Rob Weinert-Kendt

Great episode of @johnbanther.bsky.social’s Classical Breakdown on Mozart’s Requiem. Basset horns and trombones and plagal cadences, oh my! podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/c...

Excellent piece

For the past year I had the privilege of following composer Jeanine Tesori through a season's worth of events in her designation as Lincoln Center's Visionary Artist, and had the pleasure of writing about it in an official capacity. lincolncenter.org/i/about/info...

Enjoyed the new opera of LINCOLN IN THE BARDO, and not only because it gave me another chance to chat with the great Lileana Blain-Cruz

your whales must be seen before they can be killed

For this month's Goes to Show column, Rob writes about the dynamic between playwright and director as he chats with SCHOOL GIRLS' Jocelyn Bioh and Whitney White and ANON's Anne Washburn and Anne Kauffman, as well as a roundup of performances including Ryan Drake's BIG FEELINGS featuring Julia Greer.

This month in theatre history: A notorious play draws protests, a theatre impresario expands his empire, Off-Off-Broadway mainstay La MaMa ETC gets its start, and more.

A nonprofit turnaround specialist makes an evidence-based case for spinning off mission-driven new work from theatres’ board-supported mainstage programming. www.americantheatre.org/2026/10/07/n...

New column just dropped, there's a lot in this one

EXCLUSIVE: The new site CheapBroadwaySeats guides you to the best deals on Broadway. I'm thrilled to be able to break and share this news. This site is a terrific resource that could revolutionize the rush-ticket game. www.timeout.com/newyork/news...

From the fall 2026 print edition: Regan Linton reimagines Roosevelt as an openly disabled role model in FDR'S VERY HAPPY HOUR, an immersive new play now running at Denver Center for the Performing Arts.

Joni, Ravel, Madison Cunningham, etc., would all be on a poster of “albums that remade me,” but these were some of the big ones that counted for teen and twentysomething Rob #my9albums

BREAKING: Nadia Hopkins’ HUMANE TRAPS has been announced as the winner of the 2026 Relentless Award. It’s a quietly absurdist play about death and rodent infestation.

Horrifying: Arizona Democratic congressional candidate Bernadette Greene-Placentia was raped by a man after he knocked her out. Another man approached her to do the same. “She began swinging her foot at him. ‘Not even worth it,’ she heard the man say as he moved away.”

This play is excellent!

thread

Declining full season subscriptions look like a shift in what patrons want. Look closer, and it’s usually a shift in what we’ve been selling them, says Nave Strategies principal J.L. Nave. 

This captures my feelings about the last 2 seasons of SLOW HORSES exactly. I still love the atmosphere and the characters, but spy dramas also need good plotting. That element was very wobbly last season and this season it's glaringly underpowered.

An extraordinary story, definitely worth your time www.nytimes.com/2026/09/21/o...

Another invaluable Off-Broadway roundup from Times critics www.nytimes.com/2026/09/23/t...

Beautiful piece

Excited for Soraya, just subscribed

There’s something about third albums; they are often a test of where and how far an artist can go. That’s how I felt about Olivia Rodrigo’s latest, which landed harder with me than anything she’d done yet, and I feel even moreso about Phoebe Bridgers’s great, possibly bottomless new record.

New issue out, really happy with this one (and what a cover, if I may say so myself)

Amazing read

Just catching up with this Lau Noah disc from 2024. Holy moly, is it good. If you like your finger-picking folk with a strong dose of classical counterpoint, a dash of flamenco, and exquisite vocal harmonies, this one's for you. launoah.bandcamp.com/album/a-dos

One of the more beautifully specific memorial tributes I've had the honor of commissioning

Dog Day Afternoon – directed by Sidney Lumet (1924-2011) – premiered today in 1975. The story of a bank robbery & hostage situation gone off the rails is fueled by fine performances by Al Pacino & the magnificently understated John Cazale (1935-1978). Their nuanced back-and-forth is one for the ages

David Byrne at Forest Hills Stadium last night was one of the most vivid and exhilarating shows I’ve ever seen. He and his songs seem ageless. Heaven is a place where this kind of music happens.

We're devastated by the news of Duncan Sheik's death at age 56. We spoke to the SPRING AWAKENING composer back in 2006 about his work www.americantheatre.org/2006/05/01/t..., and we put the show on our April 2007 cover.

I had a blast at PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, and I'm not throwing shade on the quality of the show or its expert realization when I say that the best thing about the experience was the audience. I explain in my review for America magazine. www.americamagazine.org/theater/2026...

Devastated to hear of Duncan Sheik's death. Here's the piece I wrote about him and the writing of "Spring Awakening" for the LA Times when the show was opening at the Ahmanson back in 2008. www.latimes.com/archives/la-...

Pierce Brothers Westwood, near Billy Wilder (‘I’m a writer, but nobody’s perfect’), Merv Griffin (‘I will not be right back after these messages’), Rodney Dangerfield (‘There’s goes the neighborhood!’) etc.

Tomorrow a new season of SLOW HORSES begins. To mark the occasion I thought I'd reshare my review of the show, which I quite like (though I didn't love last season tbh), from 2 years ago.

One of the first regional productions of LIBERATION (Berkeley Rep) is following the protocols the show followed in its Off-Broadway and Broadway runs (this is from a press release I just received). This seems to be becoming a (welcome) new standard re: stage nudity.

hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling

As a huge MST3K fan, I'm used to savoring it on small screens, so it was a blast to take in a brand new installment, skewering a deliciously awful '60s horror schlockfest, STING OF DEATH, at the Regal UA Kaufman Astoria as a Fathom event yesterday. I could watch this stuff all day (and often have)

Finished the twisty Japanese sci-fi crime drama THE HUMAN VAPOR a few weeks ago. It goes to some wild places and I’m not sure it all adds up by the end, but it’s much more intense and moving than you might expect. On Netflix

posting a gift link to this excellent essay by Dan O'Brien about watching his world burn, twice: Once in NYC on 9/11 and once in the Palisades Fire in LA. Both O'Brien and his wife developed cancer from toxic air—which seems timely given the revelations of this week www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Just finished all 3 seasons of the great Irish procedural thriller THE FALL, which is above all a masterpiece of tonal control. Its cool, patient approach made its shocking turns all the more bracing, and made the familiar contours of the cat-and-mouse serial killer plot seem freshly unsettling.

Brian Cox as J.S. Bach is not the most obvious casting choice, but amazingly it's actually his second time playing Bach. And if you know his career beyond Logan Roy (particularly his role as Max, the Marxist don in Stoppard's ROCK 'N' ROLL), it makes a certain sense

As if the headline isn't enough incentive, do read this short news story to the last paragraph because MAN does it escalate! playbill.com/article/man-...

Where better to end a Cold War than in Iceland? In REYKJAVIK86 (running Sept. 11-27 at Dallas Theater Center), the story of President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s fateful peace talks to scale down nuclear weapons harkens back to a moment of diplomacy we can learn from today.

I am the very model of a modern day typographer A font take on the tune “Modern Major General” by Gilbert & Sullivan #typography #fonts #graphicdesign

What happened inside Telluride's secret screening? A meta new Elizabeth Holmes documentary, a fun Q&A moderated by Emma Stone and, for the departing audience, another secret to keep. www.latimes.com/entertainmen...