KQED’s Cy Musiker and David Wiegand share their picks for great events around the Bay Area this week.
Tough choices this week for the radio show. We barely had room for the 12th Annual Bay Area Flamenco Festival, run by Nina Menendez. She always puts on great shows, like the Feb. 19 concert featuring José Maya with his newest work Latente, at the Herbst Theater. The Festival continues through Feb. 25 with shows in San Francisco and Oakland. Now here’s the show.
Feb. 17 & 18: The Legendary Shack Shakers is the brainchild of J.D. Wilkes out of Paducah, Kentucky. He’s a harmonica player who sometimes strips off his shirt on stage — a somewhat punk move, but the music is deeply rooted in country and jump blues. We would call it rockabilly, but Wilkes hates that term. Doesn’t matter. It’s great music, and Wilkes is a renaissance man, with a novel out soon about the invasive plant kudzu, called The Vine That Ate the South. Catch them at The Ritz in San Jose (details here), or Brick and Mortar in San Francisco (details here).

Feb. 22–April 23: Annie Baker writes haunting plays in which sometimes, not much is happening. Yet she holds an audience with her deep insights into the meaning of relationships. John is her enthusiastically reviewed, Obie Award-winning play from 2015 about a disintegrating marriage. It’s set at a bed and breakfast in Gettysburg, and explores the relationship that develops between the wife and the landlady at the B&B. It features the great actress Georgia Engel (of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Everybody Loves Raymond) as the landlady. Back in 2012, we had a mini-fest of Baker plays, with Aliens at SF Playhouse, Body Awareness at the Aurora, and Circle Mirror Transformation at Marin Theatre Company. We’re so glad Baker is back in this American Conservatory Theater production at the Strand. Details here.