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Theater

‘Oy’ bring the past to the present at Culver City’s Actors’ Gang

For Academy Award-winning actor Tim Robbins, who founded Actors’ Gang and serves as its artistic director, presenting plays that are relevant to our time is paramount for the company. To that end, the Culver City-based theater’s current offering is the U.S. premiere of “Oy,” a tale set in 1995 of two German-Jewish sisters, Selma (Mary Eileen O’Donnell), age 89, and Jenny (Jeanette Horn), age 86, who have accepted an invitation to visit Osnabrück, the town in Hanover, Germany, where they were raised and which they left as Hitler was consolidating his power. Because the sisters are among the dwindling number of survivors with recollections of the Nazi era, the town’s mayor has invited them to come to bear witness to that history for the younger generation.

Loss, survival — cue the music

“When I told my son I was going to write a musical about the Holocaust,” playwright and Holocaust survivor Lucy Deutsch recalled, “he raised both arms and screamed, ‘Mother, how can you do that? Those two words don’t belong together!’

Music transcends darkest hours in ‘Willesden Lane’

Malka and Abraham Jura faced a Solomonic decision in late 1938, as the Nazis were tightening the vise on the Jews of Vienna. The couple hoped to send their three daughters to safety but were able to wrangle only one place on the Kindertransport ferrying a limited number of Jewish children to London. After much agonizing, the Juras decided to give the spot to 14-year-old Lisa, a remarkable piano prodigy.

At home, on stage and screen

Somewhere in Creede, Colo., en route to a mountain cabin in Santa Fe, N.M., Mandy Patinkin is above 10,000 feet. “If I sound stupid, it’s because there’s no oxygen up here,” he says.

In bed with Roy Cohn

The notorious attorney Roy Cohn (Barry Pearl), onetime counsel for Sen. Joseph McCarthy, deals with his demons in Joan Beber’s surreal play, “Hunger: In Bed With Roy Cohn,” currently running at the Odyssey Theatre. Beber, who is having her first production in Los Angeles at age 78, places Cohn in a state of limbo, a purgatory of the mind, where he is nurtured by a sexy maid (Presciliana Esparolini) and haunted by significant figures from his past, including his mother, Dora (Cheryl David); hotel heir G. David Schine (Tom Galup); Ronald Reagan (David Sessions); Barbara Walters (Liza de Weerd), who remained a loyal friend because Cohn had once helped her father; and convicted spy Julius Rosenberg (Jon Levenson).

Jewish theater: From Yiddish to multiculturalism

What defines “Jewish” theater? David Chack, a playwright and president of the Association for Jewish Theatre, promises that question will be among the subjects examined at the association’s upcoming conference, Feb. 5-8 at the Dortort Center for Creativity in the Arts at Hillel at UCLA.

Theater as deception

“The theatre has the power to both reveal the truth and hide the truth,” according to Spanish playwright Juan Mayorga, whose internationally acclaimed work, “Way to Heaven,” is currently being presented by the Odyssey Theatre.

Elfman circles back to the circus

Danny Elfman is a huge success, but he doesn\’t want you to know it. Humility is a hard thing to hang your hat on when you\’ve accumulated four Academy Award nominations, taken home a Grammy, and an Emmy and written some of the most popular theme music of all time, notably for “The Simpsons” and his many collaboration with filmmaker Tim Burton. But that doesn\’t stop Elfman from trying.

Two Yiddishe Boys and a Bissel of Berlin

About a dozen years ago, actor Mike Burstyn auditioned in New York for the role of Al Jolson in the national touring company of the musical “Jolson.” While waiting for a decision, he flew home to Los Angeles and on landing at LAX decided to stop by the nearby Hillside Memorial Park and Mortuary and visit the grave of the legendary jazz singer.

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