Berlin Memoir, Part 2
[In Part 1 of my “Berlin Memoir” (posted on 16 December), I told you about how I happened to start this reminiscence and introduced some of my earliest experiences in Berlin—including how I ended up...
View Article'Falsettos'
by Kirk Woodward[After making some very pertinent and interesting comments on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton (6 December), frequent guest-blogger Kirk Woodward returns now with his assessment of the...
View Article'How to be the Greatest Improviser on Earth'
I’ve never done improvisation as a performance except occasionally as a mime a long time ago. The closest I’ve come to the kind of improv that Will Hines writes about in How to be the Greatest...
View ArticleStage Rat & Doll Baby
[Some theater stories are just too good to go unshared. Life in the theater can be more bizarre than even the world of espionage, accounts of some of which I’ve related several times on ROT. (In...
View ArticleBerlin Memoir, Part 3
[As I promised in my closing note to “Berlin Memoir, Part 2” (see 31 December 2016), this installment will detail the most significant investigation in which I was engaged during the 2½ years I was...
View ArticleNominalization!
[As readers of ROT will know by now, one of my overriding interests in good writing, I’m a recovering writing teacher, having attempted to inculcate the notion that good writing is an asset to...
View ArticleStage Managers
[As I recounted in my two-part article “Actors’ Equity at 100” (19 and 22 June 2013), the Actors’ Equity Association, the union that represents professional stage actors and stage managers, was...
View ArticleMac Wellman
[About a year ago, the New York Times published an article about playwright Mac Wellman (Antigone, 2004; Second-Hand Smoke, 1997; The Hyacinth Macaw, 1994; A Murder of Crows, 1992) as a teacher at...
View ArticleBerlin Memoir, Part 4
[This is the fourth of eight installments of my recollections of serving in West Berlin, Germany, as a Military Intelligence officer during the early 1970s, a high point in the Cold War. “Berlin...
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Horsman Dolls
My maternal grandfather, Harry Freedman (1896-1967), made dolls for a living. It was a pretty good living: he supported my grandmother, my mother, and her sister pretty nicely right through the Great...
View ArticleBerlin Memoir, Part 5
[In Part 5 of my “Berlin Memoir,” I try to describe some of the unusual—you might even say weird—experiences that occurred daily, or at least weekly, in the West Berlin of the Cold War. As you’ll see,...
View Article'Jitney'
Until two weeks ago, I had seen eight of August Wilson’s ten Century Cycle plays. Up till then, I’d missed the last one he wrote, Radio Golf, the play that covers the last decade in the century and...
View ArticleEvaluating A Director
by Kirk Woodward[Kirk Woodward has been a major contributor to Rick On Theater since its inception in March 2009—which isn’t surprising because Kirk suggested to me that I start the blog in the first...
View Article'Everybody'
Plays built around gimmicks are often more interesting as theatrical fillips than satisfying as artistic experiences—curiosities more than dramas. That’s how I felt about Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s...
View ArticleBerlin Memoir, Part 6
[Thank you for returning to ROT for the sixth installment of my “Berlin Memoir,” a chronicle of my adventures on and off duty while I served in West Berlin as a counterintelligence agent in the 1970s....
View ArticleFrom My August Wilson Archive, Part 1
[On 24 February, I posted a report on the Broadway première of August Wilson’s Jitney, the last of the playwright’s 10-play Century Cycle to make it to the Great White Way. It was also the ninth of...
View ArticleFrom My August Wilson Archive, Part 2
[This is the second installment of my 2-part series of archival August Wilson play reports, performances I saw before I started Rick On Theater. Part 1, which included the linked plays Seven Guitars...
View Article'Wakey, Wakey'
A dying man making an appearance in a theater? Whoaaa! That might well be your reaction—it was mine—when you twig to what Will Eno’s come up with in his new play Wakey, Wakey, having its world...
View ArticleBerlin Memoir, Part 7
[This is the second-to-last installment of my “Berlin Memoir,” the chronicle of my 2½ years in military intelligence in Cold War Berlin in the 1970s. Part 7 covers some of the trips I took out of...
View Article'Awake and Sing!,' et al.
[Back on 16 March, I posted the first of two parts of “From My August Wilson Archive,” a collection of old reports on Wilson plays I’d seen before I started Rick On Theater. (In fact, I posted Part 1...
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