As the play “The English Bride” begins, the audience is immediately thrust into a near cataclysm with a burst of police sirens and an announcement over a loudspeaker: “Attention! Attention! All passengers on El Al flight 1540 to Dusseldorf and Tel Aviv. The flight is canceled.”
An old Jewish man walks into a restaurant, walks up to the maitre d’ and says: “Pardon me, how do you prepare your chicken?” The maitre d’ says, “We tell ’em right up front they ain’t gonna make it.”
The son of a Jewish, slave-owning family from the South confronts two of his former slaves just as the Civil War ends in the play “The Whipping Man,” which played at the West Coast Jewish Theatre in Los Angeles, has been produced by theater companies around the country and is now being presented by the Pasadena Playhouse.
The superlatives fall liberally and un-begrudgingly out of Carl Reiner’s mouth in praise of a musical he claims reaches new comic heights.
It was the talk of the literary and legal worlds in the early 1980s.
The Ramon C. Cortines School of Visual and Performing Arts in downtown Los Angeles — which is mostly Latino, Black and Asian — might seem an odd place to find a cultural experience with Jewish overtones.
The coming-out odyssey of a former Israeli serviceman and the life-altering relationship he shared with Gil, his now-deceased gay lover, form the crux of the new solo play “The Book of Oded: Chapter 2,” currently running at the Working Stage Theater.
The healing power of theater underlies the collaboration between the Cornerstone Theater Company and rehabilitation centers around the city, which resulted in the company’s production of “Bliss Point,” a play about addiction and recovery, through June 22 at the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles.
In Encino, seven actors move across the scuffed hardwood floor of a gymnasium. It’s after 10 p.m. on a Tuesday night, and this is only the third rehearsal for the play “Tefillah or Prayer: A Transition.”
Springtime, and the music is changing at the Ahmanson.
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