Your guide to WHAT’S HOT
This week’s concerts: Shawn Mendes, Queen, Beck, Audiotistic and more
Get ready for another hot week of music in the Bay Area, including Shawn Mendes and Queen + Adam Lambert. Here are some of the top picks. Shawn Mendes: The 20-year-old Canadian singer-songwriter has become one of the bigstars gest pop on the planet, thanks to such smash singles as “Treat You Better,” “There’s Nothing Holdin’ Me Back” and “In My Blood.” He performs Saturday and Sunday at Oracle Arena in Oakland. Details: 7:30 p.m.; $28-$85; www.ticketmaster.com. Queen + Adam Lambert: The music f Queen never goes out of style. Yet it certainly got a big boost in popularity with the release of last year’s hugely successful “Bohemian Rhapsody” film. f course, there’s no replacing Freddie Mercury. But Adam Lambert does do a nice job on the material. So, check out Queen + Adam Lambert at the SAP Center in San Jose on Sunday. Details: 7:30 p.m.; $49.50-$195; www. ticketmaster.com.
Beck, Cage the Elephant: No disrespect to co-headliner Cage the Elephant — a band that has put out some fine music over the years —but Beck is definitely the main reason to buy a ticket to this show on Tuesday at Shoreline Amphitheatre at Mountain View. Opening acts Spoon and Starcrawler make this an even hotter ticket. Details: 6 p.m.; $29.50-$200.50; www.livenation.com.
Audiotistic: The two-day electronic/dance music festival, set for Saturday and Sunday, brings such acts as Eprom, Gammer, Snake-hips, Tiesto, Xie, Zeds Dead, Alison Wonder-land, Boombox Cartel, Hekler, Holly, Illenium and Sober Rob to the Shoreline Amphitheatre at Mountain View. Details: 3 p.m.; 1-day ticket $89.99, 2-day ticket $149.99; www.audiotis-ticfestival.com.
Vulfpeck: The Ann Harbor, Michigan, funk act is out on the road in support of "Hill Climber" and performs Saturday at UC Berkeley's Greek Theatre. Joey Dosik is also on the bill. Details: 8p.m.; $49.50; www.ticketmaster.com. Dude Perfect: The troupe has become a YouTube sensation with its mix of sports and comedy. They visit the Event Center at San Jose State University on Friday. Details: 7p.m.; $28-$58; www.ticketmaster.com.
— Jim Harrington, Staff
Gypsy swing with a Latin lilt
The Colombian band Monsieur Periné had already gained recognition with a best new artist Latin Grammy in 2015, so its breakout performance at the Monterey Jazz Festival two years later shouldn’t have come as a surprise.
Still little known in California, lead singer Catalina Garcia commanded Monterey’s main arena with a mix of stagecraft, humor and sensuous vocals, turning a convivial and distracted afternoon audience into a com munal celebration.
Now Monsieur Periné, combining a finely honed sense of theater with a pan-American panoply of grooves and Gypsy jazz, opens a four-night run today at SFJazz’s Miner Auditorium. Collaborations with leading Latin-American artists have helped stretch the group’s identity into the rootsy, Latin electronica hybrid captured on 2018’s critically praised “Encanto Tropical” (Sony Music).
Details: 7:30 p.m. today through Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday; SFJazz Center, San Francisco; $25-$65; 866-920-5299, www.sfjazz.org.
— Andrew Gilbert, Correspondent
Clay and glass artists converge in Palo Alto for festival
The Peninsula turns into an art gallery this weekend, with top artists from around the state joining the Clay & Glass Festival for its 27th annual appearance.
The event on Saturday and Sunday is a juried show, with more than 130 members of the Association of Clay and Glass Artists of California participating. From 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. both days, artists will demonstrate potterymaking and ikebana flower arranging techniques. And attendees of all ages can participate in Clay for All, an interactive art project.
Details: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday; Palo Alto Art Center; free admission; www.clayglassfestival.com.
— Linda Zavoral, Staff
Italy’s evocative past emerges in ‘NeoRealismo’
The great Italian films from the decade after World War II — such as “Bitter Rice,” “Bicycle Thieves” and “La Strada” — weren’t just the inventions of directors gaining international fame. They had roots in Italian cities, villages and the countryside.
Now an extensive collection of photographs from the era — actually, from 1932 to 1960 — is on view at the Museo Italo Americano in San Francisco. The exhibit, titled “NeoRealismo,” centers on the postwar years, with the intense gaze of the “new realism” on Italians beyond the reach of the economic revival.
The Italian character is in the faces: an aristocratic man eating in a soup kitchen, children in the alleys of Naples, women on an ancient farmstead that survived the war. Images are both familiar and uncommon: well-dressed men staring at a young woman on a street in Milan contrast with coal miners in Sardinia.
Powerful individual photographs seem to distill entire movies. Nino Migliori’s casual view of a late-night cafe in Emiglia suggests the aimless young men in Federico Fellini’s “I Vitelloni.” And Enrico Pasquali visits the women rice pickers who inspired Giuseppe de Santis’ “Bitter Rice.”
As a bonus, monitors in the museum galleries show clips from some of these classic films, as well as many, rarely seen, from the Fascist era of the 1930s and early 1940s. There’s also a “NeoRealismo” book with
an introduction by none other than Martin Scorsese.
Details: Through Sept. 15, museum open noon-4p.m. Tuesday-Sunday; Building C at Fort Mason Center, San Francisco; free; 415-673-2200, museoitaloamericano.org.
— Robert Taylor, Correspondent
‘Language’ of loss
TheatreWorks Silicon Valley opens its 50th season with Julia Cho’s “The Language Archive,” a bittersweet comedydrama about a passionate quest to preserve that which is treasured and meaningful from disappearing from our grasp.
The theme takes on added meaning when you consider that this TheatreWorks season will be the curtain call for beloved founding artistic director Robert Kelley, who has run the company since its 1970 inception, and who recently saw the troupe win a Regional Theatre Tony Award.
“The Language Archive” focuses on a linguist (played by Jomar Tagatac) bent on preserving languages that are dying out. And as is common for a Cho play, the protagonist’s quest is indelibly wrapped up in the drama of his personal life. (The same holds for Cho’s acclaimed “Aubergine,” which played at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2016.)
The production is directed by Jeffrey Lo and also stars TheatreWorks veterans Francis Jue and Emily Kuroda as a couple who are the last people who speak a soonto-disappear dialect.
Details: In previews through Friday; main run is Saturday through Aug. 4; Lucie Stern Theatre, Palo Alto; $30-$100; 650-4631960, theatreworks.org.
— Randy McMullen, Staff