Michael Feingold. (Photo by Stephen Paley)
The phrase that stored reasserting itself as I immersed myself as soon as once more within the theatre criticism of Michael Feingold, who died on Nov. 21 on the age of 77, is “tradition.”
“Authentic tradition,” “sustained tradition,” “living tradition.” This is the worth he stored rearticulating all through his lengthy and distinguished profession—the repetition echoing the quixotic quest of an indefatigable New York theatre critic tilting towards the amnesia of business windmills.
In a 2001 column occasioned by his thirtieth anniversary at The Village Voice, Feingold recognized the malaise of the present theatre scene by noting the absence of what had beforehand given it life: an important connection to the theatrical previous.
“The theatre was better when I began because its old tradition was not yet dead, and the new movement springing up to replace that tradition was brand-new and seemed inexhaustibly fresh,” he wrote. “Today the old tradition is a ghost—or worse, a zombie—and what was once new, not exactly old enough to have become a tradition itself, has instead become a habit, rigid and repetitive, its choices blindly mimicked by youngsters who don’t know that there was once meaning behind them.”
What was he holding up instead? Not subservience to stage historical past, however a artistic engagement with it, rooted in curiosity, self-discipline, and data.
In praising Mike Nichols’ 2012 Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, which integrated design and music components of Elia Kazan’s authentic 1949 Broadway manufacturing, Feingold noticed that Nichols, working from inside earlier parameters, “demonstrated that it can be done: We own a tradition, and we have the right to see it constantly living and made new.”
I used to be, at numerous factors in our overlapping careers at The Village Voice, Feingold’s intern, fellow critic, and editor. No matter the function, I used to be eternally his pupil. When we first met I used to be nonetheless a graduate pupil in this system that had helped form his thoughts, finding out with the identical academics at the Yale School of Drama’s dramaturgy and dramatic criticism program who had influenced him. Feingold was the aim to which this eccentric course of research had been designed. A contemporary-day Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Feingold wore the theatre’s custom on his again, not as an ivory tower scholar however as a practitioner unleashed from the rehearsal corridor into the world of mental journalism.
A proud Chicago-born Midwesterner who however appeared a local of the Upper West Side that he lengthy referred to as dwelling, Feingold had adopted Robert Brustein from Columbia University, the place he did his undergraduate diploma, to Yale, after Brustein had develop into dean of the drama faculty. Feingold took half within the revolution that was underway within the college’s method to theatre coaching. To set up a bridge between the conservatory {and professional} observe, Brustein had based the Yale Repertory Theatre. Feingold was the theatre’s first literary supervisor—a transparent signal that the brand new dean was dedicated to an aesthetic overhaul of the drama faculty’s gentlemanly fame.
A polyglot and polymath with a deep data of opera and music, Feingold translated musical works by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill for the Yale Rep, together with the American premiere of Happy End. A distinct manufacturing, that includes fellow Yale Drama School alum Meryl Streep, made it to Broadway, incomes Feingold Tony nominations for his guide and lyrics.
It wasn’t the final time Feingold labored on Broadway. His model of The Threepenny Opera, one other Brecht-Weill masterwork, had a run on the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre in 1989, starring none aside from Sting. A few years after I left the Voice to develop into the theatre critic of the Los Angeles Times, I noticed Feingold’s model of Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny within the 2007 Los Angeles Opera manufacturing, directed by John Doyle and starring Audra McDonald and Patti LuPone on the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
For Feingold, the observe of criticism was completely appropriate with theatremaking. The Village Voice didn’t look askance at his moonlighting. The first time I used to be despatched out of city to evaluation a manufacturing was when Voice theatre editor Ross Wetzsteon assigned me to evaluation Feingold’s translation of Max Frisch’s The Firebugs at Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater, the place Feingold had years earlier served as literary director.
I occurred to like David Gordon’s manufacturing and wrote glowingly in regards to the staging and the interpretation. But I later realized that Feingold was nonetheless irate about my opening paragraph. Quoting a mutual instructor of ours, Gordon Rogoff, who wrote that “Frisch doesn’t write plays, he writes dissertations,” I went on to say that The Firebugs now appears after this bracing revival to have been “the best kept secret in modern theatre.”
Feingold felt the remark to be blind to Frisch’s standing within the European repertoire. But because the colleague who conveyed Feingold’s displeasure shared with me, he too had by no means seen a manufacturing and had not heard a lot in regards to the work till Feingold pitched to have his translation coated by the Voice.
As a instructor, Feingold was an unstoppable font of cultural data and perception. But he was not a mentor, and he handled each underling as a future rival. The Voice was one of many uncommon publications that inspired a vigorous cross-section of essential voices. But Feingold, a territorial animal in a jungle that was shrinking with alarming rapidity, established himself because the paper’s chief theatre critic, in an association with administration that left lingering resentments amongst his colleagues.
All of this occurred earlier than I arrived in 1992, however the specter of somebody doing to him what he had apparently performed to others was stated to be the explanation he hadn’t taken a trip from his column in years. When I grew to become his editor in 2003, I went out of my method to guarantee him that he could be protected. In fact, I used to be defending myself. It was apparent to me that, tough as Feingold may very well be, he was unmatched as a critic.
On Mondays, when his column would arrive round 11 a.m., I discovered myself enlivened by the originality of his thoughts. I might usually have seen the exhibits beneath evaluation the week earlier than. Feingold’s response by no means did not awaken contemporary perceptions, even once I didn’t share his opinion.
What distinguished Feingold as a theatre critic? Yes, his vary of reference was better than most, encompassing not solely deep experience in quite a few areas of theatre historical past but in addition a seemingly limitless fund of performances to carry up for comparability. But there was one thing extra necessary that separated him from his friends.
Feingold’s greatness rested within the agility of his focus. He had the flexibility to take an aerial view of the work into consideration. But then, with breathtaking swiftness, he would zoom in for a closeup, discussing the manufacturing with meticulous visible element and sensitivity to the alternatives of the actors and director.
He wrote with an understanding of the sensible calls for of theatrical manufacturing. But he was unusually conscious of the highway not taken, of interpretive potentialities excluded by short-sighted creative decision-making. Feingold wrote for insiders, during which group he included everybody with a passionate regard for the artwork kind. He most assuredly was not writing for customers casually questioning the place to spend their leisure {dollars} on a Saturday evening.
His loyalty was to the theatre and its tenuous survival. Theatre establishments had been ephemeral, however artists lived perpetually on the stage of his reminiscence. Tradition—that phrase once more—was for Feingold handed down by those that devoted their lives to their artwork, as he had. It is a human chain, not an abstraction, and one thing that we should settle for duty for sustaining.
History, in his view, wasn’t a shackle however a supply of freedom. To flip your again on it’s to betray not solely the previous but in addition the current and the long run.
No one was higher at figuring out new expertise. This preternatural acuity made him a useful dramaturg on the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center’s National Playwrights Conference, the place he developed an everlasting bond with a then-unknown playwright named August Wilson, who was engaged on Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.
Feingold’s essential method made him not readily transferable to different publications. The Voice was a super dwelling for him not solely as a result of it offered an exceptionally well-informed readership but in addition as a result of it inspired its critics to develop into a part of their creative group. The Obies, honoring Off-Broadway excellence, introduced Feingold for many years into shut communion with main theatremakers referred to as to function fellow judges. There had been just a few uncomfortable moments; I recall a playwright refusing to attend the ultimate voting assembly after Feingold had given his play a combined evaluation. But this was the exception. It was laborious to carry a grudge towards a critic of such unmistakable brilliance, except you had been a creative director within the behavior of casting unqualified TV actors in dramatic classics—a mortal sin in Feingold’s guide, worthy of everlasting damnation.
Kathleen Chalfant, who with the late Marian Seldes occupied the higher echelon of Feingold’s esteem, shared by way of e mail her personal expertise of being on the receiving finish of his criticism: “Michael gave me my first grownup review in New York: ‘Kathleen Chalfant, as the ferret-faced neighbor woman, transcended the direction.’ It was perfect preparation for life in the theatre in New York, and after that Michael and I became friends. Many years later he told me that he was referring to the character, which was a perfect example of Michael’s kindness and care for his friends, even if he always told the truth as he saw it. He loved the theatre and held us all to the highest standards because otherwise, what was the point? I will miss him very, very much.”
More mainstream publications wouldn’t have tolerated the blurring of critic-artist strains because the Voice did. Still, once I grew to become his editor, I gently moved Feingold away from reviewing the Pearl Theatre Company, the place his translations of classics had been recurrently on the invoice. He didn’t see an issue, however I knew others may. He wrote with the lengthy view of an artist. Journalism, with its myopic considerations, couldn’t comprise him. After the Voice started to falter, it was no shock however nonetheless a profound cultural loss that he wasn’t capable of finding a extra illustrious platform to observe his tenure there.
But there was one thing basically scrappy about Feingold. Editors earlier than me complained when he devoted his column to Broadway fare, passing up Off-Off-Broadway riches for high-priced midtown junk. But the theatrical fringe remained central to him. Indeed, he would lavish extra mental care on a efficiency artist working out of a hovel on the Lower East Side than on a multi-million-dollar import from the West End.
His recalcitrant and considerably paranoiac nature made him at instances an exasperating colleague. But beneath his curmudgeonly carapace was the unhappiness of a author who felt he hadn’t ever been given his due. A two-time finalist for the Pulitzer in criticism, he ought to have received in 1992 when the board elected to not give any award within the class.
Feingold had a method of alienating even his supporters. And his lack of social graces made appearances in his writing, in dismissals that may very well be painfully blunt. But the chief limitation of his criticism is tied to one in every of his primary strengths: the readability of his unassailable conviction. For all his dialectical propensity, he didn’t usually cease to ask what he is likely to be lacking. He was so defended towards imagined opponents calling him out and unseating him that his self-questioning needed to be stored on a decent leash. Even so, a fancy humanity was at all times reachable by way of his sterling intelligence, and his strong wit had a method of offsetting the pedantic tone that might creep into his prose.
Few critics had been as resistant to hype. While others had been touting The Producers because the musical’s second coming, Feingold acknowledged straight away that whereas the attraction of the present is “real and substantial,” stemming from “its ability to keep its feet firmly on the ground while its mind is wholly lost in a world of old jokes, old tunes, and old routines,” the last word “effect is that of a big college varsity show, on a vastly enhanced and adult professional level.”
Rereading Feingold is a cultural tonic in lately of consumerist hype and ideological grandstanding. His crankiness and hobbyhorses however, he carried on a love affair with the theatre that lasted his total skilled life. After he left the Voice and began writing a bi-monthly column referred to as “Thinking About Theater” for the web site TheaterMania, he received a second George Jean Nathan Award for his theatre criticism.
An anthology of his theatre writing ought to be printed, particularly given the uncooperative state of the Village Voice digital archives. Feingold is a necessary hyperlink within the theatre story of the final half-century, which is to say, of the final 2,500 years that ready the best way.
Charles McNulty is the theatre critic for the Los Angeles Times.
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