7:30pmPop MusicBorn in Australia and based in...

7:30pm

Pop Music

Born in Australia and based in Nashville, Jamie O’Neal has been working to break away from the pack after the country-chart success of the singles “There Is No Arizona” and “When I Think About Angels.” O’Neal, who was named best new female artist at the Academy of Country Music Awards, has played multi-act bills around the Southland, but she makes her local debut as a headliner on the Sunset Strip tonight.

Jamie O’Neal, House of Blues, 8430 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. 7:30 p.m. $18. (323) 848-5100.

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2pm

Theater

“Copenhagen,” Michael Frayn’s Tony Award-winning drama about the race to split the atom during World WarII, is one of a small wave of plays and movies drawing attention for sophisticated treatments of science and mathematics. The fact-based but speculative play probes the scientific questions, the interpersonal dynamics and the historical repercussions of one of the war’s enigmas: the 1941 visit by Werner Heisenberg, head of Nazi Germany’s nuclear research program, to his half-Jewish Danish mentor and fellow Nobel laureate in physics, Niels Bohr. This is a different production from the “Copenhagen” with Len Cariou and Mariette Hartley that ends its run this weekend at the Wilshire Theatre in Los Angeles.

“Copenhagen,” Laguna Playhouse, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. Previews today at 2 and 8 p.m. and Friday at 8 p.m. Opens Saturday. Regular performances are Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. $25 to $49. Ends Feb. 3. (949) 497-2787.

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8pm

Jazz

Some say Oscar Brown Jr. is difficult to categorize--part jazz singer, part poet, part entertainer and part songwriter. All of those aspects will be at the Jazz Bakery with top L.A. pianist Billy Childs through Sunday.

Oscar Brown Jr. & Billy Childs, the Jazz Bakery, 3233 Helms Ave., Culver City. 8 and 9:30 p.m. Thursday-Sunday. $20 to $22. (310) 271-9039.

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8pm

Movies

He who lives by the sword, dies by the yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever. What’s really cool about Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 classic “The Seven Samurai” is its relationship to the American western--both those that came before and those after. Though set in feudal Japan, Kurosawa borrowed heavily from John Ford, setting his epic in vast untamed expanses and populating his tale with the good, the bad and those who patrol the median. Seven samurai--including actors Toshira Mifune and Takashi Shimura--are petitioned by a village of impoverished farmers to protect them from the yearly ravages of the roaming brigands. A small war follows, in which only a handful survive. Furious and savagely exciting, it’s one of the screen’s superlative adventure epics.

“Seven Samurai,” New Beverly Cinema, 7165 Beverly Blvd., L.A. 8 p.m. $3 to $6. (323) 938-4038.

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9:30pm

Pop Music

The venerable Grand Avenue nightclub has been spruced up and programmed with a salsa beat every Thursday night. With renovated appointments and new sound and lights, the downtown room hosts Yari More tonight, with Freddie Crespo, Octavio Figueroa and Joe Arroyo due in coming weeks.

Yari More y Su Orquesta, with DJ Carlitos, Grand Avenue, 1024 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. 9:30 p.m. $7 before 9 p.m., $10 after 9 p.m. (213) 747-0999.