Davi Napoleon, also known as Davida Skurnick and Davida Napoleon (born 1946), is an American theater historian and critic as well as a freelance feature writer. She is a regular contributor to Live Design , [1] a monthly magazine about entertainment design and designers. She is an expert on the not-for-profit theater in America and author of Chelsea on the Edge: The Adventures of an American Theater . This book is a major study of the economic changes in the American not-for-profit theater and the impact of these on the art produced. She has written on social and political issues as well.
Napoleon did her undergraduate work in the College of Literature, Science and the Arts at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She earned a BA in psychology while studying playwriting with Kenneth Thorpe Rowe, then did a master's degree at Michigan in early childhood education. [2] She went on to New York University, [3] and graduated with an MA in drama and a Ph.D. in performance studies.
In the summer of 1977, Napoleon honed her critical skills at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Critics Institute in Waterford, CT, which she attended on a National Endowment for the Arts grant. [4]
Napoleon taught at Albion College in Albion, MI, and Eastern Michigan University. She has directed plays at Albion College, Washtenaw Community College in Michigan, and at small theaters in Michigan and New York. [5]
Napoleon has written extensively about the history and issues surrounding the not-for-profit theater in America. Her book about Robert Kalfin and the Chelsea Theater Center is an in-depth history of the life of a theater in the 1960s and 1970s. Chelsea on the Edge: The Adventures of an American Theater (1991) describes on- and off-stage dramas, detailing internal conflicts when a theater that was the darling of critics and audiences was forced to downsize because of changes in funding to the arts. Hal Prince wrote the foreword to the book that found a readership among working artists both because it is one of the first complex studies of regional theater and because of its dramatic structure and narrative. [6] [7]
She has also written many articles about producer/critic Robert Brustein. Some of her letters and manuscripts are included in the Robert Brustein archive at Boston University. [8]
She interviewed critic John Simon for The Paris Review . [9] This interview was cited in Simon's New York Times obituary. [10]
She wrote a column about theater education called Schoolbiz for four years for TheaterWeek magazine and has been a contributing editor for Theater Crafts, which became Theatre Crafts International, then Entertainment Design, then Live Design. She has also written for American Theatre, American Film, InTheatre, Playbill, ScriptWriter News, Stages and assorted general interest magazines. These include children's magazines, teen magazines Seventeen and others, and a range of general magazines, such as New York magazine, McCall's, and Weight Watchers . She was a stringer for the Detroit Free Press and for the Ann Arbor News in the 1980s. She was the theater reviewer for the Ann Arbor News. From 1986 to 1988 and wrote a theater column for The Faster Times, which was an online newspaper published by Sam Apple. She has written many articles for publications issued by the University of Michigan, and occasionally for publications from other universities that include Michigan State University and Albion College. She has written for local publications in Ann Arbor, including the Ann Arbor Observer and the Ann Arbor District Library's blog, Pulp.
Napoleon has written several plays, including Four's Company, produced at the Greenwich Mews Theatre in New York City in 1974. [11] She was awarded two University of Michigan Hopwood Awards in 1965 and 1966 for plays she wrote as an undergraduate. She later served as a judge for this creative writing contest. [12] She has participated in and led panels on playwriting. [13]
She was born in New York City to Jack Skurnick, a musicologist, and Fay Kleinman, a painter.
She married software engineer Gregory Napoleon. They have two sons, Brian Napoleon and the noted jazz guitarist, Randy Napoleon and two grandchildren, Jack Napoleon and Juliet Napoleon. [14] She has been living in Michigan for over 40 years.
The Hopwood Awards are a major scholarship program at the University of Michigan, founded by Avery Hopwood.
John Ivan Simon was an American writer and literary, theater, and film critic. After spending his early years in Belgrade, he moved to the United States, serving in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II and studying at Harvard University. Beginning in the 1950s, he wrote arts criticism for a variety of publications, including a 36-year tenure as theatre critic for New York magazine, and latterly as a blogger.
Robert Sanford Brustein was an American theatrical critic, producer, playwright, writer, and educator. He founded the Yale Repertory Theatre while serving as dean of the Yale School of Drama in New Haven, Connecticut, as well as the American Repertory Theater and Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was a creative consultant until his death, and was the theatre critic for The New Republic. He commented on politics for the HuffPost.
Kenneth Thorpe Rowe was an influential professor of drama and playwriting. For decades, Rowe taught playwriting, Shakespeare and modern drama at the University of Michigan. There he had an enormous impact on students, from Arthur Miller to Lawrence Kasdan. His book Write That Play became a widely used college textbook for the teaching of playwriting.
Randy Napoleon is an American jazz guitarist, composer, and arranger who tours nationally and internationally. He has also toured with the Freddy Cole Quartet, Benny Green, the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra led by John Clayton, Jeff Clayton, and Jeff Hamilton, Rene Marie, and with Michael Bublé.
Fay Kleinman was an American painter. She was also known by her married names, Fay Skurnick, and then Fay Levenson. The medium of most of the works Kleinman created is oil on canvas, but she also produced some mixed-media work and watercolors. She exhibited in museums in New York and Massachusetts and in galleries throughout the country. She was the co-founder of the Becket Arts Center in Becket, Massachusetts with Tully Filmus and Emanuel Levenson.
The John Jay Educational Campus is a New York City Department of Education facility at 237 Seventh Avenue between 4th and 5th Streets in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York City. Formerly the location of John Jay High School, which was closed in 2004 due to poor student performance, the facility now houses John Jay School for Law (K462), Cyberarts Studio Academy (K463), Park Slope Collegiate and Millennium Brooklyn High School (K684) .
Rocco Landesman is a long-time Broadway theatre producer. He served as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts from August 2009 to December 2012. He is a part owner of Jujamcyn Theaters.
Robert Zangwill Kalfin was an American stage director and producer who has worked on and off Broadway and at regional theaters throughout the country. He was a former artistic director of the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park and the founder/artistic director of The Chelsea Theater Center.
Chelsea on the Edge: The Adventures of an American Theater (1991) is a book by Davi Napoleon about the onstage triumphs and the offstage turmoil at the Chelsea Theater Center of Brooklyn. It includes biographies of the three co-directors, Robert Kalfin, Michael David, and Burl Hash, and anecdotes about behind-the-scenes activities at the Chelsea.
TheaterWeek was a national weekly magazine catering to artists and lovers of theater and cabaret. It covered Broadway, off-Broadway, regional and educational theater with articles that included profiles and interviews of actors, directors and designers, reviews, theater news and behind-the-scenes looks at shows. The magazine was founded and first edited by Mike Salinas. Later, Bob Sandia and then John Harris edited the magazine. Columnists as Peter Filichia, Alexis Greene, Charles Marowitz, Ken Mandelbaum, Davi Napoleon, Leslie (Hoban) Blake, and Michael Riedel were featured. The New York Daily News called the magazine "influential".
The Chelsea Theater Center was a not-for-profit theater company founded in 1965 by Robert Kalfin, a graduate of the Yale School of Drama. It opened its doors in a church in the Chelsea district of Manhattan, then moved to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1968, where it was in residence for ten years.
Performance Network Theatre, founded in 1981, was Ann Arbor, Michigan's premiere professional Equity theatre. It produced a wide variety of dramas, classics, comedies, Pulitzer Prize and Tony award-winners, many of which were World or Michigan Premieres. Its professional season included five to seven main stage productions. Other programming included seasonal productions that ran in repertory over the holiday season, the Northern Writers' Project—a week-long playwriting intensive, children's programming, the Fireside Festival of New Plays, the Open Table Series, the Open Stage series, music and more.
Jack Skurnick was an American record producer and writer, known as the founder and director of EMS Recordings and as publisher and editor of the music review Just Records.
Michael David is a Broadway producer, the co-founder of and a partner in Dodger Theatricals. His productions on Broadway include Jersey Boys, Matilda The Musical, The Farnsworth Invention, The Secret Garden, Into the Woods, and the revival of The Music Man.
Lyn Coffin is an American poet, writer, translator, and editor.
Beth Tanenhaus Winsten is an American filmmaker, screenwriter, visual artist, and creator of the digital genre tinyBigPictureshows with channels on YouTube and Vimeo. Her work has been broadcast on the National Geographic Explorer Series, TBS, PBS, ABC affiliates among others. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and the Detroit Institute of Arts have showcased her work.
Dominique Morisseau is an American playwright and actress from Detroit, Michigan. She has written more than nine plays, three of which are part of a cycle titled The Detroit Project. She received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2018.
Sadie Love is a three-act play written by Avery Hopwood. Producer Oliver Morosco staged it on Broadway, where it opened at the Gaiety Theatre in November 1915. The play is a farce about a widow named Sadie Love, who marries a prince but discovers he still has feelings for a previous girlfriend. The play was adapted as a movie of the same name in 1919.
John Waldhorn Gassner was a Hungarian-born American theatre historian, critic, educator, and anthologist.
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