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.
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.
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