Michael Feingold

Feingold was a playwright, and translated German and Italian plays and operas into English for off-Broadway productions, including Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera, Max Frisch's The Firebugs, The Beaver Coat by Gerhart Hauptmann, The Venetian Twins, The Barber of Seville, The Mistress of the Inn, Der Vampyr, and Mary Stuart, as well as the French playwright Henri Bernstein's 1908 play Israël, which had a public reading in 2007, and Max Frisch's Andorra (1961), produced off-Broadway in 2022.

Feingold's translations of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's musical collaborations are the standard published English translations.

Michael E. Feingold (May 5, 1945 – November 21, 2022) was an American critic, translator, lyricist, playwright and dramaturg.

Feingold was born on May 5, 1945, in Chicago to Elsie (Silver) Feingold, a piano teacher, and Bernard Feingold, who managed a tannery.

He grew up in Chicago and in Highland Park, where he attended the local high school and was a member of the school's drama club.

Having taken a seminar at Columbia from theatre critic Robert Brustein, Feingold applied to Yale School of Drama in 1965, and asked Brustein to write a recommendation.

Brustein told him to read The New York Times the next day where it was announced that Brustein had been named the dean, and he accepted Feingold's application.

At Yale, Feingold intended to study playwriting, but moved towards criticism at Brustein's suggestion.

He was the first literary manager of the Yale Repertory Theatre, and served as literary director of The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and literary manager of the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He graduated from Columbia University in 1966 with a degree in English and comparative literature.

Feingold began contributing to the Village Voice in 1971 and served as its chief theater critic from 1983 through May 2013.

Feingold was also the translation lyricist for the 1972 revue Berlin to Broadway with Kurt Weill.

For his work as the translator and adapter of the book and lyrics of the Kurt Weill, Elisabeth Hauptmann, and Bertolt Brecht musical Happy End, he was nominated for two Tony Awards in 1977.

He shared nominations for two Tony Awards in 1977 for the Brecht-Weill musical "Happy End": for Best Book of a Musical, for his adaptation of Elisabeth Hauptmann's libretto, and for Best Score, for his adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's lyrics.

The production included Meryl Streep and Christopher Lloyd in the cast.

Feingold was a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1977.

He was the lead theater critic of The Village Voice from 1982 to 2013, for which he was twice named a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism finalist, and was a two-time recipient of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism.

He was a judge for the Obie Awards for 31 years, and the chairman for nine years.

In 1982, Feingold was serving as a dramaturg for the National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut, and was instrumental in furthering the career of playwright August Wilson, helping to edit Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, which impressed New York Times theatre critic Frank Rich, who was in the audience for the reading of the trimmed-down version of the play.

Rich's write-up in the Times began Wilson's rise in American theatre.

Feingold's translation of The Threepenny Opera was staged on Broadway in 1989, starring Sting and has been presented in many venues throughout the world.

He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, in 1992 and 2010.

For the 2023 Obie Awards presented by the American Theater Wing on February 27, it was announced that one of the awards will be named in honor of Feingold.

One of Feingold's colleagues said of him that when he attacked something he did not like, such as the Broadway production of Miss Saigon, he "would back [the] attack with broad knowledge of the subject at hand and thereby supply insightful aesthetic, historical, formal, and conceptual context to [his] readers."

In a review of Miss Saigon which would later be characterized as "legendary", Feingold wrote "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."

He continued:

"Every civilization gets the theater it deserves, and we get ‘Miss Saigon,’ which means we can now say definitively that our civilization is over. ... After this, I see no way out but an aggressive clearance program: All the Broadway theaters must be demolished, without regard for their size, history or landmark status."

He was also a two-time recipient of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, first for his 1995–1996 season Village Voice reviews, and then in 2015 for his Theater Mania columns in the 2013–2014 season.

Feingold wrote in 1998 about Brecht and translation:

"In English, translation has let Brecht down more than most European authors 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."

Another Brecht work which Feingold translated was Round Heads and Pointed Heads, with music by Hanns Eisler, which, as adapted by director/choreographer David Gordon, was presented under the title Uncivil Wars: Moving with Brecht and Eisler in a number of venues between 2002 and 2009.

Feingold's willingness to speak bluntly to the luminaries of theater was also evident in his 2003 review of Neil Simon's final play, Rose’s Dilemma: "It doesn’t mean anything to anybody," he wrote, "and doesn’t reveal any understanding, on its author’s part, of how plays are written."

Feingold was a judge for the Obie Awards for 31 seasons, and served as its chairman from 2006 to 2011 and from 2012 to 2014.

Feingold's translation of Weill's and Brecht's The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, as staged by the Los Angeles Opera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, with performances by Audra McDonald and Patti LuPone, was broadcast on the PBS Great Performances TV series in 2007, and was released on CD as well.

On May 17, 2013, after 42 years as a writer at the Village Voice, and over three decades as its primary theater critic, Feingold's contract was not renewed.

Afterwards, he wrote a monthly two-part column, "Thinking About Theater", for the Theater Mania website from 2013 to 2017, and also wrote 35 columns for New York Stage Review beginning in October 2018.

In his columns for NYSR, Feingold did not review individual productions, but instead sought "to pull together some general reflections, linking the theater to the world outside, and linking our theater’s many diverse parts to each other."

On January 12, 2016, Feingold announced his return to the Village Voice to write a twice-monthly column for a new Voice website.

In 2020, Feingold received an Obie Award citation "for his work as a leading voice in theater criticism, his advocacy on behalf of off and off-off-Broadway, and for his masterful leadership of the Obie Awards."

Feingold was a member of the New York Drama Critics Circle, which presents the annual New York Drama Critics Circle Awards.