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Tovah Feldshuh as Golda Meir

The arrival of Tovah Feldshuh at 710 Main, the former Studio Arena Theatre, on May 8 is historic. The sublime actress, a four-time Tony Award nominee, has never performed in Buffalo before. She is coming to recreate her award-winning performance as Golda Meir, the Milwaukee schoolteacher who became prime minister of Israel in 1969. As the press materials remind us, “from the pogroms of Russia to the halls of the Knesset,” in so many ways, “Meir’s life encapsulates the dramatic story of Israel in the 20th Century.”

Shine

Matthew LaChiusa’s new play, Shine, now playing at the American Repertory Theater of WNY in the basement theater at the Episcopal Church of the Ascension (16 Linwood Avenue), is an engaging little potboiler of a show about small-town hypocrisy and corruption. The publicity describes the piece as being reminiscent of Our Town, but I’d say it’s far more Tracy Letts and Osage County than Thornton Wilder and Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire. There are dark secrets and deceptions lurking in the shadows of this Tennessee town, where right-wing politics and the manufacture of moonshine exist hand in hand.

Captain Jett Bettington and the Adventures on Planet Earth

And now for something entirely silly, it’s the cartoon antics of intergalactic bumbling Jett Bettington and his equally two-dimensional friends and adversaries. Jason Kaiser and Jacob Albarella have penned this parody of every space travelling adventure ever to hit the comic books. While a little goes for light years in this case, youth oriented Theater Jugend seems to have gauged its audience accurately, under the direction of Drew McCabe, with an evening devised purely to delight.



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