It’s well past 10 p.m. on a Wednesday evening, and the halls of Valley Beth Shalom (VBS) are filled with the sounds of creativity. In one room of the Encino Conservative congregation, the Los Angeles Jewish Symphony winds down its rehearsal, packing up instruments as its musicians prepare, finally, to go home.
Renée Taylor’s been on a diet since World War II, and, no, that’s not a misprint. The octogenarian actress, known to many for her role as Fran Drescher’s mother, Sylvia Fine, on the popular sitcom “The Nanny,” and for playing characters like Eva Braun in the original 1967 film “The Producers,” has been watching her weight since the Roosevelt administration. In 70 years of counting calories, she’s heard about and tried nearly every fad diet on earth, and now she’s taken those experiences and turned them into a humorous one-woman show, “My Life on a Diet,” now work-shopping at the Working Stage Theater in West Hollywood.
Temple Israel of Hollywood (TIOH) lived up to its name on April 28 when it threw a free biblically themed matinee musical, “Let There Be Light,” on Lag B’Omer featuring numerous celebrities.
Anybody who has trod the boards knows that little blitz of stage fright that can flood through an actor when a member of the family is in the audience.
Divorce can be a devastating experience, but one can get through it, survive and even thrive, according to Amy Botwinick, co-author of “Divorce Party: The Musical,” currently running at the El Portal Theatre in North Hollywood.
With the revival of his musical about a Jewish cabaret comedian, writer-director Pavel Cerny feels he is giving the current generation of Los Angeles audiences a taste, in English, of the kind of Yiddish theater that flourished a century ago on Second Avenue in New York.
When Zubin Mehta takes the stage at the Disney Concert Hall on Oct. 30 to conduct the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra (IPO), most in the audience will know that they’re hearing a world-class orchestra. Very few will realize, however, that the IPO’s founding was integral to the origins of the modern Jewish state. That beginning not only inaugurated the arts in Israel, but it was coupled with the saving of untold numbers of Jews from the Holocaust. Now that story is being told on the big screen in director Josh Aronson’s “Orchestra of Exiles,” in first-run screenings at selected Laemmle theaters beginning Nov. 2.
If you take Israel out of the equation, there’s little in the Jewish world that gets people as riled up as the idea of intermarriage.
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.
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