Not too far into her set at the Plush Room in San Francisco Tuesday, Katey Sagal told the audience, "My secret passion is for songwriting … but my life kind of took a different turn." Read More

At the outset of Sunday night’s show at Concord’s Sleep Train Pavilion, Stevie Wonder introduced his lovely daughter (and backup singer) Aisha Morris, telling the hyped-up audience that spreading joy, to honor a request by his late mother, was primary among his reasons for returning to the concert stage for the first time in a decade. In the third gig of his "Wonder Summer’s Night" tour, Wonder, who’s scheduled appear Sept. 4 in a sold-out show at the Mountain Winery in Saratoga, fulfilled that promise — and then some. Read More

In real life, Julie Delpy seems a lot like the sexy, chatty, smart, meandering philosophical character she plays in "Before Sunrise," "Before Sunset" and in her new movie, "2 Days in Paris," which she also produced, wrote and directed. "There is a little bit of me, somewhat," she says, in Celine, from the "Before" films, and Marion, in the recent release. "I’m similar in that I’m a New York woman in the 21st century raised by a feminist mother and a feminist father." She’s pleased when people tell her that they think "2 Days," which opened this week, is a feminist film. Read More

Before the 2007 Bay Area Rhythm Exchange — the big performance component of this year’s Bay Area Tap Festival — began Saturday night at San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre, it wasn’t necessarily easy to generalize about the kind of people in the audience.But after the terrific "shim sham finale," it became clear that the folks at the show were tap dancers themselves, and mighty fine ones.At least a few dozen dancers of all ages, shapes and sizes from the crowd joined the professionals onstage for several group routines. A bunch pulled off some nifty solos, too. Read More

Jazz queen Diana Krall seemed to thoroughly enjoy her show Wednesday night at San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall.She’s liked frequent recent visits to the Bay Area, she said, also mentioning that she’s been on tour for "nearly three years" and that her two baby boys are fine.Ever so cool, tossing her silky long hair and tapping her deliciously high-heeled feet while enlightening the audience with just enough witty banter, Krall and her superb trio played an impeccable set of straight-ahead jazz, mostly swinging standards. Read More

It really was never a question that Nik Wallenda would do anything but walk on wires. Coming from seven generations of circus performers — his great-grandfather was Karl Wallenda, who introduced the high wire to America in the 1920s with Ringling Bros. — Nik never was trained in any pursuits of a more mundane nature.He started clowning at 2 ("I’d come out in a pillow case," he says), but by the time he turned 13, after practicing "for his whole life" and proving himself to his family, he began performing on the high wire. Read More

"Avenue Q," the Tony Award-winning show coming to San Francisco this week, grew out of a project for a musical theater class. Bobby Lopez and Jeff Marx wrote something called "Kermit, Prince of Denmark," in which they proved the power of combining puppets and the Bard. Read More