Magic Theatre and Campo Santo present Grateful Fridays in the theater in Building D, Third Floor at Fort Mason Center For Arts and Culture. Grateful Fridays is a new musical series culminating in Magic’s new Fall 2025 play, Jerry Garcia In The Lower Mission by Richard Montoya of Culture Clash. The first event in the series happens on Friday, April 25, 2025, at 8:00 p.m.

Musical guests include David Gans, Alex Jordan, Effie Zilch, Kyle Alden, and Rory McNamara, bringing stripped-down communion and soulful re-interpretations with the Grateful Dead’s deep cuts. In dialogue, join Magic Theatre Artistic Director Sean San José and the play’s directors as they share a glimpse into the dream and design of the production — and what it means that Campo Santo, a theater rooted in radical love and cultural memory, has been entrusted with telling this story.

Step into a new tradition with the first-ever Grateful Fridays — a monthly celebration of the Grateful Dead’s enduring musical legacy, held the final Friday of every month at Magic Theatre in San Francisco. This inaugural evening kicks off a season of remembrance, resurrection, and radiant song in preparation for Jerry Garcia In The Lower Mission — coming to the Magic Theatre, October – November 2025.

Created by Culture Clash’s Richard Montoya, and co-directed by Rotimi Agbabiaka and Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe, Jerry Garcia In The Lower Mission is a visionary new musical chronicling Jerry’s childhood in San Francisco’s Excelsior District and imagining a celestial reunion with his parents — returning to the origin to reckon with the soul. With the heartfelt blessing of Trixie Garcia, Jerry’s daughter, this is not merely a tribute, but a calling: a chance to honor the boy behind the icon, and the mother and father who shaped him.

The soundtrack resurrects the beloved spirit songs of 1960s San Francisco — a lost, working-class era filled with union halls, dive bars, and Fillmore families — when music was sacrament and survival. At Grateful Fridays, Magic opens the doors to that time, not in nostalgia, but in a search for what still rings true.

This is not just a concert. It’s the lighting of a lamp in San Francisco’s mythic dark — a communion of song and spirit, shadow and shine.