Cal Performances

Cal Performances is a rarity for the Bay Area– world class performances in a world class venue and it’s always an honor for me to make the trip from San Francisco. In 20+ years of visiting this venue, I have never been disappointed and that is saying a great deal. Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco is trying to catch up but they are still years away from this «well oiled machine» in terms of delivering a complete, satisfying patron experience.
First to the performances. Last night I saw Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. They are to me the top in their category. Dance so precise, so stunning that it looks spontaneous and unrehearsed. As a former dance student I can only imagine how many hours it takes to pull off a feat like this. I didn’t care for the music itself in the first piece but the dancers were incredible.
The second very short piece called Awassa Astrige/​Ostrich was beyond magnificent. Just watching the man’s arms was a testimony not only to the bird but to the hours and hours of practice at the bar and at the gym. In short, Ailey’s dancers, each and very one of them are stunning.
The venue has top dancers, top musicians, some theater and many of them from around the world that you simply wouldn’t see anywhere else. This season’s offerings include a Twyla Tharp anniversary tour (she used to grace their stage for years), Mark Morris, Renee Fleming, Kronos Quartet, a unique collaboration between public radio’s Ira Glass and some dancers, Monterey Jazz Festival and others on tour.
The food at Cal Performances is top rate, comes from a local Oakland Bakery, Grace Street and for under $ 20 but over $ 10 they have pre and intermission light meals like Cold Noodle Salad, Tortillas, Seared Tuna Plated and even Chickpea crusted Salmon with couscous and the best part is small tables, long tables and whether you are seated or standing huge windows that overlook the campus grounds. Best of all the people watching is divine and it’s very much a multicultural audience.
You can buy performance souvenirs. .There are plenty of bathroom stalls. You are greeted by an entire, well dressed usher team so there is always someone on the floor when any kind of question arises. These are well trained ushers and even though most are volunteer’s efficiency and professionalism prevails. That’s what I mean by the «well oiled machine concept».
I arrive about 1.5 hours early so actually get street parking or you can pay $ 10 on Bandcroft near Dana and walk a block to Zellerbach Hall where most of the performances take place. The best thing about arriving early is it’s a drop dead gorgeous campus to walk, students are often out performing informally either dance or last night it was drums and Telegraph Avenue at Bandcroft is filled with eateries where you can dine for less than $ 10 at SF Soup Company, Chipotle, Smart Alec’s and other local eateries. Even the chains here are decent and you pick up the student vibe and can enjoy entering into that world for an evening. There are also retail stores and a unique Chinese Bakery called Sheng Kee which despite being a chain is quite the experience where you go around a large u and select your choices directly out of glass cases.
I recommend making it a night out. Try to avoid the $ 15 private parking stall and of course BART and BUSES are the other, even easier option.
This is Berkeley at its best!

I highly recommend of it!!! Always great new performances that are carefully chosen by talented people.
Great value for your money!
Always fun!

First I would like to say that this review is only of the ticket office.
I needed extra tickets on graduation weekend. I went to the ticket office to buy extra tickets. The workers did not seem to care that there was a line and took the slowest time as possible to serve people. The line easily could have went twice as fast. Seeing as commencements were going on that weekend, you would think that they would try to sell tickets as quickly as possible.

If you buy their tickets and did not receive refund for cancelled show, you need to contact them otherwise they do not refund your ticket although they said they will automatically refund the tickets.
I enjoyed many shows offered by Cal Performance over years. However, I am not sure if I want to go to there performance any longer because of my awful experience with the ticket office. They cancelled a show and they supposed to automatically refund the tickets. However, it did not happen more than a month. I wrote them an e-​mail but they did not answer so I called. The person answered the call was untrained and the on duty manager was extremely rude. He said some customers had the same problem but they did not have any way to find out if the refund was done unless the customer call them. He said he did not receive e-​mail and no apology for the cancellation of the show or their computer problem.
When I asked timeline of the refund, he said he did not know. When I asked if it would be a week or a year, he said he could not answer. When I tried to talk to his boss, he said he was the boss so he won’t transfer to anyone higher then him. I told him that I was extremely unhappy about hi attitude and rudeness. He said, «OK.» I told him that I did not feel like going to Cal Performance shows any longer and I would tell people my very uncomfortable experience with him. He said, «OK.» Basically, he was not only rude but also arrogant. Since I insisted to talk someone higher than him, he transferred me to his manager. (Off course, everyone usually has a boss in an organization like Cal Performance!)
His boss was really efficient and provided me with reasonable timeline. She was also nice and professional. It’s so sad that the performances they offer are great but their computer system and customer service are unacceptable. I do not want to deal with rude and incapable customer service and to spend so much time to get refund of the show they cancelled.

First of let me say that the performance it’s self was a five star performance — but I paid 70 dollars each for my husband and I to see this amazing art in the worst and cruel way at Zellerbach Playhouse on Berkeley Campus — shame on CalPerformances! We were lead through a darkened main theater to go to some back room with chairs a local 12 step group would provide for making sure you got out of there in a hurry after the meeting. Aside from the chairs being horrifically uncomfortably (to wit it was the noisiest audience I have sat with in a while); worse it was general admission. So being good simple east bay folk who don’t have wads of extra cash we rode our bikes 3 miles to avoid paying for parking and got to the theater 35 minutes before the show started. They would not let us in to the theater for 10 minutes and it was quite cold — why keep us standing outside? Then massing in with 50 other people we get in the general sitting theater only to find that the director’s family has reserved all the best seats (about 20) and the rest of us poor schmucks had to sit on the periphery. Clearly we paid to subsidize the family seats. Add insult to injury they were all very tall the women included my husband and I are hobbits. Note to directors: people who pay full price and LOVE the arts should be rewarded not family who goes because it’s a nice thing to do– if they are tall please put them in back!

Most of my Cal performance experiences have been magical, but I have to comment in particular about last Saturdays performance and some that have been similar. We went to see Oliver Mitykudzi and his band. They are fabulous, but before long audience members jumped up and began dancing in the aisles. The problem is that the seated audience members could no longer see anything other than dancers who were at best distracting. Zellerbach is not a club. It is a concert hall. Dancing, if at all, should be limited to the sides so that the view of the performers is not blocked.
There is much good to say about Cal performances. Diversity of programming, inclusion of shows for children, classical and seasonal fare. Thats all good. Consider taking Bart if you are coming from San Francisco. The walk through the redwoods is soothing as opposed to the frenetic parking dance. Ill be back, but not to hear a musical offering where people will spoil my view and overall experience.

Here are some of my monetary experiences with Cal Performances:
$ 12 for the Kirov Ballet
$ 0 for Bill Gates
$ 12.50 for Guangzhou Ballet
$ 12.50 for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company
$ 24 for front-​and-​center seats at Circus Oz
$ 20 for Altan
$ 12.50 for Yo-​Yo Ma and Silk Road Ensemble
$ 13 for Alvin Ailey
$ 7 for Michael Pollan (though i dont know why this is not free for students)
$ 20 for Afro-​Cuban All Stars
$ 25 for Jean-​Yves Thibaudet
etc, etc.
I don’t think I spent over $ 200 in my four years here (thanks to the Best BOGO Deals Ever) but I saw so many memorable, once-​in-​a-​lifetime performances. If you’re a college student, it would be a travesty to not take advantage of the CalPerf deals. (Students automatically pay half price, and more often than not, there are additional «buy one get one free» sales as the performance date draws near). Now that I’ve moved into a new occupation in life, I feel dismayed that I’m subjected to… *shudder* full price tickets. (Craning my neck to its full swing so that I can view a performance from the far left back row of the mezzanine? And paying $ 70 for the privilege? Is this what it means to grow up? No thanks. I’ll just stay home and watch the grainy footage on Youtube with a bucket of popcorn.)
Of course, cheap tickets go hand-​in-​hand with a cheap venue. But who’s complaining? When, during intermission, you’re suffused in the dance of a hundred twinkling lights glancing off the darkness of the glass windows, obscuring the street view of Bancroft, it doesn’t even feel like you’re in Berkeley anymore. (That is of course, ’til you leave Zellerbach, all glowing and elated from the performance, walk 10 blocks in the blistering cold to locate your car, and find a $ 50 parking ticket perched meanly on your car window.) Which ties directly into my next point: Parking is difficult. Be sure to get to Zellerbach early (and I mean something like 2 hours early) if you must drive. Walking is always the best option.
Tickets should also be booked far in advance of the performance date. Every Zellerbach performance is world class, but some are also immensely popular, and good seats sell out fast. If you know that David Sedaris or Yo-​Yo Ma is coming in April, book your tickets in September. It is far easier to do so at the ticket office than online (where you are charged a hefty convenience fee on top of the ironic inconvenience of not being sure which seats are available up to the minute.)
As an aside, you don’t have to be 5’6 to be able to see from the mezzanine. I am 5’3, and have enjoyed many a performance from the top floors. You will however, have to lean forward for the better parts. Following the rule of most venues, do not book side seats. You will spend the entire performance goosenecking for a view, but to no avail– the far sides of the stage are simply obscured for such unfortunates.
After all the diligent prep, all that’s left to do is enjoy! :) The yearly performance line-​ups are great, and I will be back for as long as I can pass for 21, or until Cal changes the format of the student ID cards… whichever comes first.

What a mystifying bundle of contradictions!
On one hand, as others have noted, the programming is excellent. I’m always hearing about great stuff coming to Zellerbach.
I just bought my first tickets, so I can’t comment personally on the facility yet. But I can’t believe that at least two people here have stated that there doesn’t seem to be a bad seat in the house, when their ticket map has to have a special code for seats in which you can’t see anything if you’re under 5’6″! (Tons of them in the mezzanine, don’t know about other levels.) Makes it easy to believe that there are indeed wings where the seats are basically perpendicular to the stage, as somebody else said.
But the real killer for me is the ticket-​purchasing process. I seriously just spent half an hour buying two tickets online.
There’s the ever-​present problem with buying tickets online, which is that you load the seat map, click on seats, and it tells you «oh, sorry, somebody else just grabbed those, try reloading.» I went through a couple rounds of that, but I don’t see any way they could get around it.
But then AFTER you pick your seats, it has you register. So somebody else can grab the seats while you’re setting up your account. I type crazy fast, and I still lost my seats.
Reload again. Find more seats. Holy crap, those ones cost ten dollars more apiece than the ones directly on the other side of the aisle?
Find more seats at the original price. Try to buy them. Get rejected repeatedly because the card I have with me is my wife’s card and it won’t let me change the billing name to my wife’s name. Or rather, it will let me change it, it just won’t save the change.
Create a new account under her name. Select the seats again. Some kind of error occurs in the system and it decides that the two seats it just let me select are already selected and can’t go in the cart. Give up and pick the ones that cost $ 10 more. Get to the checkout page — $ 240!!! Oh: it kept all four seats in the cart.
Remove those, enter the debit card information, and prepare to enjoy some tickets.
But wait: it won’t take the card info because even though it all matches up now, I didn’t put in a DONATION amount.
What donation? I’m buying tickets!
In fact, not only am I buying $ 55-​a-​seat tickets from our savings, I’m also paying the $ 9 convenience charge that the front page of the website warned me they add on for phone and online orders. Just so I won’t have to go down there in person this afternoon and risk finding out that (a) there are no seats left because I waited three hours to buy tickets for a big-​deal-​one-​time-​only event, or (b) they’re closed because it’s a holiday weekend.
In FACT, not ONLY am I paying $ 55 plus $ 55 plus $ 9, I’m ALSO paying $ 4 per TICKET for… it doesn’t even say. $ 9 is the «per order» fee and $ 4 per ticket is the «per ticket» fee, but for what? How many «processing» fees can there be? It’s not Ticketmaster, for crying out loud.
So I guess that maybe it just can’t have that field be blank. There’s no other indication of what is wrong with the donation field, other than a warning message that I have to put something in there.
So I enter 0, re-​enter all my card info, and submit it again.
And it pops up a red error message telling me that the minimum *donation* is $ 25 to cover all of their many processing costs.
Gaaaaah!!!
I should just give up, probably, but I’ve invested all this time in it and I know how excited my wife will be when I surprise her with what we’re going to go see. I don’t want to give up. I’ll squeeze the extra frigging $ 25 «donation» in. But I’m not sure I will ever, ever, ever go back to a Cal Performances event. Our $ 110 worth of tickets ended up costing $ 148 after all their fees!
And, evidently, with no guarantee that we’ll even be facing the stage.

maybe cal performances needs to start mandating a mandatory performance etiquette class before people ruin the performances here.
seriously, who TALKS during a PERFORMANCE?
and im not sure what was up with the stage hand who kept walking back and forth during the songs. it was quite distracting.

Walking toward the building, complete in concrete, it appears to be of typical state university architecture. Inside, I’m still not impressed. Certainly it’s not comparable to say Gammage Arts Center at AZ State or the beautiful theatres in San Francisco, but the decent bar/​café was slightly redeeming. What won me over was that even though I sat in the balcony where my nose could bleed, I had great views of the stage and the seats were comfortable.
My big «boo» was that the balcony was a bit stinky. It had that «I’m an old building musty scent».

Mark Morris Group, Yo-​Yo Ma, Kronos Quartet, Stefan Jakiuw, Russian National Symphony, Joshua Bell, Cypress String Quartet, Hilary Hahn, Miami Ballet, Bolshevik Ballet, Krystian Zimmerman, etc… need I say more. And the best thing is I usually get hooked up with comp tickets via the PR dept, so I could never say anything less than nice, but basically the types of performances brought on by CalPerf are top-​notch, and Bay Area should be lucky to call itself CP’s home.

The programming that Cal Performances offers is quite amazing. I’ve seen some spectacular shows over the years. However, sometimes they have shows that are just meh. It’s the diamonds in the rough that really pull their ratings up. I would have liked more international fare and fewer dance troupes. The ticket purchasing system also really needs to be updated for the 21^st century. They also need to do a better job of advertising discount tickets to students. If they just sold half of their empty seats, they could easily drop ticket prices for everyone.
Pro-​Tip: Students get 50% off… in case you didn’t bother reading my review and just wanted some pro-​tips… hahaha.

(This review is only on the programming by Cal Performances. Zellerbach Auditorium itself is quite underwhelming. It seems like a lot of other reviews here have more to do with Zellerbach than Cal Performances itself.)
The programming by Cal Performances offered me as much of if not more of an education as I got in the classrooms at Berkeley. I saw Mark Morris Dance here every year as a student amongst lots of other concerts and live performances. Over the years I had also seen Alvin Ailey, Herbie Hancock, Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, Yo Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, various other awesome live shows and David Sedaris if I hadn’t had to give up my tickets post-​tonsillectomy.
How I miss it so! I still get their catalogue and really should call to opt out of the mailing list, because every time I get it I just yearn to be a Cal student again (for the half-​price tix).

This place almost has it right. They sent out this holy-crap-it’s-so-freakin-hard-to-park-you-better-come-2-hours-early letter to us, so we hauled the gang over plenty early to get to see Circus Oz. The theater (no 3 rings, but I digress) is wide and fairly basic, but you feel close to the stage and the sound does well in the space. Circus Oz itself is so cool — acrobats are amazing, and make you want to run to the gym.
So, why 3 stars? One major problem: they do not have enough food. In fact they ran out before the show, and then again at intermission. WTH? And I mean they ran out — nada, nothin. Sorry sister, etc. So me and the kids just sat and starved, then ran home and grabbed a Korean food feast to tide us over until morning.
I will not be running back.

Same as PFA,
All drinks stay in the lobby,
Institutional.

Berkeley, the only time that I’m visiting this city is to watch CAL football games and Zellerbach Hall performance. Walking around campus, I was surprised that doesn’t reek of weed smell. ^_^
We were able to find event parking for $ 6 and it’s right across the campus. The parking guy even gave us $ 2.00 coupon for our next event.
I like Zellerbach Hall, the first time Mr & I were here we saw the modern day Cinderella by Diablo Ballet, It was pretty entertaining. And we got free appetizers and chocolate strawberry.
And yesterday, we truly enjoyed the Swedish Chamber Orchestra. Most of the crowds were foreigners, French and Swedish, pretty cool.
Between Beethoven and Schumann, I prefer Beethoven. My fav. is the Piano Concerto #1 in C Major. Op. 15. It was fantastic. They got us hook and we ended up getting 2 of their cd’s. (yeah. were suckers) ^_​^
The orchestra even gave 2 additional encore songs. And I was happy that Mr didn’t fell asleep & like it. Also we purchased our tix’s through Goldstar and as always, we have great orchestra seats for an affordable price. That you can’t beat!

When I was a little girl, my mom used to tell me stories about her training as a Philippine Folk Dancer. She trained at a school that fed directly into the Bayanihan Philippine National Dance Company. They are to the Philippines what the Kirov or Bolshoi Ballet is to Russia. Following in my mom’s footsteps, I also went to dance school. Neither of us ended up being full-​time professional dancers (she left the Philippines after being accepted into Bayanihan in the 60’s, and I got a nice ankle/​foot injury that ruled out my dance career). But being surrounded by music and dance as a kid shaped my attitude towards the arts and how important it is to always expose oneself to as much music, dance, theater, and visual art as possible — it changes the way you see the world.
Cal Performances is one of those organizations that makes amazing artists and their work accessible to thousands of people in the Bay Area. I have had the privilege of seeing the Gilberto Gil, Mark Morris, the Joffrey Ballet… and even the Bayanihan Dance Company here at Zellerbach. This season, they have Alvin Ailey, the Miami City Ballet, Yo-​Yo Ma, Arlo Guthrie, and SF Opera performing «The Little Prince». I think we’re extremely lucky to have the opportunity to see such awesome performances — it’s one of many reasons I am so glad to be living in a cultural epicenter like the Bay Area.

I love this performance series that’s put on by UC Berkeley. I go nuts practically every year, because they bring in seriously *amazing people*. Performances are usually in Zellerbach Hall or the Greek Theater on UC Berkeley’s campus.
This year, the highlights are: Sonny Rollins, Joshua Redman, American Ballet Theater and of course Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.
*does a little dance of anticipation*

I’ve been here for two performances. I enjoyed the first one immensely, and I didn’t care much for the other one. The seating needs some improvement. The wine selection was okay, but the alcohol made the second performance more bearable.

Good programming, some acoustic problems
Saw a taping of «Wait, wait… don’t tell me» and we missed A LOT. The place holds a lot of people and the sound system was just too damn quiet. My friends were in orchestra seats, we were in the front of the side balcony. Both spots were bad. You couldn’t hear any of the introductions of the panelists or guests, and some of the funniest jokes were just lost.
Seats on the upper wings aren’t facing the stage! You have to either sit side-​saddle or crane your neck the whole night. Boo to that.
Sonny Rollins concert was great. Good sound and better seats.