The fear of flying inspired playwright Bekah Brunstetter’s “Be A Good Little Widow,” but the topics that propel this strange and oddly uninvolving one-act dramedy are grief, loss and getting on with life.

“Widow” is in its West Coast premiere through June 9 at The Old Globe’s Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre. Hal Brooks directs.

I was (and am) a pretty good speller, but I never won any spelling bees. Neither will most of the contestants in “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” the musical that pokes gentle fun at that great old grammar-school institution.

“Spelling Bee,” running through June 8 at OnStage Playhouse, is a paean to being different, full of recognizable types. The kids who couldn’t spell would call them “losers” because, let’s face it, they are not like the others.

Billy Elliot just wants to dance.

Billy is the 11-year-old son of coal miner Jackie (Rich Hebert) and brother of Tony (Cullen R. Titmas), another miner. Mum (Molly Garner) has died, though she turns up from time to time in fantasy sequences, but Billy’s spunky Grandma (Patti Perkins) is still around, and has one of the best songs.

The place is Durham County; the time, 1984, the year British prime minister Margaret Thatcher decided to break the union much the way her friend Ronald Reagan had broken the U.S. air traffic controllers’ union three years earlier.

Brown and green sandwiches that have sat for two weeks in a fridge with no electricity may not be your idea of party fare, but then you’re not Oscar, Neil Simon’s favorite slob, to whom food is much less important than the cards you play.

Oscar (Matt Thompson) is a New York sportswriter who hosts a weekly poker game in his disheveled apartment for buddies Murray (Bernard X. Kopsho), Speed (John Nutten), Vinnie (Cris O’Bryon) and Roy (Albert Park).