Email Author Michael Feingold

Awards

• 2010 - The Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism/Columbia University

  Theater Reviews

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2009 Stories by Michael Feingold

• In Misalliance, Ernest in Love, and Orphans' Home Cycle, Part 2, It's Passion vs. Parents

  published December 29, 2009

  The decades before World War I, when the Industrial Revolution was just rolling into the century of unremitting technological change that... More >>

• The Decade's Best Theater

  published December 22, 2009

  I hate 10-best lists, and this column won't include one. Trying to list everything that was great in the New York theater over the past decade,... More >>

• A Little Night Music, Brief Encounter, So Help Me God! Receive Wobbly Contemporary Productions

  published December 15, 2009

  Sometimes I think theater lovers would be luckier if only we could forget the past and live, as apparently everyone else in America can,... More >>

• David Mamet's Race, Melissa James Gibson's This, Liv Ullmann and Cate Blanchett's Take On Streetcar

  published December 8, 2009

  In the theater, where your first impression is often the only one you get, matter takes second place to manner. Academics' dismay... More >>

• Fela! Gives a Pop Star the Once-Over, Dreamgirls and Girl Crazy Two-Time the Originals

  published December 1, 2009

  In some ways, the musical theater's history resembles the history of other forms of theater in reverse. At the start of the 20th century, the... More >>

• Foote's Orphans; Ruhl's Vibrator Play; Lonergan's Starry Messenger

  published November 24, 2009

  These days in New York, you can get a great deal of play for your money. Both uptown, where the memory of August: Osage County lingers,... More >>

• Ragtime and The Brother/Sister Plays Spin Black American History into Folk Tales

  published November 17, 2009

  Drawn from E.L. Doctorow's popular novel, the 1998 musical Ragtime, now getting its first New York revival (Neil Simon Theatre), deals... More >>

• Idiot Savant Travels to Foremania, What Once We Felt to Dystopia; The Understudy Goes Nowhere

  published November 10, 2009

  I've paid so many pleasurable visits to Richard Foreman's world that the number of people I know who've never been there always surprises me.... More >>

• Finian's Rainbow Retains Much Magic; Love Child Fields Frenzy; Redgrave Cries for Nightingale

  published November 3, 2009

  Mingled with the many raves for the new production of Finian's Rainbow (St. James Theatre) has come a curious counterpoint, on blogs and... More >>

• Cromer Darkens Simon's Memoirs; Marber Misdates Miss Julie; Ordinary Days are Just That

  published October 27, 2009

  Honesty, dignity, and Neil Simon. No, I know what you mean: I didn't expect to be writing those three terms in sequence any more than you... More >>

• The Cast Rescues Memphis, the Roundabout Smothers Birdie; Keen Co. Offers Tame Wilder

  published October 20, 2009

  The new musical Memphis (Shubert Theatre) supplies an object lesson in something every practitioner of musical theater should... More >>

• The Royal Family Diverts, Oleanna Provokes, Ain Gordon's Disaster Mirrors Ours

  published October 13, 2009

  The funny part, 233 years later, is that we still don't know who we are. We have a history; we have a cultural tradition, both low and high;... More >>

• Superior Donuts Peddles Stale Product; One of Mamet's Two Unrelated Plays Relates; Hamlet's Only Word Is Law

  published October 6, 2009

  " 'Twixt optimist and pessimist/The difference is quite droll./The optimist sees the doughnut;/The pessimist sees the hole." I suppose, by the... More >>

• A Steady Rain Displays Two Celebs; Tosca and Othello Display Directorial Muddle

  published September 29, 2009

  None of it matters much, of course. What the public wants is to see stars; the material chosen to show them off is of secondary importance. If... More >>

• The River Crosses Rivers: 14 One-Acts by Nonwhite Women, Two Gems

  published September 22, 2009

  Conceptually, the phenomenon seems gigantic; as experienced, it turns out to be pleasant and startlingly, almost joyously, slight. Ensemble... More >>

• The Irish Rarity Is Life Worth Living? Kids Modern Drama; Goldfarb's Retributionists Kid Themselves

  published September 15, 2009

  Mired in the gloom of our own time, we tend to forget the extent to which every time is the worst of times. We think of the great playwrights... More >>

• The Critic Gets a Callback

  published September 1, 2009

  My recent comments on criticism's tenuous position in our increasingly Web-woven world ("Theater Criticism Reconfigured," Voice, August... More >>

• Euripides' The Bacchae à la Akalaitis—Clean, Ultra-Modern, Unecstatic

  published August 25, 2009

  It's really all Winckelmann's fault. Here we sit, nearly a quarter-millennium after the 18th-century German scholar's death, and we still... More >>

• Cusi Cram's A Lifetime Burning Crams Stylish Fun into an Overfamiliar Tale

  published August 18, 2009

  A Lifetime Burning is far too grandiose a title for the 90 intermissionless minutes of Cusi Cram's new play, the opening production in... More >>

• Theater Criticism Reconfigured

  published August 11, 2009

  By the end of this paragraph, the producers of Burn the Floor will be sore at the Broadway League and the American Theatre Wing. When... More >>

• OH BOY!

  published August 4, 2009

  A concert-style pocket musical that means to spoof both boybands and Christian hypocrisy, but simultaneously seems to display its faith in both.... More >>

• Goldoni's Villeggiatura: Living on Credit, Circa 1762; Pushkin's Boris: Tyrants Then as Now

  published July 28, 2009

  Carlo Goldoni (1707–1793) was coming to the end of his reign as Venice's leading playwright when, in 1762, he wrote a set of three... More >>

• Kalkwerk's Pain Was Rewarding; The Tin Pan Alley Rag's Pleasures Aren't

  published July 22, 2009

  Konrad, the protagonist of Thomas Bernhard's 1970 novel Das Kalkwerk (The Lime Works), is struggling to write the definitive... More >>

• Les Éphémères Goes with Reality's Flow; Ivanov Twists Chekhov into Postmodern Shapes

  published July 15, 2009

  Time is a river. Events past and present glide down it, vanishing into the future we can't predict and surfacing unexpectedly out of memory.... More >>

• Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson Cooked Some Great Burghers For Knickerbocker Holiday

  published July 8, 2009

  The Dutch arrived here 400 years ago, and the last weekend in June, York Theatre Company commemorated the quadricentennial by presenting, in... More >>