New musical honors SF’s former nexus of Black culture

By James Ambroff-Tahan

Local playwright Danny Duncan has dramatized the Fillmore district’s rich cultural past, and what it has become today, in “Every Saturday Night (A Harlem of the West Musical).” Pictured above: The Fillmore Heritage Center at 1300 Fillmore St. in San Francisco on Monday, Oct. 5, 2026. Craig Lee/The Examiner

The vibrant Black neighborhood that once existed in San Francisco’s Fillmore district is personal for Bay Area playwright Danny Duncan, because he grew up there.

Inspired by that experience, Duncan wrote a musical that dramatizes the Fillmore district’s rich cultural past and what it has become today in “Every Saturday Night (A Harlem of the West Musical).” Staged by the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Company, the opus will make its world premiere Oct. 10 through Nov. 1 at San Francisco’s Strand Theater.

“I was about 9 or 10 years old in our house on Pine Street and my father converted the basement into a rumpus room, aka nightclub, with a bar and benches,” Duncan said of the family’s house, which became a hub of Black late-night social life in the 1950s. “My mother was a waitress on Fillmore Street and, in her spare time, every Saturday night she had after-hours because, culturally, Black people did that in the big cities.”

The after-hours club at Duncan’s house included a kitchen that prepared food for the attendees. It was where he and his cousins worked as servers. Proceeds from the sale of beverages, including alcohol, and food defrayed the cost of running the enterprise.

“Mama had to pay the people who were waiting for her in the after-hours, and she would use that money for the house and paying her bills,” Duncan recalled. That’s why they used to call it a rent party. You were breaking the law by doing this, but it was something that was done all over America because nobody had the money to pay for a liquor license.”

Duncan, who is also a director, composer, choreographer and educator, remembers the elaborate, multi-day social rituals Black people would engage in every weekend in San Francisco.

“They would go to these after-hours clubs and stay until six in the morning, and then they would leave and go to Jack’s on Sutter Street to do jazz at sunrise,” Duncan said. “Then, they would go home, get dressed and take the children to church, and then come home, take a nap and make Sunday dinner. I don’t know how they did it, but they did.”

The adults who attended Duncan’s family after-hours club included people from all walks of life — waitresses, dentists, janitors, maids, butlers and longshoremen — who, he said, dressed to the nines for the occasion.

“Every Saturday night, they would transform themselves into duchesses and counts, the Black nobility,” Duncan said. “It was really something to see.”

Duncan, who said his musical is heavily inflected with jazz and bebop, recalled that even jazz luminaries of the era, like Sarah Vaughn, Ella Fitzgerald, Carmen McRae and Nat King Cole, showed up at the after-hours club. As welcome as these stars were there, the discriminatory practices of the era brought them to the neighborhood, as it limited their lodging options in The City.

“They couldn’t stay at the Fairmont, where they were appearing, so they had to stay at the Booker T. Washington Hotel at Ellis and Fillmore,” Duncan said of the landmark six-story establishment that opened in 1951 and was demolished in 1970. 

The hotel, along with other Black-owned businesses, centers of culture and a legendary jazz scene helped earn the Fillmore neighborhood the name “Harlem of the West.”

Bay Area playwright Michael Gene Sullivan, who co-wrote the musical’s story with Duncan, said he worked with him to tell the tale of this dynamic period for Black culture in San Francisco after World War II.

“All these Black families who moved here to be part of the war effort, to work in the factories and shipyards didn’t just disappear, as much as the city and government would have liked them to,” Sullivan said. “They stayed and created their own world inside San Francisco; their own culture, music, poetry and politics, and the activism that came out of that time in response to being shunned and pushed to the side.”

Local playwright Danny Duncan wrote a musical that dramatizes the 

Fillmore district’s rich cultural past and what it has become today in

 “Every Saturday Night (A Harlem of the West Musical)." Courtesy of SFBATCO

The story of the musical follows two Black boys, Young Donte (Jacob Henrei-Naffaa) in the 1950s, and Adaré (Trevor Miller) in the present day, who put human faces on the different eras of the Fillmore district.

“The teenager from the past is growing up really idolizing his mother, his primary parent; he loves her, respects her, but he also is trying to find a way to express himself in a way that won’t upset her,” Sullivan said. "She definitely has a plan for him, but like many teenagers, he’s trying to figure out who he is going to be, and how can he be that person without his mother feeling betrayed by him.”

Sullivan added that the modern teenager is also trying to find himself, but in a more outgoing way and with different energy.

“He’s almost fatally infected with trying to be cool; he’s got the hoodie, he’s playing games but he hasn’t found what way he’s going to express himself yet,” Sullivan said. “Anything he does, if it’s not ‘cool,’ then he shuts that down himself.”

Duncan recalled the very changed Fillmore landscape in which the modern teenager lives. The neighborhood — now heavily gentrified with few Black residents — in the early 1980s started facing the crack cocaine epidemic. Duncan’s mother, by then an old woman, decided to close the after-hours club.

“The crack epidemic came into the Black community and changed the dynamics of our culture,” Duncan said, noting that residents had to begin closing their front doors, for safety. “My mother was fortunate in that some of the old timers looked out for her, so if crack dealers came to the door, the old timers would turn them away.”

Duncan, who said the musical asks urgent questions about who gets to stay in San Francisco today, but provides no answers, has a bittersweet theme he would like audiences to consider.

“It’s like Camelot — there once was a place called Fillmore and it’s not here anymore,” Duncan said. “It’s very much like President Kennedy’s love of Camelot; it was something mystical and magical. We didn’t have to go downtown for anything in the Fillmore because we had it all — and now all of that is gone.”

First published at the San Fransisco Examiner, October 5, 2026