Beersheba Theater season kicks off with ‘La Cage aux Folles’

By HELEN KAYE
LA CAGE AUX FOLLES with Muli Shulman and Amir Kriaf (photo credit: ILAN BASOR)
LA CAGE AUX FOLLES with Muli Shulman and Amir Kriaf
(photo credit: ILAN BASOR)
The Beersheba Theater starts off its 2018-19 season with a surefire crowd pleaser, the hysterically funny La Cage aux Folles, or as it’s known in English, The Birdcage. The 1973 play by Jean Poiret relates what happens when the son of a gay couple tells his father he’s going to get married – worse, he’s bringing his straitlaced future in-laws to dinner.
If last season’s offerings were about love, this season is built around a society, especially those more or less on the edge of it, said artistic director Rafi Niv at Monday’s press conference.
There will be five new productions in the main theater that also include Martyna Majok’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize winning Cost of Living, a scorching drama about limitations of all kinds; Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale about baseless jealousy, shipwrecks, bears and more, to be directed by the iconoclastic Gadi Roll; and two new Israeli plays: The Heir Apparent by Shahar Pinkas is directed by Shir Goldberg and stars Avi Uriah as King David in the twilight of his life, in a volatile political thriller on the succession. Hanna Azulay Hasfari stars in her own play, Dina, about a middle-aged, unmarried woman who discovers that secrets have their price – sometimes high.
The new space, Theater Three, will host two new productions: The Wasp, a tense drama by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, in which a bully and her victim meet again after 20 years; and What Does the Bird Care if the Gigolo’s from the Congo, a medley of songs and sketches by Hanoch Levin.