There’s Mary Ellen Pleasant, anti-segregation crusader and self-made millionaire. There’s Sally Stanford, small town Oregonian turned madam of a lavish Nob Bill bordello who later reinvented herself as the mayor of Sausalito.
In “The Best Bad Things,” a modular musical about Pleasant, Stanford and other San Francisco badasses from the Barbary Coast era into the 1950s, the many names Stanford adopted throughout her checkered career get their own song, with the scrumptious lyric, “The best way to success is excess.”
The show, presented as part of Jackson Square Arts Day by the Wild Women Collaborative of San Francisco, celebrates the vim and vigor it took to survive, thrive and make history as a woman in a male-dominated world. Activists and gamblers, actors and entrepreneurs, the characters envisioned by Candy Forest,Natalie Greene,Lua Hadar, Allison Lovejoy andBeth Wilmurtencapsulate the mold-breaking spirit on which San Franciscans still pride themselves.