East Bay Arts Week: Live Music, Theater & More

Spring arrived this week with a full calendar of live performances spread across the East Bay, giving Bay Area audiences plenty of reasons to cross the bridge or stay local through the weekend.

Thursday night belongs to bluegrass fans willing to think outside the front porch. Denver quartet Magoo brings its debut album, What a Life, to the Cornerstone in Berkeley, where it shares the bill with the New Acoustic Collective. Magoo plays with genuine respect for the Appalachian roots of the tradition, but the band pushes the genre into improvisational territory that keeps things unpredictable. Mandolinist Courtlyn Bills is the centerpiece of the album’s title track, a reminder that bluegrass has always traveled well beyond the hills where it was born. The show starts at 8 p.m. at 2367 Shattuck Ave. Tickets are $24.

Friday opens with a lot of options, and theatergoers should pay attention to what’s beginning at Berkeley Rep. Playwright Ngozi Anyanwu’s The Monsters launches its preview run at the Peet’s Theatre, with the full run extending through May 3. The play follows BIG, a mixed martial arts fighter, as he reckons with the sudden reappearance of his little sister, LIL, after years of distance between them. The actors describe the play as a story about a Black man learning to sit with vulnerability, and about how difficult genuine healing turns out to be. They also say it’s funny. The cast worked with a female professional MMA fighter to build the physical language of the piece, then reached into their own lives to supply its emotional weight. Tickets run $33 to $81, with the show at 2025 Addison St. starting at 8 p.m.

Also Friday, AguaClara Flamenco brings an intimate experience to The Sound Room in Oakland. The company was founded and is led by Clara Rodriguez, who spent three years studying and performing in southern Spain before establishing both a school and a performing company in Oakland. AguaClara has appeared on major regional stages, but flamenco rewards proximity. At The Sound Room, audiences can feel the percussion of the footwork and watch the conversation between dancers and musicians play out in real time. Rodriguez performs as a bailaora with concentrated, coiled energy, and her company typically works with guitarist David McLean, whose command of the tradition runs both deep and wide. The show is at 7:30 p.m. at 3022 Broadway. Tickets are $32.

For those whose Friday nights require something louder, Bad Omens takes over Oakland Arena. The Richmond, Virginia band formed in 2015 as a metalcore act and has spent the years since pulling in influences from R&B, industrial, and pop production. Their 2022 record The Death of Peace of Mind marked the shift clearly, threading moody hooks and synth textures through the kind of breakdowns the band’s original fans still come for. More recently, their single “Specter” topped Billboard’s Mainstream Rock chart, a measure of how far the band’s audience has broadened. Frontman Noah Sebastian handles the range the music demands, moving from soft melodic passages to full-throated screaming without losing coherence. The result is a live show that works for the pit crowd and for listeners who found the band through streaming algorithms. Doors open at 7 p.m. at 7000 Coliseum Way.

From progressive bluegrass to new theater to Spanish dance to arena metal, the week covers a lot of ground in a short stretch of days. All four shows are worth your attention, but the opening of The Monsters at Berkeley Rep feels like the one with staying power. New work developed specifically at a theater’s creation center, then sent into the world with a cast that has clearly done the personal work the material requires, is exactly the kind of live performance that doesn’t translate to a screen. Get there before the preview run ends.