Golda Meir could have used some of ‘Golda’s Balcony’ riches

I had purposely avoided tours of the newly opened Smith Center for the Performing Arts because I wanted to concentrate on how the productions played within the center. My first peek Sunday was the Jewish Repertory Theatre’s “Golda’s Balcony.” It’s about poverty, motherhood, war, despair. Those themes seemed at odds with the luxurious building (much as I appreciate it) and the jewels and tight designer dresses on the middle-age women with the bleach-blond hair.

If the money at that premiere performance could have gone to Golda Meir’s cause, Israel would have been assured a Yom Kippur War victory from day one. …

Also, apologies are in order to the Jewish Repertory Theatre for my chastising them last week for not providing program notes for “Golda’s Balcony.”

I argued that it’s important for both audience and crew to have the information about who did what in a production. Turns out the notes — with all the major credits — were inside a booklet that featured multiple shows. I wish the booklets had been distributed to every audience member as they entered the theater — and that “Golda’s Balcony” had its own little credit sheet — but it’s likely these things will be ironed out. Next time I’ll read before I write. …

The long-awaited live broadcast of Donny Osmond’s singalong version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” at selected theaters March 26 and April 4 was postponed because of Osmond’s well-chronicled need for vocal rest. William Goldsmith’s “She Stoops to Conquer,” a great comedy of manners that we will rarely see around these parts, went off without a hitch March 29. The calendar alternates wildly, so you might want to consider a weekly stop at FathomEvents.com. “Joseph” is expected to soon be rescheduled. …

Finally, there was a humorous edit in last week’s column.

In a piece bemoaning the loss of College of Southern Nevada’s former producer Joe Hammond, I wrote, “It wasn’t so long ago that the college’s play offerings made the institution appear to be little more than a second-rate community theater. When Hammond took over as producer, he vowed to do quality works that were not easy to find elsewhere in town. He succeeded. He gave us the likes of the violent and funny “Killer Joe” (by the celebrated Tracy Letts), the satirically evil “Why Torture is Wrong and the People Who Love Them” (by Broadway’s darling Christopher Durang) and a series of early plays by Eugene O’Neill, which showed America’s greatest playwright before he got his act together.”

The Internet got it right, but the newspaper read, “It wasn’t so long ago that the college’s play offerings made the institution satirically evil .” I’ve got a lot of beefs with your theater program CSN, but no, I don’t think you’re satirically evil.

Anthony Del Valle can be reached at vegastheaterchat @aol.com. You can write him c/o Las Vegas Review-Journal, P.O. Box 70, Las Vegas NV 89125.