I used to dread visits from my New York and Los Angeles people. You know — creative people, regulars at Upright Citizens Brigade in L.A. or at underground shows in decidedly-not-to-code Brooklyn warehouses. Where to take these visitors to San Francisco when ACT is dark or tickets are too expensive, when Pearl's is long gone and Fort Mason is too far to go for improv? I resorted to drowning the question in food and drink, hoping our status as a second-class arts city would get lost in a tide of dim sum, bourbon, and IPA.
"How far we've come," I thought to myself as I sat in PianoFight, which opened nine months ago in the Tenderloin. I sipped a mezcal Negroni at a candlelit table in the main dining room, across from a pair of excited New Yorkers — one of whom used to live in L.A. Jazz standards floated from the piano in the cabaret space near the door while we waited to slip into the joint's black box theater to catch a play.
PianoFight occupies the former Original Joe's space on Taylor Street, right around the corner from the historic Compton's Cafeteria site. A Herb Caen-era cocktail-crowd favorite, Original Joe's was devastated by a fire in 2007 and sat empty until a trio of theater and food nerds recently took it over. The result is PianoFight: a multi-venue performance complex with a large main stage, the black box with pitch-perfect acoustics, and a cabaret space.
PianoFight reflects the city's plan to do more with Mid-Market and the TL than replace seedy storefronts with tech-friendly office space and convert dive bars into $12 mixologists' cocktail lounges. Along with ACT's new Strand Theater on Market and the longstanding EXIT Theatre on Eddy, PianoFight suggests that the TL's art scene isn't just going to evaporate because of the city's tech bubble brouhaha.
Still, PianoFight is a work in progress. The dinner menu is simple but solid, with fried chicken sandwiches and Cajun fries served on plastic trays. And the jazz music is clearly calculated not to challenge the Thursday evening crowd (a Miles Davis arrangement flowed into the James Bond theme).
But Life in Trouble, the show in the black box, resonated. It was the autobiography of a young black man struggling to become an artist in a time and a place where that's harder and harder to do.
If PianoFight is a sign of the TL's encroaching gentrification, it's the kind of gentrification I'm not embarrassed to show off.
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San Francisco’s creative spaces fight back.
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The Chapel
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The Swedish American Hall
Recently renovated, this legendary venue — and everything in it — is better than ever.
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Green Apple Books on the Park
An S.F. institution goes analog in the Inner Sunset.
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