American actor Tovah Feldshuh who just wowed TV audiences with her thrilling role on AMC’s The Walking Dead will reprise her role as Golda Meir in Golda’s Balcony in June.
Feldshuh says the show mixes humour and history. “You can get an education about the 1973 Yom Kippur war, it’s phenomenal, it has humour, what Jewish person doesn’t love a good laugh, are you kidding me?” says Feldshuh.
Feldshuh was in Toronto recently, appearing at Fan Expo Canada’s Toronto Comicon, a smaller-scaled version of the annual mega-con held at the Metro Toronto Convention Center in September. Between greeting fans of her work on The Walking Dead and for her recent adjunct role as Naomi Bunch in Rachel Bloom and Aline Brosh McKenna’s award winning musical comedy Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Feldshuh signed autographs and posed for photos. Luckily, The CJN was able to snag a little one-on-one time with her as well.
Feldshuh played Deanna Monroe, the leader of the safe-haven Alexandria, in the popular TV show based in a zombie-overrun post-apocalyptic world for 12 episodes in seasons 5 and 6. Asked why the award-winning The Walking Dead has consistently been a top-rated show, Feldshuh said the show is more about the relationships between those that remain alive amidst the hordes of undead “walkers” (the survivors’ name for the zombies).
“We’re all going to die, we want to know how to live out the years in our body,” Feldshuh said.“How do we live in a sea of opposition and a sea of threat?”
Feldshuh drew parallels of the environment her character struggles in to maintain a sense of culture and decency to that of the concentration camps of World War II and any country where its people are threatened with genocide.
Feldshuh loves stories about time travel and said if offered a part in the period series Outlander, she would kill for the chance to get dressed up in costume from days gone by. “If you participate in projects that remind you of your childhood then you too can go back in time.”
In a sense Feldshuh continues to do just that each time she returns to a musical. “Just give me a great part and I’ll show up,” she told The CJN .
Parts have always been offered to her. The 62-year-old-actress, who has been thrilling audiences on stage, screen and television for over four decades said that “age is irrelevant.”
She said all directors want to know is if you can play the part. She joked, though that, “I may have to write my own series to give myself a starring role and one in which I can’t be killed off.”
After her Broadway debut alongside Canadian legend Christopher Plummer in the short-lived 1973 musical Cyrano, in 1975 Feldshuh secured the title role in Yentl both on and off Broadway.
She then became internationally recognized for her role as Helena Slomova in the 1978 mini-series Holocaust.
In 2003, Feldshuh starred in Golda’s Balcony delivering over 500 performances and winning the Drama Desk Award for outstanding solo performance. The show set a record as the longest-running one-woman play in Broadway history in 2005.
The Harold Green Jewish Theatre is bringing Golda’s Balcony to Toronto’s Greenwin Theater’s stage from June 7 to June 19.