A History of the Great Star Theater

We Return To Chinatown

In my last post I talked about Mow Lee, now a Legacy San Francisco business that has operated continuously for 170 years, (and is also included in the walking tour). Among those who first arrived from the outside world in the mid-1800s were the earliest Chinese immigrants, a community that became large enough to establish itself as a place the newspapers were quickly calling “Little China”.

The First Theater on the Block — 1868

The ground at 626 Jackson had already hosted theater before the Great Star was a gleam in anyone’s eye, over 50 years before it would open. In 1868, a two-story brick building went up on the north side of Jackson Street between Dupont (now Grant) and Kearny, costing $40,000 and funded by local Chinese investors. It opened as the Royal Chinese Theatre, and it could hold roughly 1,200 people, with over 2,000 sometimes squeezed in on popular nights. The performers were opera singers, acrobats, and circus artists, entertaining the community with lavish productions.

By 1874, a rival, the New Chinese Theatre, had opened directly across the street, reportedly costing $50,000 and backed by a different faction of Chinatown’s merchant elite. The competition between the two houses reflected deeper rivalries within the community. Power and egos were at stake.

The Performances

The repertoire was overwhelmingly Cantonese opera, the dominant theatrical form of Guangdong province from which most immigrants came. The plays drew from a vast well: Cantonese opera has a repertoire of some 11,000 operas written over 700 years, emphasizing acrobats and martial artists alongside the sung dramas.

The specific plays documented on Jackson Street in this era were historical epics and warrior cycles: sweeping, multi-hour stories rooted in Chinese dynastic history. One title that period sources singled out as so popular it was considered obligatory for tourists was The Return of Sit Pin Quai, a warrior saga about a general returning from decades of war to find his wife remarried, drawn from the Tang dynasty.

Warring Factions

The two houses facing each other across Jackson Street were not simply commercial competitors. Rather, they were proxies for the Sam Yup and See Yup companies, rival clan associations within Chinatown’s Six Companies that controlled employment, housing, and credit for their members. Controlling a theater meant controlling one of the neighborhood’s most visible and profitable institutions. These ingrained rivalries only intensified after the New Chinese opened in 1874 and within a few years, riots between the factions had become a recurring pattern.

Picture it: two packed houses facing each other across Jackson Street on any given night of the week, each with 80–90 performers, charging 75 cents admission, and backed by a different clan network whose members would have felt the other house’s success as a direct economic and political threat. Loyalty to one theater or another wasn’t casual. Rather, it ran through family, employment, housing, and credit. When something went wrong inside or between the houses, they took it outside.

Riots of a Different Sort — 1877

In July 1877, a three-day riot swept through San Francisco, this one against Chinese immigrants, waged by the city’s majority Irish population. The economy was faltering and Chinese people were the scapegoats. Four people died, and more than $100,000 worth of property belonging to Chinese residents was destroyed. A mob stormed the nearby docks of the steamship lines that transported Chinese workers, then rampaged through Chinatown. Order was eventually restored but the anti-Chinese sentiment continued.

Out of the violence emerged a movement. Denis Kearney, an Irish immigrant freight hauler who proved to be a compelling street orator, had initially helped quell the riots, then reversed course entirely within months, taking control of the newly formed Workingmen’s Party of California. His rallying cry was four words: “The Chinese must go.” He warned that San Francisco would burn if conditions did not improve and called on his followers to arm themselves. The Workingmen’s Party went on to win almost every elected seat in San Francisco and successfully pushed anti-Chinese sentiment both locally and statewide. Soon enough, this hatred reached the halls of federal power with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

The Price of Exclusion — 1882

Eventually Chinatown’s theaters faded, not because of San Francisco’s standard mass inflection point, the 1906 earthquake and fire, but due to the Chinese Exclusion Act that was born from racist fear mongering. It was the first nationality- and race-based immigration restriction in American history making it nearly impossible for newcomers to arrive from China.

Opera performers occupied a legal gray zone that immigration officials were rarely inclined to interpret generously, and the few who were admitted operated under a surveillance system: permits that required renewal twice a year, bonds posted by the theaters, and government approval for transfers between houses. Troupes that disbanded couldn’t be refreshed. Stars couldn’t cross the Pacific without risking detention at Angel Island. Repertoires stagnated and companies dissolved.

Chinatown’s Rebirth by Fire — 1906

Then came the earthquake and fire. Both theaters, like almost all of Chinatown, were destroyed. The city’s Anglo establishment saw an opportunity to push the Chinese to the margins, proposing a relocation to the far edges of town. The community stood their ground and within years Chinatown had rebuilt itself on the same blocks and this time with an architectural layer reminiscent of their homeland across the Pacific Ocean, a visual calling card to the outside world, one we can still observe today. The theater tradition on Jackson Street was not finished, either. But without the ability to bring fresh troupes from China, rebuilding the cultural machinery was a different and harder problem than rebuilding the physical environment.

The Theaters’ Resurgence by Policy — 1921

In the 1910s and into the 1920s, Chinatown’s merchant class worked through cross-border joint ventures to revive some fluidity of movement for performers along the Pacific coast, stitching together a fragile network between San Francisco, Vancouver, and other cities. Then a court ruling in 1921 clarified that Chinese opera performers could qualify for entry under existing exemptions in the Exclusion laws. The pipeline, long choked, reopened, and Jackson Street would not wait long for its resurgence.

The Great China Theater Opens — 1925

On April 5, 1925, the building that would eventually become the Great Star Theater opened its doors at 636 Jackson Street as the Great China Theater. It had more than 500 seats, a traditional proscenium stage, and an atmosphere that would be familiar to anyone who watched Cantonese opera in the century prior: loud, social, and communal. Though performances could run five hours or more, patrons chatted, snacked, and read newspapers in their seats. The opera house was not a place for hushed reverence but a living room for a community that had endured in an unwelcoming place.

A Dragon is Born — 1940

In 1940, a projection booth was installed in the theater and films joined the program alongside opera. That same year, a Cantonese opera company from Hong Kong was performing on the Great China’s stage, led by a singer named Lee Hoi-chuen. His wife Grace was pregnant. On November 27, 1940, in the Year of the Dragon, in the hour of the Dragon, at a hospital just blocks from Jackson Street, Grace gave birth to a son named Lee Jun Fan. The world would come to know him as Bruce Lee.

The infant made his first screen appearance at three months old in a Cantonese film called Golden Gate Girl, shot partly in San Francisco. The family returned to Hong Kong shortly after. Decades later, after Bruce Lee had become a global phenomenon, his films would play regularly on the very screen where his father had sung opera.

Kung Fu, Shaw Brothers, and the Big Dark — 1960s to 1998

Through the 1950s and into the early 1960s, the Great China remained the last active Chinese opera house in the United States. But opera audiences were aging and waning, and the theater had to adapt. At some point around that time it was renamed the Great Star.

In 1970, the programming pivoted toward kung fu cinema. This turned out to be impeccable timing. Bruce Lee’s films were crossing from Hong Kong to American screens and causing a sensation. The Great Star was ready.

Later in that decade, Hong Kong entertainment mogul Run Run Shaw purchased the theater, one of just six American venues he acquired to distribute his Shaw Brothers productions in their original Cantonese and Mandarin. For nearly thirty years, the Great Star ran first-run Hong Kong action films at a pace of roughly one per week. Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, and Chow Yun-Fat all appeared on that screen for an audience of Chinatown residents who could watch them in their own language.

When Run Run Shaw retired and the operation wound down in the late 1990s, the theater went dark. By 1998–1999, the doors were closed. The building sat dormant for more than fifteen years.

Reopening and Reinvention — 2015 to the Present

In 2015, magician and performer Paul Nathan reopened the doors, and for a few years the Great Star ran an eclectic, eccentric program of cabaret, circus, film screenings, and burlesque, drawing new audiences into a building that felt like a time capsule.

The current chapter began in 2020–2021, when husband-and-wife team Roger Pincombe and Alice Chu, software engineers at Salesforce who had their first date at the theater in 2017, signed a ten-year lease and founded a nonprofit to restore and operate the venue. They even reupholstered all 400-plus red seats while preserving their original frames. The Great Star officially reopened in June 2021 with a ribbon-cutting, a lion dance, and fireworks. I personally attended a show a couple years ago and was taken by the classic Chinatown exterior, the immaculate condition of the theater, and the high quality of entertainment and stage production.

Today the theater maintains an eclectic calendar: Cantonese opera on special occasions, contemporary theater, film screenings, comedy, cabaret, cultural showcases, and up-and-coming local artists. It is, as Alice Chu described it, “a place where people can feel connected in real life.” It’s a space where you have to put down your phone and be present. It is also, as of this writing, the last remaining Chinese theater in any Chinatown in the United States.

Stand on the sidewalk at 636 Jackson Street and consider what the ground underneath has held. The Great Star Theater is neither a relic nor a tourist attraction dressed up as history. It is a living, breathing institution that has contributed to the city’s vibrancy for over 100 years. Please consider attending a performance or making a donation to keep that vibrancy going!

This is a reprint of my post on Substack.