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Jackie Hoffman gets her Scrooge on in ‘Chanukah Charol’

Bach! Chumbug! Jackie Hoffman has got the guttural “ch” sound down like nobody’s business.
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November 22, 2016

Bach! Chumbug!

Jackie Hoffman has got the guttural “ch” sound down like nobody’s business. And she’ll be showcasing her throat-clearing Hebrew in her upcoming one-woman show “A Chanukah Charol” on Dec. 7 at the Skirball Cultural Center.

An actress, singer, comedian and self-proclaimed “self-loathing Jew” (all in good jest), Hoffman doesn’t tiptoe around political correctness. “Gays and Jews are my best audiences,” she said. Quick-witted, outrageously funny and brashly honest, Hoffman’s face has graced many Playbill covers (including those for “The Addams Family,” “Hairspray” and, most recently, “On the Town”). Her Wikipedia entry says she’s “known for her facially contorting expressions and one-woman shows of Jewish-themed original songs and monologues.” 

Which brings us to her upcoming show at the Skirball, a pseudo-autobiographical production inspired by Patrick Stewart’s “A Christmas Carol” that she co-wrote with the show’s director, Michael Schiralli, and performed off-Broadway. In the show, which will be making its Los Angeles premiere, Hoffman impersonates Stewart and plays a slew of ragtag characters, including Yiddish theater starlet Molly Picon.

Hoffman is a bicoastal member of the tribe who hops between Los Angeles TV shoots and Manhattan, where her 95-year-old mother resides. Living in the two cities has given Hoffman some insight into the differences between East Coast and West Coast Jews, which she’s simplified into one sentence: “L.A. Jews have avocado on the menu.” 

“I rarely go to shul when I’m home in New York, but when I’m in Los Angeles, there are no atheists in foxholes and L.A. is my foxhole,” Hoffman said. So, in the proverbial foxhole she calls a second home, Hoffman regularly attends services at different synagogues. Her first week in Los Angeles, she attended Shabbat services at Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills. 

Hoffman currently is taping a new FX show called “Feud,” which dramatizes a notoriously catty rivalry between Joan Crawford (played by Jessica Lange) and Bette Davis (Susan Sarandon) on the set of their 1962 film, “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?”

When she’s not on a TV set, Hoffman said, you might find her browsing the aisles at Ralphs (she loves big supermarket chains, with Ralphs topping her list) or doing the very un-L.A. act of walking to a destination (“Mostly, I try to avoid being run over”).

During a phone interview for this story, Hoffman was in New York celebrating her mother’s birthday. “It’s a Jewish interview, nothing can be easy,” she said, kicking-off the conversation with a brief rant about her “farkakteh headphones.”

With her “mellow Orthodox” upbringing and nine years of yeshiva, how did Hoffman become such a ham? “I was blessed with a really funny family, and they’re all extreme characters, so it just fed me,” she said. “And I was imitating people since as early as I can remember.” At 21, she scored her first paid gig as Plain Jane Wayne, the Terror of the Plains, in “Shootout at the Trailblazer Saloon,” a six-times-a-day show at Hersheypark. (“It’s a theme park near the Hershey factory in Pennsylvania, and the lamps were shaped like Hershey’s Kisses,” she recalled.) Since that fateful gig, she has expanded her credentials, from performing with Second City in Chicago to playing roles in the movies “Birdman” and “Kissing Jessica Stein.” 

In 2011, Hoffman decided she wanted to try something new. “I normally do many more cabaret shows with a lot of salty banter and, I think, very funny songs. But I wanted to do something that was more like a play with me playing all the characters,” she said. Mentored by the late Roger Rees (with whom she performed in the Broadway adaptation of “The Addams Family”), she entered unprecedented territory: “I’d never done anything autobiographical before.” 

Hoffman has vivid memories of sitting around the TV with her family, watching the 1951 version of “A Christmas Carol” with Alastair Sim. “It was the only Christian-related thing my family would do,” she said of their annual tradition. It’s no surprise, then, that Hoffman would turn to Dickens for inspiration when creating her one-woman show. 

“If there ever was a female Jewish Scrooge, you’re talking to it right now,” she said. “So there is no better character to be visited by three ghosts.”

Of course, the ghosts have been tailored to fit Hoffman’s rendition of the holiday classic, including a gay Broadway dancer and Shelley Winters.

With minimal props — only lights, a chair and Hoffman onstage — the performance is painfully intimate. Granted, it’s comedic and satirical, but the underlying themes delve deeper, forcing Hoffman to contemplate and ultimately choose between two conflicting factors: fame or family. What makes this production so timely and relevant to Hoffman is her current situation —  working and living part-time in Los Angeles, away from her mother in New York. “I had to leave her at 95 years old to do ‘Feud,’ ” she said, referring to it as a “tremendous conflict.” 

“Whoever’s lucky to be there [at the Skirball],” she quipped, “will see me have a complete emotional breakdown.”

Jackie Hoffman will perform her one-woman show, “A Chanukah Charol,” Dec. 7 at the Skirball Cultural Center. For more information,

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