392 stories from The Wicked Stage
photo 2012 by Stephen P. Marsh
In this second installment of my talk with Stew and Heidi about rock and theater (part 1 here), we get deeper into the divide between the two, and talk about …
If you made a list of the singer/songwriters whose work pointed them toward the theater, let alone made them seem likely to have a Broadway show built around them, let's be honest, would Ste…
My recent post on why I depart from the chorus of hallelujahs for Matilda led the paper of record to ask me to write about my (relatively) lonely position (though I see that Feingold ha…
A passage from We Are Proud To Present a Presentation etc. in which one actor coaxes another into the right emotion for a scene.
I don't usually get the chance, or at least I seldom take…
A human moment at last (photo by Joan Marcus)
It's hard to wear a smile and a sneer at the same time, but Matilda the Musical sure does try. This new British import is both day-glo bright a…
NOTE: Next week I'll see Bruce Norris' Clybourne Park for the third time, after taking it in on Broadway and at Woolly Mammoth, when I visit Baltimore's CENTERSTAGE, where they're doing the …
At the heart of religion are mystery and terror; peace, joy, gratitude, and forgiveness, it seems to me, are byproducts of, responses to, our encounters with the divine, which is maybe just …
This is why I love the theater, or keep coming back to it, in any case: It holds my attention like nothing else. It may be my age, and it most certainly has to do with the multi-screen age w…
I got a lot of response to Sunday's post on the future of arts journalism"encouraging words, actionable ideas, quibbles. I should acknowledge the response of Bitter Lemons, the site that gav…
When I opine and argue about the state of criticism and arts journalism, as I have often in this space and which I had occasion to do last week on HowlRound, I realize I speak from a po…
in Light My Fire at Teatr.doc
This time last year, thanks to the generosity of the Center for International Theatre Development, I was in Moscow to cover the Golden Mask festival, a sort …
The Lisps
I've been in bands, and I've written musicals, but apart from my actor/singer/musician adaptation of The Devil and Tom Walker a few years back, I've never really put the two …
Among the many things critics can be counted on to have strong opinions about is their own reason for being. Indeed, the why-criticism-matters essay seems as evergreen a genre as the don't-l…
Pippin at the ART (photo by Michael J. Lutch)
I'd never met Diane Paulus until my recent interview regarding her new revival of Pippin for Time Out NY. We chatted on a rehearsal break at t…
I was raised by Germans and Eastern Europeans but discovered a few years back, when I tracked down my birth mother, that in fact my blood runs Dutch and Norwegian, with a smattering of Irish…
As there always is, there was more to my interview with Nobel winner Elfriede Jelinek than I was able to fit into my Times piece. She asked, through her translator Gitta Honegger, if she cou…
Apologies, I've been too buried under deadlines to even point you in the direction of one of the stories that put me under the gun: a piece in the paper of record on the U.S. premiere of Elf…
Photo by Ursa Waz
One little-remembered wrinkle in the chronology of last year's Mike Daisey scandal is that, between the time he appeared in January on This American Life to talk about bru…
Dizzia and Keller in Cradle and All (photo by Joan Marcus)
Maria Dizzia and Greg Keller aren't a couple in real life, but the current New York Theatre Workshop production …
Burstein at the 2012 Tonys, performing "Buddy's Blues" from Follies
I first spoke to the extraordinary, multifaceted actor Danny Burstein for a TDF story back in 2008, wh…
Theater-related blogging has been light here, I'll confess. That's because whatever bloggy energies I have have been redirected to my music blog, where I've been revisiting formative albums …
Loved this anecdote from Julie Crosby, artistic director of the Women's Project: At a recent performance of Bethany (which, by the way, I can't recommend highly enough, as much for the taut,…
Finally caught the Broadway folk phenom Once last night, and I liked it, but what impressed me most was the endearing fragility and directness of its sound; there are some well-chosen reverb…
Željko LuÄić in Rigoletto
Years ago, when I first arrived in New York, I was up for an editorial position at the fine Met-produced magazine Opera News. I was in the running but it…
Photo by Carol Rosegg
I've been mostly knocked on my ass by the New York flu since my Ed Wood musical reading last week, but I managed to file this piece for Time Out before t…
