The draw of Andy Summers’ one-person theater show isn’t nostalgia—it’s the way he fuses sound, vision, and memory into a live, cinematic experience that keeps shifting under your feet.
“I’ve set this whole thing up, you know, visually and obviously, in terms of guitar playing and sound. I’m trying to make the two connect,” Summers says. “Technically, the show has about eight or nine pieces of sequence with photography and me playing guitar… In a sense, I’m doing exactly what they did in the early 20th century, when a pianist would play to a movie.”
The photographs—many from his travels, some from Japan—don’t just appear; they morph and slide into each other, a visual counterpart to the layered textures that defined Summers’ guitar language. “People seem to pay pretty rapt attention,” he adds. “We heat it up a bit… I play a couple of Police songs at the end of the show. It’s the climax!”
If you’re picturing an arena-sized production, think smaller—by design. “There are so many beautiful little theaters… usually 500 or 600 seats, and that suits this particular show,” Summers explains. “You have to look at a screen; if you were doing it in an arena, it wouldn’t work. It’s very intimate.”
That intimacy also lets Summers talk freely. After a handful of pre-pandemic performances and several post-shutdown tours, he says the production has smoothed out, the cues are tight, and the onstage conversation has grown more spontaneous. “I’ve gotten a lot more confident with it,” he says. “I talk quite a lot… I’ve gotten more settled down with just being the front man and just talking… it’s evolving and being a work in progress, if you like.”
And despite some press kits suggesting otherwise, you won’t see him reading fiction on this run. “I don’t read from Fretted and Moaning [a collection of short stories] in this show,” he notes. “For me, I put the guitar down and walk out with a mic… I have rough ideas of what I’m going to talk about, but I don’t rehearse it. It always comes off.”
The “work in progress” ethos has shaped Summers’ recent releases, too. Last year, he paired his photography book, A Series of Glances, with the digital EP Vertiginous Canyons, music conceived to complement his imagery. “The photography comes first,” he says. In the studio, he lays images into a grid, moves them around, knowing which piece of music he’s going to play, and which set of images will be up. Then comes reality: “We go out into the world and perform it, and I realize I need to make about 19 changes to the first version… I’m always ready to make some adjustments.”
Side paths keep opening. The recent audiophile reissue of Summers’ early-80s collaborations with Robert Fripp revealed a surprise cache. “I had all the tapes… There are actually a lot of tracks that we didn’t use,” he recalls. “The biggest shock for me was when the guys started sending me the tracks… I thought, oh my God, that’s pretty good… We ended up with about ten extra tracks, almost like a third album.” He’s pleased with the package and remembers the project’s unlikely chart moment: “The first one got into the Billboard top 50—for a record like that, it’s extraordinary.”
And the Police? The legacy rolls on, if mostly at arm’s length. “When they put out these last box sets, I’m not in my
house laboring over the sequence,” he says with a laugh. “We let the record company handle it… We do get sent tracks and approve or disapprove, but generally we agree… They always sell so well; they keep churning them out.” One thing he’d change? “They always want to show the three blonde heads,” he says. “Why can’t they do something a little more out there?”
Revisiting that era in the studio still sparks fresh connections. Bassist Christian McBride recently asked Summers to reassess the darkly witty Police closer “Murder by Numbers.” “He said he wanted to do that on his latest album… They send me the tracks, and I play the guitar,” Summers says. “It’s a nice little connection between us, especially after all this time… I was pleased because I wrote that song.”
A novelist’s thread is also woven into the schedule. Summers has completed a full-length story set in Japan and is exploring what might come next. “People are very cautious about committing… but I’ve written a story—a full-length novel, actually, set in Japan—and I’m hoping for the best,” he says. “I’m going to Japan in about three weeks to meet. We’ll see.”
Through all of it—the small theaters, the photochemical fades, the post-Police collaborations—the signal is unmistakable: Summers doesn’t silo his arts. “I think… whatever the medium, you’re looking to connect with something that you feel somewhere,” he says. “You couldn’t be in it if you were doing something to try and look good. It just doesn’t work that way.”
Which is why An Evening with Andy Summers lands with such cohesion. It’s built for a room where you can hear harmonics bloom and see the grain of a street photograph dissolve into another city. It’s also built for a crowd that wants to listen to the guitarist who helped reshape pop harmony step inside his own archive, then step out again. At the Presidio, Summers says, that arc will close this leg of the tour: “I’m pleased we’re ending in San Francisco… I should be just about ready to do it, and then the tour ends.”
What should fans listen for that ties it all together? Summers doesn’t hesitate. “I’m the thing that ties it all together—my sensibility, my guitar playing, the way I play the guitar,” he says. “They get all of that.”
Ticket Info
Presented by Presidio Theatre & Guitar Player, An Evening with Andy Summers arrives at the Presidio Theatre on Saturday, September 27, 2025, at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are priced $49–$99. The venue is located at 99 Moraga Avenue, San Francisco, and doors typically open an hour before showtime. Get tickets here: https://www.presidiotheatre.org/show-details/an-evening-with-andy-summers.
Listen to the interview on Spotify:
Photo credits: Top and left – Mo Summers. Right – Dennis Mukai
