499 stories by "Rob Weinert-Kendt"
Tom Hanks and Maura Tierney in Lucky Guy (photo by Joan Marcus)
The Tom Hanks/Nora Ephron romance, which brought them so much success with romcoms onscreen, has continued even after Ephron…
I just learned that Christopher Shinn's extraordinary three-character two-hander Dying City will get its L.A. premiere in the capable hands of Rogue Machine Theatre"a troupe whose …
photo by Paul Kolnik
This is something of a genre by now, the not-quite-believer's Passion play: from The Last Temptation of Christ to Corpus Christi to The Gospel According to th…
If Eliza Bent's new play The Hotel Colors hits the ear at an odd angle, that is by design: When we hear the play's six Italian characters, holed up together in a tatty hostel in Rome, u…
In the last installment of my long interview with Stew and Heidi Rodewald (here's part 1, and here's part 2), we talk more about Shakespeare, why Homer was a bluesman, and how the theater wo…
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 writer reflects on what it's like not to agree with popular opinion, prompted by his lukewarm response to the much-celebrated "Matilda."
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…
Jackie Sibblies Drury, whose latest play is running in Providence, R.I., is a playwright of the moment for creating works that are collaborations by actors, a director and a writer.
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…
There are signs everywhere that the Woman's Project production of Elfriede Jelinek's "Jackie," about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, is not a traditional bio-play.
