Yale Repertory Theatre at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut was founded by Robert Brustein, dean of Yale School of Drama, in 1966, with the goal of facilitating a meaningful collaboration between theatre professionals and talented students. In the process it has become one of the first distinguished regional theatres. Located at the edge of Yale's main downtown campus, it occupies the former Calvary Baptist Church.
The David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University is a graduate professional school of Yale University, located in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1924 as the Department of Drama in the School of Fine Arts, the school provides training in every discipline of the theatre – acting, design, directing, dramaturgy and dramatic criticism, playwriting, stage management, technical design and production, and theatre management. It was known as the Yale School of Drama until its endowment by David Geffen in 2021.
George Jean Nathan was an American drama critic and magazine editor. He worked closely with H. L. Mencken, bringing the literary magazine The Smart Set to prominence as an editor, and co-founding and editing The American Mercury and The American Spectator.
John Henry Lahr is an American theater critic and writer. From 1992 to 2013, he was a staff writer and the senior drama critic at The New Yorker. He has written more than twenty books related to theater. Lahr has been called "one of the greatest biographers writing today".
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.
Martin Gottfried was an American critic, columnist and author. He was born in Brooklyn, New York.
Adrienne Kennedy is an American playwright. She is best known for Funnyhouse of a Negro, which premiered in 1964 and won an Obie Award. She won a lifetime Obie as well. In 2018 she was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame.
Shlemiel the First is a musical adaptation of the "Chelm stories" of Isaac Bashevis Singer about the supposedly wise men of that legendary town, and a fool named Shlemiel. It was conceived and adapted by Robert Brustein, with lyrics by Arnold Weinstein and music based on traditional klezmer music and Yiddish theater songs by Hankus Netsky of the Klezmer Conservatory Band and Zalmen Mlotek, who wrote additional music and arrangements, and served as the musical director of the original production. Singer had written a non-musical theatrical adaptation of the stories, Shlemiel the First, which Brustein produced in 1974 when he was the artistic director of Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven, and this served to provide the basic material for the musical.
Theatre World is an annual American theatre pictorial and statistical print publication. It includes Broadway, Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway, and regional theatre, national theatrical awards, and obituaries.
Bernard MacGregor Walker Knox was an English classicist, author, and critic who became an American citizen. He was the first director of the Center for Hellenic Studies. In 1992 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Knox for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities.
Hilton Als is an American writer and theater critic. He is a teaching professor at the University of California, Berkeley, an associate professor of writing at Columbia University and a staff writer and theater critic for The New Yorker. He is a former staff writer for The Village Voice and former editor-at-large at Vibe magazine.
The Elliot Norton Awards are presented annually to honor the best achievements in Boston-area theater. The genesis of the awards was the Norton Medal, which was first awarded in 1983 and was named after long-time theater critic Elliot Norton (1903-2003), a 1922 graduate of Boston Latin School, who had retired in 1982 after 48 years as a Boston theater critic. In addition to bestowing awards on the best theatrical productions and theatrical personnel, the Elliot Awards include a Lifetime Achievement Award and the Norton Prize for Sustained Excellence.
Charles McNulty is the chief theatre critic for the Los Angeles Times newspaper and a recipient of Cornell University's prestigious Nathan Award for dramatic criticism, who, himself, served as chairman of the Pulitzer Prize drama jury. McNulty was engaged in the year 2005 as the Times newspaper's chief theater critic after an exhaustive 4-year search.
Christopher Nigel Jones is a British-American journalist and academic. He is the chief theater critic and Sunday culture columnist of the Chicago Tribune. Since 2014, he has also served as director of the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Critics Institute. Jones has appeared on the news broadcast of CBS-2 Chicago as a weekly theater critic.
Jill Susan Dolan is an American educator, author, blogger and feminist. She writes on theatre, sexuality studies, and feminist theory. Since July 2015, Dolan has been the Dean of the College at Princeton University, where she is also the Annan Professor in English and a professor of theatre studies in the Lewis Center for the Arts. Prior to Princeton, Dolan served as the Department Head of Theater and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin, and as Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dolan's notable works include her blog The Feminist Spectator, for which she received the 2011 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, and Theater and Sexuality. Dolan also edited Menopausal Gentlemen: Plays and Performances of Peggy Shaw which won the Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBT Drama.
Michael E. Feingold was an American critic, translator, lyricist, playwright and dramaturg. 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. 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.
Soraya Nadia McDonald is an American writer and culture critic. She was previously a reporter at The Washington Post, and has been the culture critic for The Undefeated since 2016. McDonald was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
Alisa Solomon, is a writer, Professor of Journalism, and the Director of the Arts and Culture concentration at the Columbia Journalism School. Born in 1956, Solomon served as a story consultant for the documentary on the musical Fiddler on the Roof titled Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles. Solomon has written two award-winning books: Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender and Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof. Additionally, she has served as a reporter for The Village Voice, The New York Times, The Nation, and many other publications.
Laurence Senelick is an American scholar, educator, actor and director. He is the author, editor, or translator of many books.
Kenneth Gross is an American scholar whose work ranges from early modern English literature, especially Spenser and Shakespeare, to modern poetry and fiction; he is the Alan F. Hilfiker Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Rochester. After undergraduate study at Hamilton College, he earned a Ph.D. in English literature from Yale University in 1982. His research has been supported by grants from the New York Public Library, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Academy in Berlin, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. In 2010 he received the Goergen Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, and in 2012, he was awarded the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for his book Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life.
