Email Author Michael Feingold

Awards

• 2010 - The Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism/Columbia University

  Theater Reviews

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2006 Stories by Michael Feingold

• Class(y) Struggle

  published December 19, 2006

  Struggles are always dramatic. While the characters of Tom Stoppard's trilogy, The Coast of Utopia, struggle to evolve their ideas for society's... More >>

• Newies but Oldies

  published December 12, 2006

  What's a new musical? These days, it's hard to tell. The Brit-import megaliths, with their recycled tunes and Lit 101 stories, have been followed... More >>

• Quiet Centers

  published December 5, 2006

  The diner of August Wilson's 1992 Two Trains Running, set in the 1960s, is an easygoing home away from home for drifting souls with... More >>

• The Lonely Guy

  published November 28, 2006

  Stephen Sondheim's 1970 show Company, built around a string of short plays by George Furth, is the modern musical at its most... More >>

• Battle Fatigue

  published November 28, 2006

  The heroine of David Hare's The Vertical Hour is a former war correspondent turned political-science professor (Julianne Moore) who doesn't... More >>

• Steppes Toward Chaos

  published November 21, 2006

  In his posthumous novel Dead Souls, Nikolay Gogol famously compared Russia to a runaway troika, with its passengers huddled together in... More >>

• Unstrictly for Laughs

  published November 21, 2006

  Almost funnier than any but the biggest laughs in Paul Rudnick's Regrets Only is the desire of some daily reviewers to scold the play for not... More >>

• Urban Fairy Tales

  published November 14, 2006

  All theater tells fairy tales; even a documentary play is a sort of fairy tale, arranging reality to fit the way its audiences, or its makers,... More >>

• Omission Accomplished

  published November 7, 2006

  Entirely by coincidence, this week the East Village offered reviewers a look at two opposing ways to simplify theater by leaving out certain... More >>

• Inanity Defense

  published November 7, 2006

  Mimi LeDuck is one of the great mysteries of the theatrical universe. People of high professional standing are involved. The show boasts at... More >>

• Weirder People's Houses

  published October 31, 2006

  We think of classic drama as an open-air event, taking place on the steps of the palace, the street, the battlefield. Modern drama, in contrast,... More >>

• Tragic Kingdom

  published October 24, 2006

  The ancient Greeks knew that tragedy could be funny, but for the most part, they didn't see it as laugh-out-loud funny. For them, it was a state... More >>

• Positively Not 4th Street

  published October 24, 2006

  Hey, Mr. Broadway Producer dressed up like a tambourine man, I've just seen The Times They Are a-Changin' and I'd like to suggest a... More >>

• Unnecessary Evils

  published October 17, 2006

  Why do we go to the theater? Supposedly, it enriches our life, in any of half a dozen ways. We get thrills, we get meaning, we get laughs, we get... More >>

• Shard Experience

  published October 17, 2006

  Sumi (Dian Kobayashi), the heroine of Philip Kan Gotanda's Yohen, is an aspiring potter, and the play's title, which literally means... More >>

• Two If By Sea

  published October 10, 2006

  Although passionately insistent about his Irish identity, George Bernard Shaw lived in England for the bulk of his adult life, and Heartbreak... More >>

• Undoing the Math

  published October 10, 2006

  More miniature historical pageant than play, Tanya Barfield's Blue Door uses a crisis in the life of a black mathematics professor as a... More >>

• What They Did for Love (and Money)

  published October 3, 2006

  "Once you've seen everything," runs a lyric in the 1964 Rosalyn Drexler–Al Carmines musical Home Movies, "what is there to see?" The... More >>

• No Way Out

  published September 26, 2006

  Superficially, Eric Bogosian's subUrbia (1994) and St. John Ervine's John Ferguson (1915) couldn't be further apart. What can the... More >>

• Voices Carry

  published September 26, 2006

  Jay Johnson is famous for throwing his voice. In his 95-minute, one-person and multi-puppet Broadway show, Jay Johnson: The Two and Only,... More >>

• Defeats of Strength

  published September 19, 2006

  Plays about defeat have a reputation for discomfiting audiences; they tend not to get produced all that much except when, as now, a regime shows... More >>

• Painfully Employed

  published September 19, 2006

  If you were wondering what the future of sitcom might be after Fox buys up PBS, then you're among the minimal audience likely to find some... More >>

• Pittsburgh Living Blues

  published August 29, 2006

  Like bands of black on the windows of a house in mourning, respectability and death are the two ends of a spectrum in Seven Guitars, the... More >>

• Early RSVP

  published August 29, 2006

  They did not hire Paul Rudnick to write the screenplay for World Trade Center. If you don't know why that statement is funny, you... More >>

• A Streep Cart Named Desire

  published August 22, 2006

  Nobody ever said it would be easy. By common consent one of the greatest plays of the 20th century, Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her... More >>