Jessica Koslow

The story of “Three Coconuts,” West Coast Jewish Theatre’s dramedy now playing at Miles Memorial Playhouse, is a true tale mined from Howard Teichman’s life.

“It’s the story of my mother when she divorced my father, she decided to put an ad in the Jewish newspaper to audition men to become my father,” Teichman, who wrote and directed the play with Steven G. Simon, said. “She would make dinners for them, and this one particular night when she did this, we all got busted, and we were all thrown in jail.”

This is West Coast Jewish Theatre’s first production at Miles Memorial Playhouse since the pandemic. The nonprofit performed at the Pico Playhouse from 2005 to 2016 and then relocated to Miles Memorial Playhouse from 2017 to 2020. . . .

Read the entire article at The Argonaut.

In 2018, the city of Santa Monica ordered assessments on all the buildings on Airport Avenue in the Santa Monica Municipal Airport. One of those buildings housed Ruskin Group Theatre, founded by John Ruskin in 2001.

Ruskin was having a good run at 3000 Airport Avenue. When he first launched his acting school, Anthony Hopkins taught the masterclass. Its productions have starred such celebrities as Rob Morrow (“Northern Exposure”) and Ray Abruzzo from “The Sopranos.”

“I knew that those assessments would lead to the demolition of many of the buildings on Airport Avenue,” explained Michael Myers, producing artistic director and Ruskin’s managing director since 2002. “When the assessments came back, lo and behold, it was going to take a lot of money to bring 3000 Airport Avenue to code.” Myers and his team contemplated the situation before them, but every scenario in their current location seemed too costly. They were also hoping to remain in Santa Monica, a city where Myers was born and raised and Ruskin had grown to love ever since he relocated from New York and rented an apartment at The Shores on Neilson Way. . . .

Read the entire article at The Argonaut.

Laura Vega never saw Fernando Valenzuela, the legendary Mexican Major League Baseball pitcher, play for the Los Angeles Dodgers. At the time, the team did outreach at local high schools, and Vega was lucky enough to have the players sign her glove.

“I am 62,” said Vega, of Pasadena. “I remember when this giant came to the Dodgers. I was a huge Dodgers fan (and of players) Steve Garvey, Ron Cey and Tommy Lasorda.”

Vega is now a professional actress who will return to CASA 0101 in “Fernandomania,” a collection of 10-minute world-premiere plays focusing on the MLB legend’s effect on the city. “Fernandomania” is part of CASA 0101 Theater’s 25th anniversary season, presented by founding member Josefina López and Emmanuel Deleage, executive director. . . .

Read the entire article at Pasadena Weekly.

When the Latino Theater Company chose Rickérby Hinds as one of its 10 playwrights commissioned to write works on Latinidad, or its Circle of Imaginistas, the professor of theater, film and digital production at UC Riverside was stuck. He started one play, then stopped. He started another, but the words did not flow.

“One day it just hit me,” Hinds explained. “What if I wrote a play about trying to write a play, which is something I vowed I would never do: writing about writing.”

What he did write, “The Last Play by Rickérby Hinds,” opens on Saturday, April 26, at The Los Angeles Theatre Center and runs through Sunday, May 25, with six previews from Thursday, April 17, through Friday, April 25. . . .

Read the entire article at LA Downtown News.

The cast of “Invisible Cities” rehearses at Union Station. Photo courtesy of The Industry.

A tall, slim dancer commands the attention of everyone in his immediate area in the entrance of downtown LA’s Union Station. He’s rehearsing for Invisible Cities, an experimental opera collaboration between Yuval Sharon’s The Industry and Benjamin Millepied’s L.A. Dance Project, which premieres Saturday at the stroke of 7 pm.

Falling, sliding, lunging and flailing, the dancer executes large movements in a designated small space. Suddenly, another dancer gallops briskly by the first company member, hands flapping wildly, scratching his head and neck, keeping to his own rhythm. But he doesn’t stop. He heads out the main doors and into the night because, in fact, he is not a cast member. In retrospect, he was one of the eccentrics who frequent Union Station, one of the many characters who will make this innovative production even more interesting and challenging.

“From the beginning of the concept [of Invisible Cities], I wanted the piece to feel like an invisible layer of what is already among the reality of Union Station,” says Sharon, director of Invisible Cities and artistic director of The Industry, an LA-based nonprofit that aims to expand the traditional definition of opera and explore new paradigms for interdisciplinary collaboration. “The idea that there is a really eclectic, wild mix of personalities, characters, costumes, activities — that’s a major theme of the performance.”

Union Station is gorgeous to look at …

Read full article at LA Stage Times.

Photo by Enci Box

“Joe’s a physical, full-of-movement guy,” says Lizbeth Hasse, co-writer of In My Corner, as she joins Joe Orrach for an interview in the lobby of the Odyssey Theatre over Labor Day weekend.

Orrach is a boxer, tap dancer, storyteller, former Teatro ZinZanni performer and star of the one-man play In My Corner, which opens Friday. It’s a father-son redemptive tale, according to Hasse, based on the writings in Orrach’s journal. Together, Hasse and Orrach wrote the script, which caught the eye of Jeremiah Chechik (Benny & Joon, Diabolique, The Avengers (1998), plenty of recent TV episodes), who signed on to direct. Three musicians play Latin jazz as Orrach taps, punches, skips and shares his story of a Puerto Rican-Italian kid from the Bronx who finds his voice through the arts.

“I wrote a journal years ago to try to figure out what was going on because I wasn’t in a good place,” Orrach says. “It was very cathartic. I wrote for four days nonstop, and then let it go.”

Years later, Orrach asked Hasse, a San Francisco-based entertainment lawyer whom he describes as his “lady,” to take a look. He thought he saw the makings of a story, and Hasse agreed.

“The journal was stream of consciousness,” Hasse says. “So we talked about it. And I started to see the arc of the story. I wrote scenes. I’d read them. He’d do movement. We figured out where the story was better expressed in movement than words. …

Read full article at LA Stage Times

Jonny Rodgers, Dylan Kenin and Erica Rice in “Miss Julie(n).” Photo by Ashley West Leonard.

When Ken Roht first saw Mike Figgis’ 1999 film Miss Julie, an idea was born. As a gay man, Roht (best known for his 99cent holiday shows) thought he could completely relate to Julie. He knew at once he wanted to embody her on stage. Ten years later, although Roht has handed the title role to Jonny Rodgers, Ken Roht’s Miss Julie(n) opens at MorYork Gallery this week for 12 performances through March 10.

More than a few artists have shared Roht’s impulse to recreate Miss Julie. August Strindberg’s 1888 play popped up in 1971 on television with Helen Mirren, again as the Figgis film starring Saffron Burrows, and in 2007 at LA’s Fountain Theatre, this time set in 1964 Mississippi with an interracial twist. One month from now the Geffen Playhouse presents Neil LaBute’s adaptation directed by Jo Bonney, and it was recently reported that Liv Ullmann will direct a new film version starring Jessica Chastain and Colin Farrell.

Roht’s piece features a cast of 12, and song and dance.He maintains that his is a responsible adaptation of the play. “What works is that we just changed the gender and sexuality of the lead character,” Roht says. “To me that’s an interesting experiment that works out. It’s not meant to be some abstraction so I could make a gay play.”

Miss Julie(n) follows Julien, a lonely gay man who feels oppressed by his father. …

Read full article at LA Stage Times

Stevee Mills and Jeremy Davies in Circus Oz’s “From the Ground Up.” Photo by Rob Blackburn

As Mike Finch explains his role as artistic director of Circus Oz over the phone from Tacoma, Wash., loud noises erupt in the background. The Australian company features a 12-piece live band, and Finch is at sound check.

This week, Circus Oz lands in Los Angeles for a four-day run of its From the Ground Up at Royce Hall, as part of the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA (CAP UCLA) season. It’s the troupe’s first time in LA since the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival — when the company appeared across the UCLA campus at the smaller Freud Playhouse. Reviewing Oz in that 1984 run, Sylvie Drake ended her glowing LA Times notice by proposing a transfer to a larger LA venue:  “If we had any sense at all, we should move them into the Ahmanson after Evita closes and keep them there all summer.”

Finch was equally impressed when he first saw Oz a few years later, when he was 21. “It completely blew me away,” Finch says. He dreamed of selling programs or being a stagehand for the company. “It put together all of the pieces for me, because it was funny, irreverent, musical, spectacular, political.”

Read full article at LA Stage Times