Wendy Rosenfield

Quill • 29th August 2024

2022 Fellows Feature: Clarissa Ward

November 30, 2022 • Featured, Quill Archives
CNN Chief International Correspondent Clarissa Ward often cites her “peripatetic upbringing” as the spark for her wanderlust.
Born in London, the only child of an American mother and British father, she moved to Manhattan, then back again to London, with a rotating cast of nannies (11 by the time she was 8) along the way. Her father soon moved to Hong Kong, though her parents never divorced, and she was shipped off to boarding school at age 10.
An un...

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

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

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

The Philadelphia Inquirer, LLC • 17th July 2008

Veganism grows up

Five months ago, I went from lapsed vegetarian to full-blown vegan, and somehow, by cutting my caloric options in half, gained five pounds. I'd always associated vegans with teeny-tiny hippie chicks in dreadlocks and yoga pants, arranging kombu in a pressure cooker before leaving for a job at the co-op.

Obviously, times have changed. These days, going vegan requires almost no planning and, better yet, no dreadlocks. With the spread of Whole Foods and Trader Joe's, and the mainstreaming of the h

The Philadelphia Inquirer, LLC • 18th May 2008

In Cirque shape

Cirque du Soleil's newest touring show to arrive in Philadelphia, a slip of a girl leans backward, folding herself in half and touching her toes. Another performer stands on stilts perched atop one end of a teeterboard. He flies into the air, stilts and all, turning several somersaults and landing with perfect poise, still firmly on his stilts.

Acrobatics are Cirque's particular hallmark, but in each new show the troupe creates, performers weave a dramatic tale while making extraordinary feats