Beit Lessin, Cameri neck in neck in nominations for this year’s Israel Theater Prizes

The 2018 Israel Theater Prize Awards (ITP) will take place May 25 at 12:30 p.m. at Habima’s Rovina Hall with the Bet Lessin and Cameri theaters running neck and neck with 15 nominations each for the 12 major award categories, such as Play of the Year and Best Director/Actor/Actress.

This year’s ITP Life Achievement Award goes to the multi-talented Rivka Michaeli, and ITP is also celebrating Habima’s first 100 years and the Jerusalem Khan’s 50.

The play with the most nominations is Bet Lessin’s King of Dogs with seven, including Play of the Year, Best Playwrights (Yoav Shotan-Goshen, Irad Rubinstein), Director (also Rubinstein), Actor (Tom Hagi as Motke Ganef) and newcomer Offri Bitterman for Most Promising Actor as Burek the dog and as Yaron in the hilarious The Play that Goes Wrong, that’s also up for Best Comedy. Another newcomer with two nominations for Most Promising is Alaa Daka in We Don’t Duel Nowadays and Solika, both from the Beersheva Theater.

Also up for Best Play is the Cameri’s adaptation of David Grossman’s A Horse Goes into a Bar which has four more nominations, Best Actor (Dror Keren as the narrator Dovaleh G), Best Director and Supporting Actress (Aya Granit-Shva as Pitz), and in fitting tribute to a great theater person, the late Micha Loewensohn is nominated for Best Playwright.

The Cameri and Habima share the nomination for Three Sisters as Best Translated Play. Scenes from a Marriage is up for the same award. Other Best Actor/Actress nominations include Osnat Fishman for both Doing His Will and Love, Love, Love, Osnat Ben-Tzur for Scenes from a Marriage, Itai Tiran for the same play and Avi Kushnir for The Lie.

Sharing Best Director nominees are Gilad Kimchi for Horse and Shir Goldberg for We Don’t Duel, while Moti Lerner and Hadar Galron are among those getting the nod for Best Playwright for, severally, Doing His Will and The Secrets. Kimchi and Tiran .are up for Best Translator for Scenes together with Eli Bijaoui for 1984 and Assaf Tzippor for Good People.

Altogether there are 18 categories including video and choreography. Except for Gesher, which has been sulking on the sidelines since 2015, all the repertory theaters are participating.