sublime second movement, Yuan Yuan Tan offered her accustomed regal composure. If there seemed to be a shade of distant coolness between her and partner Tiit Helimets, it was nevertheless a refined and engaging performance.

Not so, for Molly Smolen, who was largely unsuccessful at conveying a very-much-needed graciousness in the notoriously difficult third movement. Smolen has gotten a lot of the hardest technical assignments of the season, perhaps because she gives the impression of solidity, but the swift, allegro footwork of this hair-raising section of the ballet seemed to sneak up and ambush her. To be sure, it’s never easy to have to jump side-by-side with Pascal Molat, who sails easily through two turns in the air in the time of her single turn, and elicits spontaneous gasps and chuckles from the audience. Molat does more than serve up the lofty leaps, though. His knack for phrasing and warmth shows us that dancing is not just steps, any more than an ode is just words on a page.

Also making a strong debut was Sarah van Patten, newly promoted to principal this season. Van Patten, partnered sometimes unsteadily by soloist Hansuke Yamamoto, has discovered an appealing glamour and warmth onstage that gave her steps--even faltering ones –a sparkle as she led the fourth movement.

Looking more energetic was Lar Lubovitch’s “Elemental Brubeck,” an over-long commission to three recordings by Dave Brubeck that was fueled by a jet-propelled Garcia and an easy-going sweet romance between Katita Waldo and Ruben Martin in the duet. It decently filled out Program 7, running in rep with Program 6, which features old favorites such as Julia Adams’ mesmerizing “Night” and Agnes de Mille’s “Rodeo,” in addition to the premiere of Helgi Tomasson’s newest work, “On Common Ground.”

This last, though not one of Tomasson’s best ballets—the choreography for a fearsome quartet of Tina LeBlanc, Lorena Feijoo, Joan Boada and Davit Karapetyan, plus the trio of Elana Altman, Jennifer Stahl and Rory Hohenstein has a feel of spiky, mid-1950’s Balanchine -- nevertheless has a way of sticking in one’s mind days after the performance.

The program notes gave little hint as to Tomasson’s intentions, however the Ned Rorem score against Sandra Woodall’s visuals – blood red streaks projected on the back, and a raft of gigantic gingko leaves floating above –were striking and clearly invited further thought.

A bit of research reveals the odd fact that in post A-bomb Hiroshima, a gingko tree only a few miles from ground zero was the first thing to bloom after the war. This hardy perennial has since become a symbol of hope and renewal – an apt metaphor for our times, and a forward-looking expression for a company that now looks ahead to its 75th anniversary season in the fall.

Keeping Dances Alive

How do you keep a dance alive?

Dance is perhaps the most fleeting of all the performing arts and I sometimes marvel that we’ve been able to preserve any ballets at all. Sure, there are videos and films, but the real art of the ballet is still passed on in oral tradition and you’d be surprised how much of the ballet repertoire exists only in the memories of the people who danced it.

So, let’s say you had a hankering to put together a famous work created, maybe 70 years ago, or even a work made last year. A musician could pull out a score and set to work learning it immediately. For dance, though, things are a little bit different.

Although there are several notation systems for movement– Labanotation and Benesh are among the best-known –unlike musicians and composers, many dancers and choreographers can’t read or write in either one. Most rely instead on memories, recordings, and the feeling for movements stored in their muscles from years of doing a ballet. Trained to pick up a series of steps within minutes and retain them --plus any changes a choreographer might make – it is the dancers who keep these works alive over the years.

Even though videos and films have helped to preserve dance immensely, recordings can be unreliable—any misstep from a dancer can be carried through the years as choreographic gospel. And a film also won’t necessarily relay the inspirations or feelings that breathe life into a step.

Enter the repetiteur – the ballet master or mistress whose job it is to guard the collective memory of these works.

On a warm afternoon, in the Contra Costa Ballet studios, dancers of Company C Contemporary Ballet are still scattered about the studio readying for rehearsal when Donald Mahler, a distinguished-looking, silver-haired gentleman, enters and chats with the Company C’s ballet mistress Lou Fancher and director Charles Anderson.
“You ready?” calls out Mahler finally as he settles into a chair at the front of the studio, “You swear?”

A ballet master of the Antony Tudor Ballet Trust, Mahler is in Walnut Creek for a whirlwind couple of weeks, during which he’ll stage “Dark Elegies,” one of Tudor’s most somber and difficult ballets on this young troupe of dancers.

As the dancers scurry into place for the opening, a sudden change comes over their faces, as if something had suddenly clouded their eyes. The mood shifts palpably and suddenly all focus is on the quietly anguished Gianna Davy and Elliott Gordon Mercer, who dance a pas de deux in the center of the room.

Austere and emotionally weighty, Tudor’s “Dark Elegies” was created in 1937 for Ballet Rambert—now the Rambert Dance Company and Britain’s oldest dance company. Tudor’s Expressionist choreography, filled with angular breaks, and twisting limbs, seems to match the wrenching music, Gustav Mahler’s “Kindertotenlieder” or “Songs on the Death of Children.”

Although there is no explicit narrative, the two scenes of this one-act ballet clearly paint a picture of a small community in mourning for the loss of their children. Through choreography laced with fiendishly difficult steps and jagged body angles, Tudor strives to show the inner turmoil outwardly without launching into histrionics – a balance that is a difficult one to master, and the devil can be in the details.

Only a few minutes into a run of the ballet, Mahler shakes his head.
“No, that’s not right,” he says pointing at the feet of the women corps, “That’s not right. Let’s stop. Let’s fix that.”

He adjusts the emphasis of where they’re placing their feet, corrects the direction slightly. The changes seem small and perhaps very minor, but ultimately, it makes a clear difference to the quality of their movements.

Mahler’s association with the Tudor legacy dated back to his own youth, when he hitchhiked from Syracuse to New York for his first taste of ballet in the big city.

Mahler studied with Tudor and Margaret Craske in the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School, then danced for the National Ballet of Canada and Metropolitan Opera Ballet, where he would later become the Director of the Ballet. Now considered an expert on the work of Antony Tudor, he spends much of his time staging the choreographer’s works for such companies as American Ballet Theatre, the Joffrey Ballet, Ballet West, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet and Alberta Ballet.

Like the most skillful ballet masters, Mahler has a mental file not only of each ballet, but also of the many variations that may have been made over the years. Mahler will not just set what he has stored in his memory banks, but he also continues to refines those recollections, enabling him to stage each work in a way that he feels will be true to Tudor’s intention, and yet still work on the dancers in front of him.

Mahler, a cheerful raconteur with numerous amusing and woolly stories, cites a section of the “Dark Elegies” in which the dancers are on their knees on the floor and then tilt backward at an angle. For years, he says, he set the tilt at a 45-degree angle backward. More recently he had an encounter with a dancer who had worked with Tudor and was certain that the dancers had leaned backward all the way until their heads touched the floor.

“I wasn’t sure,” he said, “Because no one else seemed to remember that, but then much later, I saw a very old clip of film of the ballet, and there they were, all the way back.”

Back in the rehearsal, Mahler makes indications with his hands and murmurs to Fancher, “You’ll have to have them work on that. That should be fixed.”
Fancher nods, and you can see her writing the mental note to herself. In another week, Mahler will return home, and it will be up to her and the dancers to carry it on.

Company C Contemporary Ballet performs “Dark Elegies” along with “3 Epitaphs,” “Hush,” and “Firebird” at the Amador Theater in Pleasanton on Saturday (April 7) at 2 pm and 8 pm. For more information, call (925) 931-3444, www.companycballet.org

KQED Profile: Shuji Ikeda

A native of Okayama, Japan, ceramicist and ikebana artist Shuji Ikeda originally hoped to become a film-maker. After coming to the United States in 1973 to study film at San Francisco State University, and graduating cum laude, however, he was frustrated by the challenges of breaking into the business, and in a serendipitous turn of events, turned to pottery as a means of therapy.

Now renowned for his craftsmanship and innovative methods-- including his unusual woven baskets made of hundreds of delicate strands of clay and his organically elegant dancing pots-- Ikeda has had a carved a unique niche for himself in the ceramics world and his work has been exhibited everywhere from the San Francisco Crafts and Folk Art Museum to Gump's.


Read more on the KQED Spark website.

KQED Profile: Ronn Guidi

Passion for the art of dance is perhaps the defining quality of Oakland's Ronn Guidi, director of the Oakland Ballet Academy, and founder of the famous Oakland Ballet.

An ever-energetic mainstay of the East Bay's dance scene, Guidi created the Oakland Ballet in 1965, leading the small regional company to international attention in the 1970s with his canny choices of repertoire. Bolstered by a National Endowment for the Arts Grant and ambitious world premieres, like Eugene Loring's The Tender Land --for which composer Aaron Copland himself conducted the opening night -- Guidi's enthusiasm and efforts paved the way for the troupe to become a major force in the dance world as one of the few remaining companies in the world performing the lavish and inventive ballets created for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. It was he who brought living legends such as Leonide Massine, Frederic Franklin and Irina Nijinska to stage authoritative restorations of Boutique Fantasque and Les Biches.


Read more on the KQED Spark website.

Words on Dance: Tina Le Blanc

Few dancers of this generation so clearly embody the all-American ballerina as Tina LeBlanc, who steps onto stage for Words on Dance on April 30-- not to dance, but to talk about a career which began in 1984 at the world-renowned Joffrey Ballet.

LeBlanc, who will be interviewed by fellow Joffrey alum Leslie Carothers at the Cowell Theater, danced under Robert Joffrey and Gerald Arpino for eight years before joining San Francisco Ballet as a principal in 1992. Described as one of the finest ballerinas of her generation, she has danced roles from the classical to the contemporary, and has been widely acclaimed for her technical wizardy and the elegance of her lines. LeBlanc is, nonetheless, down-to-earth and unassuming about her accomplishments, which include juggling a career as one of SFB’s leading ballerinas with her role as mom to two young sons, 4 and 9 years old. But hearing about this sort of balancing act, along with the inspirations that drive artists like LeBlanc to new heights, is just a part of what makes the Words on Dance events so appealing to the balletomanes in the audience.

Founded in 1994, Words on Dance is unusual in the arena of dance lecture-interviews in that the format centers on dancers being interviewed by other dancers. It establishes what Words on Dance founder and producer Deborah DuBowy thinks of as more of an oral history than a lecture, where you’re likely to hear less of the dry facts and more of the kind of fascinating details that bring the dance world to life. The combination of interview, along with rare, archival film clips-- many of which come from the private collections of the artists themselves and often have never been seen before in public-- lends a uniquely personal voice to the recollections of these artists, who often speak frankly about their struggles and personal challenges on the way to success.

Among the luminaries who have conversed onstage for Words on Dance are both internationally and locally renowned guests such as Violette Verdy, Edward Villella, Mark Morris, Peter Martins, Maria Tallchief, Frederic Franklin, Martine van Hamel, Cynthia Gregory, Helgi Tomasson, Michael Smuin, Joe Goode, Alonzo King, as well as San Francisco Ballet principals like Evelyn Cisneros, Joanna Berman, Yuri Possokhov, Lorena Feijoo and Muriel Maffre. In 2006, Words on Dance celebrated the Balanchine Centennial with a an ambitious program that brought together a cross-generational group of Balanchine dancers, including Merrill Ashley, Allegra Kent and Tomasson interviewed by Boston Ballet’s artistic director--and an early Words on Dance participant--Mikko Nissinen. In 2008 she plans a similar tribute, this time with a focus on one of the 20th century’s great choreographers, Jerome Robbins, under the auspices of a grant from the Jerome Robbins Trust.

Given all the history that is recounted onstage, archiving has become perhaps the most important component what DuBowy considers a larger documentation project. This year, DuBowy has announced that the main portion of the Words on Dance archives will go to San Francisco Ballet’s Center for Dance Education, who will also benefit from part of the proceeds of the April 30 event.

LeBlanc’s acquaintance with DuBowy stretches back to 1995, when LeBlanc attended one of the earliest Words on Dance events, Violette Verdy in conversation with Mikko Nissinen who was at the time, a principal with San Francisco Ballet. Over the years, she says, she and DuBowy talked often about offering a WOD event centered on her career, particularly because it would give audiences the chance to hear more about the enduring legacy of the Joffrey Ballet.

From its first tour across America, with the dancers packed into a station wagon and a U-Haul toting their theater cases behind, the Joffrey Ballet has been thought of as the quintessentially American company. With a dizzyingly diverse repertoire and a coterie of highly individual dancers, she laughingly describes it as a company of misfits, but in a good way.

“Mr. Joffrey would bring things into the company repertoire for certain people, he would search out pieces that would show them off,” she recalls, noting that her first breakout role with the company was the full-length “La fille mal gardee,” in which she attracted the attention of the New York critics with her lyricism, as well as her “assurance and emotional range.”

It’s those qualities which endear her to San Francisco Ballet audiences now, in roles from Kitri in Don Quixote to the dreamer in Julia Adam’s “Night.” But there is lurking question as to whether the Words on Dance retrospective means that she’s considering herself at the end of distinguished career? Fear not, at least for this year.

Retirement is definitely on my mind, it’s looming,” says the 40-year old LeBlanc with a wry tone. “I feel like I’m constantly pulling myself together to get through the daily grind, but I’m committed through the 2008 season, which will be SFB’s 75th anniversary.”

This season, she's hosting the Community Matinees sponsored by the Center for Dance Education, which she says has been enjoyable. But she's really hankering to work in the studio with kids, so she sees teaching in her future almost certainly.

"I think I have a gift for working with children," she says, "I love to work with people who are hungry to learn. I love to be in the studio, teaching them and working with them."

Already she's taught for the SFB School's audition tour, an experience that she describes as depressing and exhilarating and exciting.

"It was eye-opening, but it was also hard to see so many kids come to audition, when the reality was we could only take a few," she says with a sigh, " There are just so many kids out there who study and have these hopes and dreams and it's difficult to know that they may never make it."


This article originally appeared in In Dance Magazine.

WHO: San Francisco Ballet Principal Ballerina Tina LeBlanc onstage in conversation with former Joffrey Ballerina Leslie Carothers
WHAT: Words on Dance
WHERE: Cowell Theater, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, CA
WHEN: Monday, April 30, 2007 at 7:30 pm
HOW MUCH: $65
MORE INFO: 415-345-7575 or online @ www.fortmason.org/boxoffice