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With the Ritz — which opens with Johnny Cash tribute band Cash’d Out on Saturday and the Reverend Horton Heat on Sunday — the SoFA District’s bumpy renaissance has received a major boost. The corner theater has been vacant for more than seven years since Angels, the last club to occupy it, shut its doors. Mayor Sam Liccardo said having the corner reactivated with live music was a sign that downtown San Jose is becoming a more vibrant part of the Bay Area entertainment scene. “Today, we can officially proclaim that SoFA is back,” he said at a VIP preview party Wednesday night.

Like a haunted ballet christmas house, the building has had many lives, holding different memories for every generation that walked through the glass doors next to its old fashioned streetfront box office, In the 1940s and ’50s, it was the Gay, one of many mainstream movie theaters that dotted downtown, But by the 1970s, with downtown in decline, it found new life of a sort as the X-rated Pussycat theater, That’s what it was when Fil Maresca entered the picture and relaunched it as F/X, one of several live music venues that were part of the block’s transformation during the 1980s and ’90s into a burgeoning arts district called the South First Street Area, or SoFA..

“The first time I stood on this stage was 25 years ago,” said Maresca, a longtime downtown club promoter, who remembers the rows of filthy theater seats that were pulled out to create a dance floor. “It’s amazing to be back in this building.”. F/X lasted for nearly six years before closing in 1995. O’Brien — a South San Jose native who went to Gunderson High in the early ’80s — was a regular and worked there, too, hosting shows in the venue’s lobby area bar when the main auditorium was dark. “My vision of Corey at F/X was him parked on a stool with a cigarette in the front bar,” said Maresca, who gifted O’Brien with an old “Please, No Smoking the Auditorium” sign he saved from the venue’s Pussycat days.

Following F/X, a new club called the Usuals was popular there for a few years, followed in quick succession by Spy, Pete Escovedo’s Latin Jazz Club and, finally, ballet christmas Angels, For O’Brien, closing the popular Blank Club and moving to a bigger venue on South First Street was a logical next step, It became a reality for O’Brien after several friends came on board as part of the ownership group and the San Jose Downtown Association offered its support, The Ritz makes it much easier for bands to load and unload equipment and provides back stage space and a green room that the compact Blank Club could never provide, The sound system has been upgraded dramatically, and everything inside has been given a new polish — Spartan black decor, accented by red lighting, a color scheme reminiscent of the Blank..

At the preview party for friends and family, people walked around sharing memories, telling stories about their favorite shows, or the spot where they met the people they would one day marry, and sometimes where they got into a fight. San Jose City Councilman Raul Peralez remembers being there when it was Angels and Pete Escovedo’s. “Before that I wasn’t old enough to go to the clubs,” said the former police officer, one of several city officials and downtown business owners who came by to check it out.

Lanford Wilson’s gentle romantic comedy gets a graceful revival at Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre Company, Tenderly directed by Joy Carlin, this two-character valentine launches the company’s Talley ballet christmas Trilogy, which continues with “Fifth of July” in a main-stage production and staged readings of “Talley and Son.”, The heartfelt trilogy begins on a touching note with a 97-minute tale of two people making one last stab at romance before youth has fled entirely, It’s a small and intimate play about the science of courtship that’s perfectly framed by the confines of the 49-seat venue known as Harry’s UpStage..

It is 1944 in the tiny town of Lebanon, Missouri, and Sally (Lauren English) has hit 30, the age when women of her social circle have already married and settled down. She’s practically an eccentric old maid, destined to teach Sunday school and hold her tongue. Destiny seems to have departed without her. That’s part of why this feisty Midwestern gal resists the advances of Matt (Rolf Saxon) a Jewish accountant from St. Louis who is already past 40. They are two lost souls who clearly spark for each other, but Sally is content to leave their summer flirtation behind, while Matt demands more. She seems resolved to turn him out of her family’s crumbling Victorian boathouse, but he resists. He holds his ground.

“You can chase me away, or you can put on a pretty dress,” he wryly surmises, “But you can’t put on a pretty dress to come down here and chase me away.”, It’s that sort of chutzpah that eventually wears down Sally’s reserve, her fear of ever hoping for something good to blossom amid her wilted dreams, Shiny new longings begin to sprout from deep within the rundown gazebo at the edge of the river, Jon Tracy’s set and his dreamy lighting scheme mark the most effective use of the new Harry’s UpStage theater space yet, thrusting the awkward lovers right into ballet christmas our laps..

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