Time to change costumes

An old-fashioned trunk festooned with a cardboard crown, a top hat, a feather boa, a frizzy wig and a spangly robe holds center stage at the Norton Simon Museum’s auditorium on a recent Sunday.

As a packed audience of children and parents looks on, an athletic man in jeans and yellow T-shirt jogs down the aisle and leaps on stage to take the spotlight.

“Our bellies aren’t the only things we need to feed,” announces Carl Weintraub, artistic director of the We Tell Stories theater-in-a-trunk troupe. “We need to feed our hearts -- and our minds.”

So begins another signature performance by one of Southern California’s oldest and most respected educational children’s theater companies. Led by Weintraub, with fellow cast members Diana Tanaka and Gerald James and several young audience volunteers, the rollicking show is vintage We Tell Stories: a celebration of literature as theater through colorful, comical retellings of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” e.e. cummings’ “The Man Who Said Why” and Lloyd Alexander’s “The King’s Fountain.”

The show will also be one of the last that Weintraub will helm. This month, Weintraub, 57, who founded We Tell Stories 23 years ago, is stepping down as artistic director.

“It won’t be the same without me, but that’s a good thing,” he says, waxing philosophical several days later, as he relaxes on the patio of the South Pasadena restaurant that he and his chef daughter and son-in-law opened a couple of years ago.

Under Weintraub’s leadership and through the Music Center’s Education Division, which brings professional artists into L.A.-area schools, We Tell Stories has reached more than 2 million schoolchildren, presenting hundreds of shows each year. With about 15 regular members, the company also conducts teacher workshops in its literature-to-plays process and performs for the general public in parks, libraries and theaters.

Weintraub “was a groundbreaker,” says Barbara Leonard, Music Center Education Division artistic director, who has worked with Weintraub since 1989. “He created a kind of storytelling landscape that really didn’t exist here before. As the architect of the storytelling performances, he makes connections between the stories and our lives, always on a level that kids can understand.”

Although Weintraub will continue to perform with the company on occasion and will remain on the executive board, he is passing the torch to Tanaka, 44, a longtime company member whose work Weintraub describes as “brilliant. She’s the right person.”

Writer-director-actor Tanaka has created several pieces for the company, among them Asian folk tales and a deeply felt play that combines Japanese and American folklore with the history of the Japanese in America.

Tanaka, reached by phone at the We Tell Stories L.A. headquarters, says she plans to “keep what Carl has brought to the company, turning literature and folk tales into plays, and maintaining that philosophy of working with children, educating them and creating an atmosphere of trust.”

Gale Cohen, who joined We Tell Stories as its first executive director in 2003, is also key to Weintraub’s ability to leave. Tanaka will not take on the administrative responsibilities, as did Weintraub, who has “handled everything through most of the organization’s history,” says Cohen, former managing director of L.A. Theatre Works.

“It wouldn’t happen if Diana had to do it all,” Tanaka says wryly.

We Tell Stories was created on a whim. Weintraub, a UCLA graduate who grew up in Los Angeles, worked as both a social worker and a mason before he cut his professional acting teeth doing Shakespeare at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre in the early 1970s.

His off-again, on-again work in television, where he has been typecast as a blue collar Italian leading man type -- despite his Russian Jewish, non-Italian heritage -- includes a recent guest star stint on “8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter” and nine months as mob boss Vincent Moroni on “Days of Our Lives.” “Cagney and Lacy” fans will remember him as Sharon Gless’ hot boyfriend.

In 1981, however, Weintraub was an underemployed actor looking for a gig. He heard that the Los Angeles Museum of Art needed a company to do a holiday production on short notice, so he pitched a children’s show that he had done several years before. He made up a company name on the spot, and pulled together some actor friends, who, like Weintraub, had studied theatrical improvisation at UCLA.

Audience reaction to the show inspired Weintraub to pursue this unexpected new endeavor. Serving as director, writer, actor, grant-writer, bookkeeper and even broom-pusher, he soon crafted the formula that defines We Tell Stories: scripted and improvised multiethnic plays inspired by curriculum-based classics of literature.

Human themes recognizable to children are paramount and the shows are highly portable, performed by one or more actors using deliberately ragtag costume and props as visual aids. Audience participation, on- or offstage, is at the heart of each show.

“The characters would discover the story as we went along,” Weintraub says, “and the children would discover the story with us. As silly as a show is, there’s a seriousness to it,” he adds. That seriousness extends to the treatment of child volunteers on stage.

“When we get somebody new in the company,” Weintraub says, “and we start rehearsing and we say, OK, you play the part of a child [from the audience], they’ll often come up and do silly stuff. And we say, no, wait a second, if you’re going to step in as a child you’ve got to be smarter than we are. Because children are smart and you have to respect them.”

Weintraub’s gift to children is “accessibility to literature,” says Judi Garratt, a long-time arts education advisor for the Los Angeles Unified School District. “He showed them what happens to literature when it comes to life, and creatively [We Tell Stories] is one of the strongest groups to involve students with actors in a meaningful way and show them that theater can be for everyone.”

Tanaka is brimming with new ideas to explore in the near future and in the years to come.

To expand the company’s reach, she is overseeing the development of a music-based show, “We Tell Opera,” and an upcoming fact-based piece called “Ballona Creek,” about the Ballona Wetlands. Tanaka envisions an expansion of the company’s teacher workshops and hopes to create shows not just for younger audiences but for junior and senior high school students.

“I’d love to do ‘The Canterbury Tales’ and ‘Metamorphosis,’ she says. “And I would love to do work to bring young people and old people together and to create pieces that have a little more direct relationship to social issues.”

Meanwhile, Weintraub, who is married to Ovation Award-winning actress Laurie O’Brien and is a grandfather of three and father of four, isn’t retiring.

He’s pursuing acting (“my first love,”) and will continue as a solo storyteller and part-time restaurateur. He’ll also put his literature-to-theater process in written form to support We Tell Stories’ new workshops for the LAUSD-mandated Open Court reading program curricula.

And if that’s not enough, he says, “maybe the universe will hear that I’m available for something.”