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TEXT OF REVIEW
Every Saturday Night Cities change all the time. Napoleon III rebuilt Paris nto an Art Nouveau wonderland. New York’s San Juan Hill slums became Lincoln Center . And in San Francisco, urban renewal turned a poor yet vibrant black neighborhood called The Fillmore into the amorphous Western Addition.
That story, or at least an aspect of that story, has become an important element in the world premiere musical, Every Saturday Night, presented by SFBATCO at ACT’s Strand Theatre through November 1st.
The show opens on a living room in a large Victorian in what was once the Fillmore, in two time lines. In the today timeline, an elderly man named Dante is selling his family home because it’s time to downsize. A couple with a teenage son are looking around, thinking of buying. While they look, Dante remembers his teenage life in the early 1960s, when his mother opened their large boarding house on Saturday nights as a kind of nightclub, with dancing, food and drink.
This is the real past of the show’s songwriter and co-librettist Danny Duncan. Using a jazz score from songs composed over the years, Every Saturday Night is at its best during the ensemble numbers set in the past, when the entire cast shows up, dancing, singing and fooling around.
The cast is led by Darryl V. Jones as old Dante, Jacob Henrie-Naffaa as his young counterpart and Cathleen Ridley as his mother. Stealing every scene he’s in is R. J. Wayne as Dante’s missing father. But a musical is also a play, and it’s there that Every Saturday Night stumbles. Act One has has one or two subplots, but no drama. An old man reminisces to the couple’s son. The couple looks at rooms. There’s no so-called want song, no way to rev things up. Act Two goes the other way. It’s all plot, most of which is never mentioned in Act One, and all of which peter out. A second act subplot involving Peter Pan feels like a closeted something else. Every Saturday Night would need to be torn up and recreated from scratch to have a future.
But there’s so much richness in Every Saturday Night, the dancing, the music, the singing, the vibe, the performances, the love and care visible every moment in the production, so maybe there’s still good reasons to catch the show before it disappears forever.
Every Saturday Night, a Harlem of the West Musical, plays in a BATCO production at ACT’s Strand Theatre through November first. For more information you can go to sfbatco.org. I’m Richard Wolinsky on Bay Area theatre for KPFA.
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