Sometimes, when the going gets tough, the tough take the Kris Kringle route. This winter, the Christmas mindset finds new legs in A Merry Little Christmas Cabaret, a story focusing on how music executives turned to the man in the red suit for a boost to record sales. Set in 1964, the cabaret plays off of British Invasion and other melodies of the time to retune into what music-lovers really want—Christmas in July! Showgoers who missed the production’s run at the Tabard Theatre need not worry: it is now available to stream all the way through the new year.
A Merry Little Christmas Cabaret
Wed-Tue, Various Times, $15+
Tabard Theatre, San Jose

San Jose’s St. James Park has seen more than its fair share of violence since the city was founded, its gardens and grasses—meant to provide tranquil escape—also often acting as grounds for death.

During the 1850s, hunters pit bears and bulls against one another in makeshift amphitheaters in the park, attracting hundreds of ticket-holding spectators. In 1875, a man declared a “bandit” was hanged from the park’s scaffolding, spending his last hours in front of an audience perched on nearby rooftops and windowsills. And in 1918, mobsters tarred and feathered a “disloyalist” on the land.

Most shocking of all was the park’s 1933 lynching—a savage finale to an infamous crime, spurred by a mob of vigilantes. Now, audiences can bear witness to the crime and what led up to it only blocks away from the park in a production of the historical drama Swift Justice, at the Tabard Theatre in San Pedro Square.

After the tragic kidnapping and murder of beloved local department store scion Brooke Hart, a mob extradited two jailed suspects from their cells and slung them from nearby tree branches. The affair was met with the jubilation of a carnival—up to 10,000 people gathered—complete with souvenirs of sticks and rope. Translated to today’s population, the lynching would have attracted around 130,000 spectators.

Former San Jose Mayor-turned-playwright Tom McEnery first chronicled this bizarre tale in 2016, inspired by former Mercury News reporter and personal friend Harry Farrell’s book, also titled Swift Justice.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“People who’ve lived in San Jose for any number of years, even briefly, have heard something about this,” McEnery said, hours before Friday’s opening performance. “It was then—and still is in a lot of ways now—a small community. We have hundreds of thousands of people who’ve come here over the years, now literally millions of people, but that particular story just seems to capture people’s attention.”

Swift Justice begins with a man named Joseph Karesh, a rabbi who consoled the devastated Hart family and who later became a judge. Within the play’s modern adaptation, Karesh hashes out memories from 1933 alongside commentary of the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capital.

McEnery says he hopes the juxtaposition will draw parallels for viewers between the politics and culture of San Jose’s past with its ever changing future.

“It captures, I think, a lot of the fear and uncertainty that people have been going through for the last number of years and in our community as well as in the nation,” McEnery says. “It wasn’t right then and it isn’t right now to set aside the laws and to do what your emotions guide you to do. We’ve seen how these types of things can fail horribly and affect the country now.”

But more than simply a tragedy, McEnery says it’s a history lesson. If it was possible for San Joseans to forge community and prosperity despite mobs and the Great Depression, he says it’s also possible to push through the desperation that’s grown as the pandemic continues to linger.

“Whatever sins we’ve committed as a nation, we’ve never walked away from our real principles,” McEnery says. “There’s always someone out there—whether Martin Luther King or John Lewis —to remind us what the principles of this country mean and why they have to be fought for, even though we may fail in some of the battles as we serve one another.”

Vickie Rozell, the play’s director, says working with McEnery provided a layer of authenticity to the almost unbelievable turn of events, since the former mayor’s personal conversations with surviving family members of the characters contributed to the play’s script. That human element, she says, catapults audience members even deeper into realizing the weight of the lynching.

“Being in the room, it’s a much more intense experience because you can’t put the book down and go away—it is happening in front of you, getting to know these people and seeing what happens to them,” Rozell explains, relating those lessons to what’s at stake in the current political climate. “We cannot give in to these kinds of urges…It’s going to take each one of us to move forward.”

Swift Justice
Through Nov 21, Various Times, $16+ 
Tabard Theatre, San Jose

Bay Area guitarist Mason Razavi is a terrific and consistent presence in the Bay Area jazz scene. The West Valley lecturer has performanced with both SF Jazz and San Jose Jazz, and caught play on jazz radio across the world with some great records of originals. Joined by frequent collaborator Brian Ho on the organ and Jason Lewis on the drums, Razavi will be playing two sets at Art Boutiki. The first includes standards and originals with selections from his upcoming solo guitar album, and the second will be a tribute to jazz guitar legend Wes Montgomery.

Mason Razavi
Tue, 7pm, $10
Tabard Theatre, San Jose

In The Turn of the Screw, a young woman hired to watch over two orphans becomes convinced that they are not alone in their stately English manor. A pair of eerie strangers keep appearing on the grounds, bearing a striking resemblance to the kids’ former caretakers, who died mysteriously. As the mysteries pile up, the tale races towards a thrilling conclusion still debated today. The Tabard Theatre presents a timely staging of Henry James’s classic horror tale, just as the leaves begin to turn and a chill cuts through the air.

Turn of the Screw
Opens Fri, 8pm, $35
Tabard Theatre, San Jose

Coriolanus is fairly unique among Shakespeare’s tragedies, and perhaps the most rarely produced; protagonist Caius Marcius’ tyrannical worldview and lack of soliloquies make him both unsympathetic and opaque. But the travails of the Roman general-turned-politician-turned-traitor have offered a terrific window into the soul of societies undergoing great political turbulence, and have inspired terrific reimaginings like Bertolt Brecht’s posthumous labor-oriented subversion. Ken Kelleher’s Cry of Curs, is the latest entrant in this small but mighty canon, updating Marcius to a present-day politician, and mixing filmed sections with live onstage acting.

Cry of Curs
Opens Thu, 8pm, $32+
Tabard Theatre, San Jose

When the late Alice Coltrane ran her hand along the harp’s 47 strings, it was as though the totality of existence vibrated with her.

“The whole vibration shifts upward,” says harpist Destiny Muhammad.

Since 2018, Muhammad has been performing tributes to Alice Coltrane, beginning with a moving performance at SF Jazz 11 years after the musician’s passing. This weekend, Muhammad comes to the Tabard Theatre to perform her tribute to the spiritual jazz master in an event presented by local Coltrane enthusiasts TraneTraxx Lounge.

“[TraneTraxx founder] Craig Bright saw me at that first tribute to Alice Coltrane and he was smitten. He said, ‘We gotta do it again, take it to the South Bay,’” Muhammad says. “When they realized that there was someone in the Bay Area who could do an interpretation of Alice’s works, I became that person.”

Though often overshadowed by her husband’s rightly-celebrated work, the music of Alice Coltrane is incredibly absorbing and spiritually rich, and features many of the musicians from her late husband’s last band, like saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and drummer Rashied Ali. In fact, the most distinctive mark of John Coltrane’s late period—his “sheets of sound” saxophone technique—was directly inspired by the flowing notes of Alice’s harp.

“He was literally doing his best to imitate what we call the ‘glissando’ on the harp,” Muhammad says, referring to a long, connected strum of the instrument’s strings. “He was enamored with the tonality of the harp.”

Muhammad herself has long been enamored with the instrument’s distinct sound. As a nine year-old living in Compton, she decided suddenly one morning that the concert harp was her life’s calling after watching Harpo Marx perform “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” in an episode of I Love Lucy. It would be twenty-one years before she finally saw good on that goal—and even then it was a challenge.

“My first teacher, she was 29 and I was 30, and she was adamant that she was not going to teach me,” Muhammad remembers. “She said, ‘I don’t mess with the old ones. They don’t stick.’”

To convince her she would indeed stick, Muhammad promised her that she wasn’t just entertaining a passing whim—she wanted to create and release her own harp music into the world.

“It was ‘92, so the first CDs had just come out, and I said, ‘I want to do a CD, I want to write and interpret music.’ And she said, ‘Ok, then I’ll teach you.’”

Today, Muhammad’s two Soundcloud pages feature more than a decade of original harp music spanning a wide range of musical influences, from jazz and classical, to Celtic melodies, blues and pure glowing pop, as on 2019’s “All About You.”

But to get there, Muhammad had to start by paying her dues. After moving to the Bay Area, she began her professional career performing at farmers markets, funerals, baby showers and anywhere that would pay for a gigging harpist. Since, the self-described “Harpist from the Hood” has gone on to become an SF Jazz teaching artist, won awards from ASCAP and the Northern California Entertainers Music Awards, and even performed harp with Kanye West’s invite-only Sunday Service.

“I did four of those,” Muhammad says. “Kanye is clear about who he is. He knows that he is an on-going contradiction, and he does not care. There’s clarity in knowing that and being unapologetic.”

At Tabard, Muhammad and band will be performing works from some of Coltrane’s most entrancing albums as bandleader, like the hypnotic Huntington Ashram Monastery, and the transportative Journey in Satchidananda—both albums marked by Alice’s distinct fusion of Black American spirituality with eastern instrumentation and thought.

As for Muhammad herself, she says she’s just glad to be playing the instrument she’s always loved.

“I am unapologetically grateful to be doing this work,” she says. “After 29 years, I look forward to the next 129 years of seeing what musical majesty can come forth from this beautiful instrument.”

Tribute to Alice Coltrane
Sun, 7pm, $20
Tabard Theatre, San Jose

When the room gets stuffy, throw open the window and let in some fresh air. That’s the idea behind ‘Open a New Window,’ the ‘Slightly Unconventional Cabaret’ presented by downtown San Jose’s Tabard Theatre. Available in-person and online, ‘New Window’ is a night of music and storytelling from talented actors Glenna Murillo, Karen DeHart, and the night’s MC, Tabard veteran James Creer. An intimate cabaret experience including pop and broadway numbers, ‘New Window’ is sure to be a boon for anyone who thought social life had become ‘The Impossible Dream,’ or perhaps nothing more than a ‘Memory.’

Open a New Window
Fri, 8pm, $29+
Tabard Theatre, San Jose

In Shylock, a Jewish actor throws a Shakespeare Festival into chaos with his controversial performance as the notorious moneylender from Merchant of Venice. The festival is canceled (along with the actor’s career), and he is left having to defend his actions, and explain his artistic choices. Exploring themes of censorship, artistic freedom, and cultural representation, Shylock is a timely piece with a lot to say, and an exciting start to the Tabard’s 20th season. Performances run June 4-20, and are viewable both in person and online.

‘Shylock’ Premiere
Fri, June 4, $15-50
29 N San Pedro St, San Jose

Like any play worthy of the descriptor “farce,” The 39 Steps relies on quick takes and physical humor for laughs. With a cast of four playing dozens of roles in the show, many of the laughs simply come from the quick costume changes the actors must make. While Patrick Barlow’s script is based on Alfred Hitchcock’s far more serious film, the possibility of a wardrobe malfunction might be the most suspenseful aspect of this production, which runs through March 1.

The 39 Steps
Fri-Sun, $35+
Tabard Theatre, San Jose

Tony-award winning playwright and composer William Finn recounts his tribulations with a brain aneurysm in his semi-autobiographical 1998 musical, A New Brain. Protagonist Gordon, a composer, grapples with anxiety and existential angst as he tries to keep his cool before a dangerous brain surgery that threatens his life, and with it, all of his unfulfilled artistic potential. Premiered at New York City’s Lincoln Center, A New Brain has been performed in theaters across the US and in the UK, and now makes its South Bay premiere at the Tabard Theatre Jan 9-26.

A New Brain
Thu-Sun, Various Times, $18
Tabard Theatre, San Jose