Email Author Michael Feingold

Awards

• 2010 - The Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism/Columbia University

  Theater Reviews

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2008 Stories by Michael Feingold

• Martin McDonagh's The Cripple of Inishmaan Plays with Truth, But May Not Have One to Tell

  published December 31, 2008

  The Cripple of Inishmaan, currently being revived at the Atlantic Theater, is one of the plays by which Martin McDonagh became well... More >>

• A Holiday Trek through Shrek, Pal Joey, and ReWrite.

  published December 24, 2008

  It's Christmas week, so I asked my editor to give the photo space for this column to a small-scale downtown show by a new writer, instead of... More >>

• Prayer for My Enemy and Too Much Memory—Overpacked Suitcases Bursting in Transit

  published December 17, 2008

  It's clear now: The 21st century exists mainly to drive playwrights crazy. Playwriting, after all, involves finding the sense of things. A... More >>

• Hammerstein's Complete Lyrics Tells the Story of One Man's Struggle

  published December 10, 2008

  Between 1943 and 1959, the lyricist-librettist Oscar Hammerstein II (1895–1960) and his composer partner, Richard Rodgers... More >>

• Welcome to Irving Berlin's White Christmas

  published December 3, 2008

  Thinking about musicals, as we grit our collective teeth and start to face the nasty realities of the Bush Depression, seems a paradoxical... More >>

• Road Show, Dividing the Estate, and American Buffalo Carve Up Our National Turkeyhood

  published November 26, 2008

  As we prepare to carve the last Thanksgiving turkey of the thankless Bush era, the theater displays a trio of half-familiar works pondering... More >>

• Faust and Billy Elliot: Souls Adrift in Multimedia. Saturn Returns: No Soul at All.

  published November 19, 2008

  Billy Elliott gives his soul to the dance; Berlioz's Faust gives his to the Devil. Both heroes' stories, albeit simple, call for a lot of... More >>

• Peter Brook's Grand Inquisitor Brings Clarity; Shanley's Romantic Poetry Turns Prosy

  published November 5, 2008

  Neither the greatest nor the most exciting piece of theater you'll ever see, Peter Brook's production of The Grand Inquisitor is... More >>

• Guys Rule in Speed-the-Plow, Boys' Life, and The Fourposter

  published October 29, 2008

  "It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be." That's the moral humorist James Thurber attached to the update of "Little... More >>

• John Adams's Doctor Atomic at the Met Doesn't Radiate

  published October 22, 2008

  In his new autobiography, Hallelujah Junction, composer John Adams calls the 1944 creation of the atom bomb at Los Alamos "the American... More >>

• All My Sons Gets Gimmicky, To Be or Not to Be Goes Flat, and Kindness Rides the Downbeat

  published October 22, 2008

  Some people can't leave well enough alone. Simon McBurney, who staged the new Broadway production of Arthur Miller's 1947 drama All My... More >>

• Pig Iron Transforms the Great Russian in Chekhov Lizardbrain, the Roundabout Undoes Bolt, and 13 Breaks Out in Teen Clichés

  published October 15, 2008

  In our crazy world, the reasonable, in art, often makes far less sense than the outré. No surprise, then, that Pig Iron Theatre's... More >>

• Forbidden Broadway Looks deeper; The Seagull and 50 Words Look Shallow Next To It

  published October 8, 2008

  The latest edition of Forbidden Broadway may be its last. Gerard Alessandrini, creator and longtime chief perpetrator of the... More >>

• Equus, The Tempest, and The Glass Cage—Old Texts That Need Some Old-Style Theatrical Flair

  published October 1, 2008

  The cherries that grew in Chekhov's Cherry Orchard, the old butler Firs tells the younger generation, were formerly made into jam, but... More >>

• Tale of Two Cities, Three Changes, and Anger/Nation Try to Relive What Other Artists Once Did

  published September 23, 2008

  It's always the best and worst of times simultaneously. Human beings could make any time the best, but somehow they never do. Instead of... More >>

• What's That Smell and Enter Laughing Keep the Trivial Happily Alive

  published September 17, 2008

  I'm guilty; I confess. It was the end of summer, still the dog days weather-wise, and the list of theater openings cracked neatly into two... More >>

• Afrobeating the Dictators in Fela!

  published September 10, 2008

  The two most noticeable things about the new musical Fela!—and they may be all that a musical needs to succeed—are, first,... More >>

• A Plea for Theater Producers to Become Less Predictable

  published September 3, 2008

  They're previewing the new season again—just as if, in the world of global warming and the 24/7 media barrage of the Internet, such... More >>

• The Signature Theatre Revives The First Breeze of Summer

  published August 27, 2008

  Three decades, depending on your perspective, can be either a very short or an infinitely long time. Leslie Lee's play The First Breeze of... More >>

• Hair's Central Park Revival Still Shines With Youthful Energy; Buffalo Gal Skillfully Reworks Chekhov

  published August 12, 2008

  Hair is 40 years old. And I was already a practicing (though still unpaid) theater critic when it opened at the Public Theater in the... More >>

• [title of show]: From Off-Off to Enthusiastically Received Broadway Show

  published July 29, 2008

  The appeal of [title of show], the tiny Off-Off phenomenon that has now moved up, via Off-Broadway, to become an enthusiastically... More >>

• Sam Shepard and Christopher Durang Stage Competing Visions of Deathville, USA

  published July 23, 2008

  Americans do so much and say so much; they're so busy, so restless, so eager to try a new fashion and a new look. You'd think this manic... More >>

• Damn Yankees and The Bacchae: Devil Dogged

  published July 16, 2008

  The ancient Greek god Bacchus, or Dionysus, has a lot in common with Christianity's Devil. Notoriously tricky, sexually ambiguous, flamboyant,... More >>

• A Week in the Slow Lane

  published July 9, 2008

  It was Assignment Day, which, despite its sound, is not a Calvinist adumbration of the Last Judgment, but rather a weekly occurrence in the... More >>

• Macbeth 2008: Opposite Poles

  published July 2, 2008

  In a rueful quip that still rings true, the Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt once joked that tragedy, in the classical sense, was no... More >>