The theater world lost a number of champions in 2022, from the visionary director Peter Brook to the irreplaceable performer Angela Lansbury. Not as widely celebrated was Michael Feingold, who was perhaps best known through his association with the Village Voice, where he wrote reviews and essays for more than 40 years, starting in 1971 and becoming chief drama critic in 1983. He died in November at 77.Yet Feingold’s contributions went beyond the probing, passionate, razor-sharp articles that earned him a pair of prestigious George Jean Nathan Awards for Dramatic Criticism. He was also a playwright, translator, and dramaturg, one whose efforts in those capacities informed two productions on Broadway and many more off-Broadway. The range and depth of his experience and expertise, in fact, gave him a distinct edge over the majority of his peers, resulting in criticism that could be as instructive — and constructive — as it was erudite and entertaining.Assessing a production of David Marshall Grant’s play “Current Affairs” in a 2000 review titled “Dramaturgy 90210,” Feingold praised Mr. Grant as “an intelligent, inventive, and sympathetic writer,” but took issue with the “dramatic shape” of the work, noting it relied too heavily on “contradictions and what-ifs and teasers, as if Grant thought the people themselves weren’t enough to hold our interest.” Having gained particular attention for his translations of the musical theater collaborations of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, now the standards published in the Kurt Weill Edition, Feingold could bring both historical and personal insights to his evaluation of their work. “In English, translation has let Brecht down more than most European authors,” he wrote in 1998, marking the 100th anniversary of his subject’s birth, “precisely because the challenges he offers are wider ranging as well as more difficult. Adaptors who catch the theatrical saltiness unwittingly strain out the poetic pepper; academics, busily measuring the exact ingredients, often omit the flavor altogether.”Feingold wrote just as vividly about all areas of theater, as well as music (his work as a translator included opera), dance, film, and even television, when his encyclopedic cultural knowledge could be of service. His final piece for the Voice, in 2018, was an appreciation of Paul Taylor, in which he likened the great choreographer to a playwright, observing, “What Taylor created was, first and foremost, a theater, enlivened with narrative touches just as it was enlivened with movement and visual surprise.”I was lucky enough to become acquainted with Feingold in his later years, first as a fellow member of the New York Drama Critics Circle and then as a colleague at New York Stage Review, where he contributed three-dozen columns between 2018 and 2021. Always humble, gracious, and drily funny in person, Michael, as I will take the liberty of calling him, joined the staff of the latter in a special role befitting his stature. Rather than reviewing individual shows, Michael explained in his first column — written while he was recovering from open-heart surgery — that he would seek “to pull together some general reflections, linking the theater to the world outside, and linking our theater’s many diverse parts to each other.” He made good on his word and then some, delivering treasures ranging from an appreciation of the great stage actor Alvin Epstein to an account of could-have-been classic musicals that never failed to materialize, among them a prequel to “Show Boat.”Michael’s wit could be scathing; his 1991 takedown of the bloated, banal mega-musical “Miss Saigon” is legendary. In a column written on the occasion of his 30th anniversary at the Voice, Michael noted, “If the theater 30 years ago had been, in general, like the theater we have today, I would probably have gone into some better-paying business.” Returning to the publication in 2016, two and a half years after a deluge of layoffs had stripped him of his perch, Michael seemed no more bullish on the state of media. “Instant results, instantly commented on, then instantly archived and forgotten, now constitute the basic product that people demand from what used to be called journalism,” he wrote in his first new column.Yet Michael was not a Cassandra; nor was he a snob. While his advocacy for emerging playwrights and adventurous work was renowned — and invaluable during his more than three decades as a judge for the Obie Awards — he could be equally enthusiastic about popular work and artists. The Broadway productions that have received his praise over the past decade include Mike Nichols’s starry staging of “Death of A Salesman” and another revival, of “The Iceman Cometh,” that was essentially a vehicle for Denzel Washington. Conversely, Michael didn’t spare critical darlings his sardonicism. One of my favorite of his reviews in recent years was of a 2017 production of “Measure for Measure” staged by the adored downtown company Elevator Repair Service. Michael crafted the piece as an interview with a Martian who was entirely unfamiliar with the playwright. After expressing frustration with the busy, mannered staging, the alien notes, “Perhaps some company that isn’t on such quarrelsome terms with Shakespeare will produce it at some point.” Michael completed his tenure at New York Stage Review with an extensive, fascinating series called “Old Movies for Theater Lovers,” his response to the Covid shutdown. “The theater lives again in cinema,” he explained in the introduction, “and the cinema, with help from the theater’s effect, brings something alive in you.”Much the same could be said of Michael Feingold’s writing, which made theater live even for those who didn’t have immediate access to it — and will continue to do so.
