Michael Feingold, longtime chief theatre critic of the Village Voice, has passed away. He was 77. News of Mr. Feingold's passing was shared by his peer, Time Out's Adam Feldman.
Mr. Feingold graduated from Columbia University in 1966, and later the Yale School of Drama where he served as the literary manager of the Yale Repertory Theatre. Prior to his career in theatre criticism, he was the literary director of The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, MN and the literary manager of the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA.
He began to write for the the alternative newspaper The Village Voice in 1971, and became the paper's chief theatre critic in 1983, a position he continued to hold until his untimely dismissal in 2013. Feingold was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism, in 1992 and 2010. He also received the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism twice.
Mr. Feingold was the chairman of the Obie Awards from 2006 to 2011, and later returned to the post from 2012 to 2014. He served as a committee member for the honors for decades. In his later years, Mr. Feingold wrote for New York Stage Review and TheaterMania.
In addition to his work as a critic, Mr. Feingold was a playwright, and a translator of German- and Italian–language plays and operas into English for Off-Broadway productions. His translations include Kurt Weill's Happy End and The Threepenny Opera, Gerhart Hauptmann's The Beaver Coat, The Venetian Twins, The Barber of Seville, The Mistress of the Inn, Der Vampyr, and Mary Stuart. For his efforts on Happy End, he was twice Tony nominated when the piece transferred to Broadway, where he received nominations for both his English lyrics and his adapted book.
Mr. Feingold's translations of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's musical collaborations are the standard English translations published, and his translations of The Threepenny Opera have been staged across the world, including Broadway. In 1972, he served as the translation lyricist for the revue Berlin to Broadway with Kurt Weill.
