LOCAL
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HEATHER KNIGHT
Reopening Chinatown's Great Star Theater is a gamble for this couple. It could pay off for them and community
Photo of Heather Knight
Heather Knight
June 9, 2021
Updated: June 9, 2021 4 a.m.
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Great Star Theater in San Francisco, Calif., on Monday, June 7, 2021. Roger and Alice Pincombe have taken over the nearly abandoned 96-year-old theater in Chinatown and restored it. Photos by Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle
San Francisco’s small businesses suffered greatly over the past 15 months. So did nonprofits. So did performing arts venues. So did movie theaters. So did Chinatown.
So it might seem like the worst possible time to start a new venture that combines all of those into one hugely risky gamble, but Alice Chu and Roger Pincombe are betting big. And here’s hoping their efforts pay off.
This month, the married couple, who live in an apartment in Twin Peaks and work as software engineers for Salesforce, will reopen the Great Star Theater on Jackson Street after signing a 10-year lease. They’ve formed a nonprofit called, fittingly, the Great Star Theater, and have sunk $150,000 of their own money and donations into the massive project of restoring the theater to its former glory.
They’ll have a soft opening this weekend and plan to hold an official launch complete with lion dancers in the street on June 18.
“We’re excited to open and put people back to work and start that community back up,” Pincombe, 33, said of giving the city another venue for live arts groups that lost nearly all their revenue during the pandemic. “There’s always something up in the air, but it always comes together so beautifully.”
Pincombe’s face lights up when he talks about the theater, and his goal is to make it his full-time work. Chu, 31, who moved from China’s Henan province 10 years ago to obtain her master’s degree in computer science at the University of Southern California, seems to be the practical one and said she’s definitely staying at Salesforce.
“Slow down! Slow down!” she kept telling her husband as he chattered excitedly while giving me a tour of the theater the other day. “She isn’t done writing!”
They showed off the new red upholstery on the theater’s 410 seats after the droppings from birds nesting overhead proved disastrous to the previous seat covers. They showed off lovely bathrooms with touchless faucets and art and calligraphy made in China by Chu’s parents hanging on the walls.
They showed off a huge, used movie screen they installed. Eighty-five new fire sprinklers they added since the old ones were 50 years out-of-date in terms of code compliance. A traditional Chinese altar where actors can pray before going on stage. A downstairs lounge for actors that’s decorated with a mural painted by Chu.
“We’re honoring the history of the theater, but also making it cleaner and more comfortable,” Pincombe said. “If you could have seen what this place looked like in November when we took over. There have been a lot of last-minute headaches.”
The theater opened in 1925 as a venue for Chinese opera singers, and Pincombe said Bruce Lee spent time there as a kid watching his dad, Lee Hoi-chuen, a Cantonese opera singer, perform.
But those wondrous years are long gone — and the theater had become dirty, derelict and abandoned. Sporadic movies, plays and operas showed over the years, but attendance required being OK with revolting bathrooms with no hot water, thick layers of dust and general grunginess.
The lowest point came in 2015 when the body of a 31-year-old woman was found inside the theater, and police arrested the man who was leasing the space at the time on suspicion of homicide. Prosecutors did not file charges against him due to lack of evidence.
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Paul Nathan (left) and John Anaya prepare for the June 10th opening of Devil in the Deck at Great Star Theater in San Francisco, Calif., on Monday, June 7, 2021. Roger and Alice Pincombe have taken over the nearly abandoned 96-year-old theater in Chinatown and restored it.Scott Strazzante / The Chronicle
So nothing about the theater exactly screamed opportunity and excitement. Except to Chu and Pincombe.
They attended a circus-themed show there on their first date after meeting on a Chinese dating app and reached out to its landlord to ask about managing the theater. She finally got back to them last summer, and they settled on lease terms in November. The couple declined to provide the details.
They’re hoping their newly beautiful theater will draw crowds to the neighborhood who will go out to eat and drink after the shows — a mix of movies, plays, variety shows, circuses and others. Chinatown’s small businesses suffered during the pandemic not only from strict shelter-in-place rules, but also racism fueled by the former president’s insistence on calling the coronavirus the “Chinese virus” and even “kung flu.”
The recent spate of violence against Asian people, particularly elders, has also negatively impacted Chinatown and its residents’ feelings of safely walking around their own neighborhood.
Chu said she’s reached out to many local organizations to introduce herself and her husband and see how the couple and their new theater can help.
Amy Lee, 29, is the founder of Revive SF Chinatown, a group that aims to bring young people back to Chinatown, holds weekly events to support neighborhood businesses and organizes larger events. Lee grew up near Chinatown and recently moved back to her childhood home.
“Pre-pandemic, the businesses were surviving, but the atmosphere was obviously different,” she said. “It wasn’t as happy compared to when I was growing up. People don’t really come and stay — they come and do their errands and then go home to the Richmond and Sunset.”
She said she’s “very excited” about the reopening of the Great Star Theater and already has tickets to one of its first shows.
“Having a space that provides entertainment and something that brings joy is very important,” she said.
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An altar backstage at Great Star Theater in San Francisco, Calif., on Monday, June 7, 2021. Roger and Alice Pincombe have taken over the nearly abandoned 96-year-old theater in Chinatown and restored it.Scott Strazzante/The Chronicle
Jeff Lee, vice president of the 88-year-old Wah Ying Club, a Chinatown social group, said he remembers being the only one of his mother’s six kids growing up in Chinatown who would begrudgingly attend Chinese operas with her at the Great Star.
“The condition was after the opera, she’d take me out for a midnight snack,” he said with a laugh.
He said his group and the wider neighborhood is excited about the reopening.
