WaxWorks, a silent German Expressionist film from 1924 will be reimagined with a modern score of musical madness...

Honoring the long-held tradition of coupling together contemporary musicians with classic silent films, this year's SF International Film Festival has forged a psychedelic, improvisational aficionado dream team, sure to shock, scintillate, and maybe even offend.

Mike Patton, of Faith No More, Mr. Bungle, and Peeping Tom, among other strange sublime bands, has joined up with three genre-bending percussionists, Scott Amendola (Scott Amendola Trio, Nels Cline, Jeff Parker, Charlie Hunter), William Winant (John Cage, Mr. Bungle, John Zorn, Lou Reed) and Matthias Bossi (Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, The Book of Knots, Skeleton Key) to perform an original "score" for WaxWorks (Das Wachsfigurenkabinett), a silent, German fantasy-horror flick from 1924.

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Jamie Lyons

The Collected Works is a brand-spanking-new theater producing company formed by Stanford and Berkeley alums who are hell-bent on bringing exceptional, experimental performance to the West Coast theater scene. Together with the Performance Art Institute they present Princess Ivona, the 1935 Absurdist comic play by Witold Gombrowicz. The story involves a silent, awkward young woman whose strangeness fascinates a Prince to the point that he proposes to her, and is a brilliant and often hilarious examination of the role of power and desire. More »

Repeated exposure and adoration from the masses have turned most popular music and art festivals into blown out, oversaturated, and commercialized trash -- vain attempts to recapture the aura and frenetic glory of Woodstock or Monterey Jazz. Today's festival scene is a post-breakdown Dave Chappelle -- broken, lost, and aimlessly wandering for an adequate sense of home (ahem, S.S. Coachella). Then, there's the Wintersalt Music and Arts Festival.

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Jos Truitt

What was your favorite part of The Little Mermaid? Was it the classic fish-out-of-water moment when Ariel styles her hair with a dinglehopper? Perhaps when the enchantress cuts out the mermaid's tongue in payment for her potion? Ah, Disney omitted that detail from Hans Christian Andersen's original tale, along with the mermaid's suicide. Artist Jos Truitt also strayed from the Disney version, but felt a connection with the story since childhood, reading it as a "trans fairy tale." 

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Michael Xavier knows you've heard the story of the Salem Witch Trials, and that you might even remember Abigail Williams, the young girl who first cried "witch." Something about this story is so resonant, Xavier says, "people seem to have a lot of ownership of it."

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Maxx Kurzunski

Entrepreneur Franco (Chris Marsol) tries to inspire disillusioned Baby Boomer Arthur (Don Wood).

If you looked just at the dramatis personae in Tracy Letts' Superior Donuts, which premieres tonight at Custom Made Theatre Company, you might think it easy to peg. Arthur (Don Wood) is a draft-dodging hippie who hasn't altered his Uptown, Chicago donut shop in 40 years. Franco (Chris Marsol) is his newly hired assistant who's young, black, and deeply optimistic about change. But don't think you can simply see the generational, cultural, and racial conflicts unfolding, warns director Marilyn Langbehn.

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The Republican party has once again gotten in bed with Ayn Rand. Her formidable legacy made an appearance in the political arena this election year when Paul Ryan revealed that he grew up reading the author's famously individualist work, proclaiming "it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are," only to rescind his enthusiastic Rand support once he realized her atheism didn't really fly with the Republican platform (or his own Catholicism).

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Jose A Guzman Colon

In his Halloween! The Ballad of Michele Myers, drag performer Raya Light brings a bunch of people to their deaths, but, more importantly, he brings the 1980s back to life. Dunn cherishes the glory decade for its music, sitcoms, slasher flicks, political incorrectness, and its San Francisco Halloween spirit, which has changed for the worse, he says, now that "so many people come in to gawk."

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Claire Rice

Zombie mine!

Did the season premiere of The Walking Dead leave you with a craving? Not to worry. The fine folks of San Francisco Theater Pub have your back. Over the last couple years they've done an amazing job filling the theater week's dark nights with cold pints and footlights, interpreting the works of Václav Havel, Alfred Jarry, Euripides, Sophocles, and the Bard in an atmosphere that makes all that sophistication pretty easy to swallow. And we're not just talking about the tasty victuals from their rotating pop-up kitchens.

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Davy Rothbart is a really nice guy. A really nice guy who, at 30-something, has chosen to maintain a transient lifestyle, where being the guy that'll exchange unabashedly genuine conversation with just about anyone (from Ira Glass to Kid Rock) is an open invitation for peculiar experiences around the country.

And if you're hanging out with him, you're getting the same.

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