All day: Festival

Traditions of Northern African and Mediterranean Jews take center stage for the Skirball Cultural Center’s Sephardic Arts Festival, a day of music, food, arts and crafts. Other offerings: performances by the Stefani Valadez Ensemble, Isabelle Ganz and Za’atar; “Forty Years in the Wilderness,” an exhibition of contemporary Sephardic and Mizrahi artists; children’s hamsa crafts; a museum hunt for Sephardic artifacts; henna hand painting demonstrations, storytelling and more.

* Sephardic Arts Festival, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd. $8, free for museum members and children under 12 years. Advance ticket purchases recommended. (323) 660-8587 for tickets; (310) 440-4500 for information.

11 am: Blues

Born in Mississippi, raised in New Orleans and Pittsburgh and now based in Germany, the colorful Louisiana Red makes a rare U.S. appearance to highlight the sixth annual Big Time Blues Festival, one of the reliable summer events on the Southland music calendar.

* Big Time Blues Festival with Louisiana Red, Big Jay McNeely, Freddie Roulette, Monster Mike Welch, Carey Bell, the Bernie Pearl Blues Band and others. Gemmrig Park, Wardlow Road entrance to El Dorado Regional Park, Long Beach. $20 advance, $23 at gate (12 and under free with adult). (562) 493-8300.

Noon: Art

Best known for housing the greatest painting collection in town, Pasadena’s Norton Simon Museum is also home to the only complete collection of Edgar Degas modele bronzes cast from Degas’ original wax sculptures. With Degas’ birthday on Sunday serving as a reminder of the collection, art lovers can enjoy more than 100 works by the French artist, currently on display in one of the museum’s newly renovated galleries.

* The Norton Simon Museum, 411 W. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena. Museum hours: Today-Sunday, noon-6 p.m. Admission: adults, $4; students and seniors, $2; children under 12, free. (626) 449-6840.

7 pm: Music

Not just a string of Broadway tunes, “Voices of Broadway” features a cast of 10 singers and dancers in a story that follows the music from George M. Cohan, through Rodgers & Hammerstein, to Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber. In the Art Deco dinner theater setting of the club Moonlight, the show, directed by David Ruprecht and choreographed by Patti Colombo and Fred Tallaksen, should send you out the door singing!

* “Voices of Broadway,” Moonlight, 1370 Ventura Blvd, Sherman Oaks. $10. Also Sunday, July 26. (818) 788-2000.

11 am: Art

The first major one-person survey devoted to New York-based artist Christopher Wool will be mounted at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Wool gained notoriety in the 1980s for his black-and-white word and pattern paintings, many made with stencils and rollers. The all-over pattern paintings will be represented in the exhibition, along with stenciled word-text works and stamped images from the 1980s, and silk-screened, over-painted and spray-painted works from the 1990s.

* “Christopher Wool,” Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., downtown. Ends Oct. 18. Museum hours: Tuesday-Sunday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thursdays, 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Admission: Adults, $6; students and seniors, $4; children under 12, free. (213) 626-6222.

5 pm: Theater

Comic complications mount for a vain actor besieged by a stage-struck ingenue in Noel Coward’s witty 1939 play “Present Laughter,” with Robert Curtis Brown.

* “Present Laughter,” Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena. Sunday, 5 p.m. Regular schedule: Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 5 and 9 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends Aug. 23. $13.50-$42.50. (800) 233-3123.

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Freebie: Lisa Haley & the Zydecats, Point Fermin Park, San Pedro, 1 p.m. (213) 473-6471.