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The Do List

‘Every Saturday Night’ Captures a Fight for the Fillmore’s Soul

Full of vibrant jazz and activist camaraderie, this new musical brings the neighborhood’s history to life.
Nia Coats
A Black woman in a bright red dress smiles and dances in a dimly lit room with several others
Ardella (Cathleen Ridley), center, and the cast of SFBATCO’s ‘Every Saturday Night.’ (Alexa LexMex Treviño)

In Every Saturday Night, a world-premiere musical that opened Thursday in San Francisco, a single mother living in the Fillmore District opens her old Victorian home to the Black community each week to keep the party going well after the clubs close. It’s the story of a time when the Fillmore was filled with jazz music, prosperous businesses and community.

Today, after so-called urban renewal in the 1970s decimated the cultural fabric of the neighborhood, and various attempts to recapture its “Harlem of the West” vibrancy, that same area tells a very different story.

Donte (Darryl V. Jones), left, tells Adarè (Trevor Miller) about growing up in the Fillmore in SFBATCO’s ‘Every Saturday Night.’ (Alexa LexMex Treviño)

Cowritten by Michael Gene Sullivan and Danny Duncan and produced by SFBATCO, Every Saturday Night casts the Fillmore itself as the show’s main character. Donte Coleman (Darryl V. Jones), tells stories of his childhood in the Fillmore to the teenage son of a new family looking to buy his home and move in. Having learned the history of the neighborhood, the family is shocked to see that it’s not what they expected. Samuel (Jon-David Randle), the new homebuyer, puts it plainly: “There aren’t as many Black people as I thought there would be.”

Across its 70-year timeline, from the 1950s to present day, the script is constant in its message, if a little hard to follow at times. The production comes alive when it reenacts the different parties hosted by Donte’s mother Ardella (Cathleen Riddley), providing a “nice place where colored folks can rest” at the end of a busy work week. Between these lively parties with loud jazz and busy dance numbers (with music by Othello Jefferson and choreography by the director, AeJay Antonis Marquis), there’s also a fight to save the district from encroaching redevelopment, and to protect Black residents from the removal that its Japanese residents had faced a few years earlier.

Doris (Imri Tate) speaks out against urban renewal and the displacement of the Fillmore’s Black community in SFBATCO’s ‘Every Saturday Night.’ (Alexa LexMex Treviño)

Doris (Imri M. Tate) is crusader for this cause, and convinces Ardella to join her. (“I don’t want to be moved out of my home because somebody wants to bleach the Fillmoe like a damn shirt,” Doris says.) In the original song “For the Greater Good of the Neighborhood,” Doris pleads for Ardella to keep her home, and the audience gets immersed into an anti-redevelopment protest. 

Back to the present day, as Donte bonds with the new family’s teenage son, Adarè (Trevor Miller), similar efforts are underway. A “Western Addition Heritage Association” knocks on the door trying to purchase and flip the house, under the guise of keeping it in the community. 

Young Donte (Jacob Henrie-Naffaa), center, and others dance the night away at Ardella’s after-hours joint in SFBATCO’s ‘Every Saturday Night.’ (Alexa LexMex Treviño)

San Francisco is an ever-changing city, for better or for worse. In Every Saturday Night, emotional and comedic performances bring the city’s history into the present day. “There’s still efforts to disappear and erase the Fillmoe,” Marquis said during a pre-show discussion on opening night. “We are trying to keep it alive.”

‘Every Saturday Night’ runs through Nov. 1 at The Strand (1127 Market St., San Francisco). Tickets and more information here. 

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