Remembering the Circle Star Theatre, one of Bay Area’s oddest venues.
My first concert with my parents was an evening with Little Richard, performing that night on top of a lazy Susan.
That was the gimmick of the Circle Star Theatre in San Carlos, a 3,700seat entertainment venue that hosted a strange mixture of aging Vegas crooners, R&B legends, comedians and wild cards. The Sugarhill Gang played there in 1981, one of the Bay Area’s first big rap shows. Oliver North was also an act, weeks before the disgraced military officer’s July 1989 sentencing related to the Iran-Contra Affair. Ella Fitzgerald, Richard Pryor and Frank Sinatra performed in the dying light of their careers.
All climbed onto a disc-shaped stage that rotated slowly at maybe four revolutions per hour, letting everyone in the in-the-round format feel like they had VIP seating for a few minutes (while also looking at a performer’s back an equal amount of time).
More than just about anything in The Chronicle archive, the Circle Star Theatre feels like a dream. But almost 30 years after the last concert there, the legend seems to be growing. The Circle Star comes up frequently on the “Total SF” podcast, as the site of every other guest’s first Bay Area concert.
“My first concert was at the Circle Star Theatre with Mommy and Daddy, and it was Sammy Fricking Davis Jr. and Dionne Warwick,” Giants announcer Renel Brooks-Moon said on the podcast earlier this summer. “I think I was 9 or 10. I went there all the time — through childhood, high school, college. I saw everybody there, Luther Vandross, Stevie Wonder … that little nugget hidden away in San Carlos. It was fabulous.”
The Circle Star was built in October 1964 as a live theater, with a lineup that included Jane Powell in “My Fair Lady,” Red Buttons in “Damn Yankees” and Nat King Cole in one of his final performances before his February 1965 death. It had a restaurant and multiple nightclubs, and guests wore suits and gowns.
But even from the beginning, it attracted some bizarre human drama. Late-stage Judy Garland played an odd show in 1965, where reviewer Ralph Gleason described her “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” performance as a mix of pantomime and audience participation. She sang another song while lying on the floor.
“Miss Garland will stagger through this grotesque charade, if all goes well, nightly through Sunday,” Gleason’s column finished.
In later years, the lineup was always the most random collection of acts among the Datebook nightclub advertisements. A two-week period in 1986 featured Waylon Jennings, Smokey Robinson, dancer Gregory Hines with Dionne Warwick, Liza Minnelli, rapper Doug E. Fresh, 1980s soft rock
ers Air Supply and bandstand legend Frankie Avalon. (Peninsula residents will remember driving by the marquee on Highway 101 and seeing Luther Vandross appearing at least once per year.)
Frank Sinatra played three of his last four Bay Area concerts at the Circle Star, in 1989, 1991 and 1992. Richard Pryor also closed his career there, drawing bitter humor from advancing multiple sclerosis that kept him seated throughout the night.
There were no trapdoors or pneumatic lifts at the Circle Star. Performers had to walk down an aisle and up stairs to the elevated stage. Often, when it came to the older performers, with much assistance.
Comedians seemed to thrive there the most, often mining material from the rotating stage. San Carlos native and actor Greg Proops recalled a Cheech & Chong performance where the pair used the moving stage to pretend to be a hitchhiker getting picked up by a driver. George Carlin, a frequent Circle Star headliner, reportedly declared an intermission — then took out a book and began reading in the center of the stage.
The Circle Star was a less successful venue for a cappella or a quiet country ballad. The motor for the stage emitted a low hum, which in later years seemed to get louder. When I saw the band Fishbone in 1988, the stage sounded like the BART rails when a train is passing through the Transbay Tube.
Throughout its run, the Circle Star seemed to attract weirdly historic moments. Sonny and Cher appeared one day after Cher filed papers to divorce Sonny Bono, claiming that he kept her in “involuntary servitude” and that she wasn’t getting her share of their partnership profits.
Toward the end of its life, when the Circle Star was owned by a former car dealer, the acts got even more eclectic. Mario Cuomo appeared one night. Oliver North spoke in front of a halffull crowd for a reported $25,000.
When the new booker reportedly got behind on payments, owner Jim Burney changed the locks in 1993, leaving John Tesh and B.B. King on the calendar with no place to play. The theater was demolished in 1997, replaced by two office buildings.
“There have been a lot of happy folks who have come here over the years,” Burney told The Chronicle in 1993. “With it closing, there is no mid-Peninsula entertainment at all. That’s one of the reasons I bought it in the first place.”
It was a very visible loss. Along with the thatched roofs of Marine World Africa USA, Malibu Grand Prix miniature golf and race cars, and the castle-shaped Dunfey Hotel, the Circle Star marquee was one of the most memorable landmarks on any trip between San Jose and San Francisco.
But for those who lived in the bedroom communities near San Carlos, it was something more. Yes, watching Frank Sinatra sing on a giant Frisbee was a strange way to spend your money. But it meant Sinatra and Willie Nelson and Al Green were practically in our backyards.
For a few nights every week, with two shows on Saturday, San Carlos, population 25,000, wasn’t just a place to pass through on the way to something cooler.
The Circle Star Theatre building may be long gone, but that stage is still spinning in our hearts.