499 stories by "Rob Weinert-Kendt"
I've heard from colleagues that sometimes they don't really know what they think until someone asks them--whether in the context of teaching a course explicating what they do, or just in the…
Today my employer American Theatre joins the 21st century and debuts a fully functioning, up-to-the-minute website, Americantheatre.org (apparently "americantheater.org" also takes you there…
The New York Philharmonic's live concert staging of Sondheim's masterpiece Sweeney Todd will be broadcast on PBS stations on Sept. 26. I had the privilege of covering the show for curre…
I felt pretty lonely back in 2005, when as the critic for Broadway.com I raved about the musical version of The Color Purple. My colleagues were largely unimpressed, as you can see here. So …
Inside the play’s long-awaited Off-Broadway debut — Tom Stoppard’s characters are seldom at a loss for words, and the chatty creatures of Indian Ink are no exception, debat…
There's been a fair amount of rumbling from L.A. theater folks I know and/or follow via the indispensable site Bitter Lemons about a coming "war" over the long-contested Equity 99-Seat Plan.…
I've mentioned it a few times in this space, but it's official now: Today is the release of a CD I helped make with my old film-school and campus newspaper colleague Susan Lambert: O Baby Mi…
My first exposure to Dennis Miles' work was inauspicious: His one-act Rosa Mundy, about a strange young woman who alternately lusted for and killed visitors to her lonely home, was staged as…
I spent a fascinating afternoon a few weeks ago at the Minetta Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village talking to some unfailingly gracious Icelanders, and a few slightly baffled American actors, …
Ballinger and NithapalanI had the pleasure of breaking bread (larb, actually) with Erik Patterson yesterday. He's an L.A.-based playwright whose work I admired more than a decade ago at Thea…
"Revolution in the Elbow of Ragnar Agnarsson Furniture Painter" is an allegorical tale about economic crisis that's set in, well, an elbow.
My heart sank early and often last week at the City Center concert rendition of Randy Newman's Faust, but never so low as when Newman muffed one of his own best lines. That he was onstage at…
One challenge of my job trying to cover theater with a national perspective, both at American Theatre and, to a certain degree, at the NY Times, is how to keep tabs on work I can't actually …
The writer and director of "Sex With Strangers," opening at the Second Stage Theater, have sought to excavate the inner strength in the wounded female character.
I'll be at tonight's one-night-only concert reading of Randy Newman's Faust with bells on. (How 'bout you, George Hunka?) I'd noted the possibility that the show would finally get a hearing …
photo by Caitlin McNaneyA few years ago, a musical theater colleague of mine told me that someone named "Glen Kelly" was the guy who really wrote the scores of The Producers and Young Franke…
Glen Kelly, whose Broadway work this season includes "Bullets Over Broadway" and "Aladdin," is one musical arranger who knows the score.
I'm just back from the TCG Conference in San Diego last week--my fourth ever, and despite (or perhaps because of) the perfectly sunny but cool weather in my beloved, much-missed Southern Cal…
The Scottish writer-performer Andy Manley returns to the New Victory Theater with a show aimed at the 8-and-older set about a close schoolyard friendship shattered by peer pressure.
Chris Myers and Danny Wolohan in An Octoroon"I rarely hope for my writing to have any effect. But I confess that I hope this piece makes people feel a certain kind of way." -Ta-Nehisi Coates…
Blogging has been light for much the same reasons as I noted here, but I feel I should catch readers up with my extra-curricular work.I interviewed Norm Lewis, Broadway's first black Phantom…
Norm Lewis, the first black actor to play the title role in "The Phantom of the Opera" on Broadway, has longed to tackle the part for years.
Mark Ruffalo and Laurel Green in Justin Tanner's Still Life With Vacuum Salesman at the Cast Theatre, 1994 (photo by Ed Krieger)I haven't lived in Los Angeles since the summer of 2005 but I'…
A favorite scene from Foreign Correspondent, referenced in David Rudkin's new play The Lovesong of Alfred J. Hitchcock. Some time in the early 1980s, my dad flagged a listing in our loc…
"The Lovesong of Alfred J. Hitchcock," part of the Brits Off Broadway series at 59E59 Theaters, looks into the filmmaker's youth and early career for clues to his later cinematic obsessions.
