Wendy Rosenfield

Broad Street Review • 7th October 2021

Philly’s Protect the Artist protestors take their demands to the…

Before the Mummers showed up on opening night to drown out dissent, before a team of white guys showed six women actors how to lighten up the civil rights era in this, the first WST mainstage show since Covid-19, a plethora of factors led to what may be the most baldly hubristic moment in WST artistic director Bernard Havard’s career. Prior news stories abound, including BSR’s coverage of a June 2021 protest pointing to accusations of Havard barging into women’s dressing rooms after a cursory kn

Broad Street Review • 7th January 2020

Not so marvelous: Why I’m done with ‘Mrs. Maisel’

And I finally caved, bingeing the first two seasons, and then, out of guilt (did I mention I’m Jewish?), the third. I did not love it. I suppose my friends like it for the same reason they like The Goldbergs, which premiered in 2013. This network sitcom (set in 1980s Jenkintown, PA) treads similar shticky ground and gets extra points for eastern Montco accuracy. Maisel and Goldbergs are comfort food, both harking back to a time when Jews ostensibly had the same backgrounds, aspirations, and sens

Philadelphia Magazine • 28th September 2019

A Museum Exhibit Devoted to Ruth Bader Ginsburg Is Coming to Philly

A Museum Exhibit Devoted to Ruth Bader Ginsburg Is Opening in Philly

Take a moment to recall the last time you attended a major museum exhibition entirely devoted to a pop-culture icon. Was that icon a woman? Still alive, working, and in her 80s? Jewish? I bet the answer is no.

Such are the boundaries still being smashed by the first Jewish woman to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose life and pop-culture status are celebrated in the National Museum of American Jewish H

Broad Street Review • 2nd July 2019

What art critics really do—at home and abroad

One of the first things you notice when you’re a US theater critic among an international cadre of theater critics is that other countries go about theater and criticism differently. That is, other countries lend significant financial support to both endeavors. Also, in some of those countries, a critic’s too-free speech might just endanger their own freedom.

The last time I joined the International Association of Theatre Critics (IATC) in France was about five years ago, on a tour of the Norma

Philadelphia Magazine • 7th January 2018

"A Doll’s House" in a #MeToo World

Matt Lauer. Harvey Weinstein. Charlie Rose. I could go on. High-profile men are feeling the wrath of the women they’ve wielded their power over, making this a timely moment for the Arden to produce Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 drama A Doll’s House.

The play was considered shocking in its day. The central couple, Nora and Torvald, rely, like so many married partners do, on the fictions they create: Nora is a twittering “sparrow,” banned from eating macaroons lest they ruin her pretty mouth. Torvald is a

Broad Street Review • 18th April 2017

The curious case of David Patrick Stearns, 'Oslo,' and the 2016…

Last weekend, David Patrick Stearns’s Philadelphia Inquirer review of J.T. Rogers’s new drama Oslo caught my eye. First, as you can hear here, the show was developed in Philadelphia at PlayPenn; second, I’m always interested in work about Israel; third, Stearns asserted he wouldn’t want to see the show without “New York-caliber actors” and that it should have won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama. [Ed. note: Online, Stearns later changed "Pulitzer Prize" to "Tony."]

First, a little backgroun

Broad Street Review • 7th February 2017

Remembering music writer, author, and playwright Marc Spitz

It’s always strange -- at my age, anyway -- when a former classmate dies. You figure you all have plenty of time, and you recall them through an overlay of old, tangled feelings. This week, writer Marc Spitz died in his sleep at age 47. We were classmates at Bennington College. (He was actually a year younger, but the school is so small it hardly matters.)

I barely knew Marc, and we hadn’t spoken in at least 25 years. But one summer, when we both stayed on in North Bennington after classes ende

The Philadelphia Inquirer, LLC • 7th January 2017

'Lizzie': Great voices, great theme, needs cutting

Lizzie Borden took an axe, and with it she smashed the patriarchy. Or at least that's the idea presented by 11th Hour Theatre Company's production of Steven Cheslik-Demeyer, Tim Maner, and Alan Stevens Hewitt's Lizzie, a bare-bones (no pun intended), eardrum-rattling musical about the best-known citizen of Fall River, Mass.

The show's set and lighting design, by Thom Weaver, takes its cues from concert stages and maybe a little bit from another musical, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, with risers

The Philadelphia Inquirer, LLC • 22nd October 2016

Wilma's 'Rain': A thunderous warning to the world

The Wilma Theater's production of Andrew Bovell's When the Rain Stops Falling is like one of those old photo albums you run across in antiques shops, but better. Instead of staring at the images, wondering who they were, where they lived, and what happened to land them discarded in a pile of junk, we trace the tragic histories of two families, the Yorks and the Laws, over two continents and 80 years.

But there's also something larger at work. When the play begins, we're in the near future, the

HowlRound Theatre Commons • 1st April 2013

But I Really Don’t Want To Direct

Once, outside a performance, an actor/director/playwright (I’ll never tell who) approached me in a kind of passive-aggressive fervor. S/he began asking how I became a critic, what were my qualifications, and finally, what did I want to do? The first two questions were easy, but the last? Well, that left me stammering.

wanted to be a critic. Like, always wanted it. S/he pressed on. “Yeah, but . What do you

I said I wrote some fiction, some essays on the side, but , truly, I had my dream job. I