Melissa Rose Bernardo is a staff editor at Entertainment Weekly, where she reviews theater, plans and supervises stage coverage and edits the DVD reviews section. She has worked for magazines including Newsweek, Us, TheaterWeek and InTheater (as one of the founding editors). She is a graduate of the University of Michigan, where she studied dramatic literature.

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David Cote is theater editor and critic for Time Out New York, and appears as a contributing critic on NY1’s On Stage.  His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Maxim, Opera News and The Best Plays Theater Yearbook 2005-2006. Hyperion published his book, Wicked: The Grimmerie, in 2005. David is the Public Dramaturge for Montclair State University’s Peak Performance series. In the 1990s, he was a performer and director in productions by Richard Foreman, Richard Maxwell and others. He ran a ’zine called OFF: A Journal for Alternative Theater from 1996 to 1998; he also created and edited FringeNYC Propaganda, the daily newspaper of the New York International Fringe Festival. B.A. Bard College, ’92. Visit davidcote.com and his blog, histriomastix.typepad.com.

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Joe Dziemianowicz is the Daily News drama critic. In addition to Broadway and Off-Broadway reviews, he writes news stories, profiles and features. A journalist for nearly two decades, he joined the paper in 2000. He has been published in a number of newspapers and national magazines including Entertainment Weekly, TV Guide, InStyle and Biography.

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Michael Feingold is the chief theater critic of the Village Voice and chairman of the Obie Awards Committee. A graduate of Columbia University (B.A.1966) and the Yale Scholl of Drama (M.F.A. 1972), he has for many years sustained an ongoing second career in the theater as a playwright, lyricist, translator, director, and dramaturg. He currently serves as Literary Advisor to New York's Theater for a New Audience. Among his numerous translations are the standard versions of the Brecht-Weill works Happy End, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and Threepenny Opera. Other recent translations include Schiller's Mary Stuart, Eduardo de Filippo's Souls of Naples and Goldoni’s Venetian Twins.

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Robert Feldberg has been the theater critic and columnist for The Bergen Record since 1982. Before that, he reviewed movies and pop music for the paper. He has served as the chairman of the nominating committee for the Drama Desk Awards. He has a bachelor's degree in English and a master's in American history from NYU.

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Adam Feldman is president of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle, and reviews theater and cabaret for Time Out New York. He has written for Broadway.com, Show Business Weekly and Canada’s National Post, and his online video reviews appear on Yahoo Broadway. He is a graduate of Harvard University, where he received the Helen Choate Bell essay prize in American literature. In addition to reviewing, he has worked as a performer,  adapter and script reader. He has been a judge for the Lucille Lortel Awards and the Actors Equity Awards. He lives in Greenwich Village.

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Elysa Gardner has been covering pop music and theater as a critic and reporter for USA TODAY since 2000. She has also been a contributor to the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, VH1, Entertainment Weekly and The New Yorker.  

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Eric Grode has been chief theater critic for the New York Sun since 2005. Prior to that, he reviewed for Broadway.com, Back Stage and Time Out New York. He has also written about theater, books, film, television, and music for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, American Theatre (where he received an Affiliated Writer fellowship), the Boston Phoenix, the Sondheim Review, FHM and Playbill.com. He is on the advisory board of the Goldring Arts Journalism Program at Syracuse University. He lives in the Bronx with his wife, Beth, a psychiatrist.

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John Heilpern has been the New York Observer drama critic for  the past 15 years, God help us all. Born in England, educated Oxford, he is the author of Conference of the Birds: The Story of Peter Brook in Africa; How Good is David Mamet, Anyway? Writings on Theater–and Why It Matters; and the authorized biography of John Osborne, John Osborne: The Many Lives of the Angry Young Man, published by Knopf in the US (2006 Theatre Book of the Year in England).

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Michael Kuchwara has been the drama critic and drama writer for the Associated Press since 1984. Before being named to that position, he worked for the AP in Chicago as a general assignment editor and reporter and in New York on its General (now National) Desk, the main editing desk for national news. Born in Scranton, PA, he is a graduate of Syracuse University, and has a master's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri. He is a past president of the New York Drama Critics' Circle.

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Jacques le Sourd was born in Paris and graduated from the University of Chicago in 1971, with a degree in political science. His first job was as a writer of entries ("Stalinism," "Leninism," etc.) for the Micropaedia section of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His first newspaper job was as a cub reporter for the Daily Times of Mamaroneck, NY. In 1975, he became drama critic for the Gannett Suburban Newspapers, later consolidated as the Journal News, of White Plains, NY. In 1978, his reviews began to be syndicated nationally by Gannett. He served four years as president of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle. Le Sourd does a weekly radio broadcast with Mary Alice Williams on WCBS News Radio 88.

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Jeremy McCarter is the theater critic of New York magazine. He previously wrote for the culture pages of The New York Sun and is a contributing editor of The New Republic. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian (UK), MTV Magazine and the Best Plays yearbook. In the theater, he has worked as a playwright, director and dramaturg. He studied history at Harvard, and is editing a collection of Henry Fairlie’s work, to be published by Yale University Press.

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David Rooney is the chief theater critic and theater editor for Variety. He began contributing to the entertainment industry paper in 1991, becoming its chief Italian correspondent and film reviewer in 1994. He relocated to New York for Variety in early 2003, initially covering film. At the start of the 2004-05 season, he switched departments to head up Variety's theater coverage. He lived in Sydney, London and traveled extensively in the U.S. before moving to Rome in 1989; while based in Rome, he fronted a weekly roundup of new film releases on Italian Canal Plus affiliate Tele+ and was a host of public broadcaster RAI's Radio 3 show Hollywood Party.

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Frank Scheck reviews theater for the New York Post and the Hollywood Reporter.

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David Sheward is the executive editor and theater critic for Back Stage East, the actors’ resource. He has published two books on show business: It’s a Hit! The Back Stage Book of Broadway’s Longest-Running Shows and The Big Book of Show Business Awards. He served as president of the Drama Desk, the organization of New York-based theater critics, editors and reporters for seven years. He can be seen as contributing correspondent on NY-1 News’ weekly theater show On Stage.

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John Simon covers theater for Bloomberg News. He was born in Yugoslavia in 1925 and received his B.A. in English, as well as his M.A. and Ph.D. in comparative literature, from Harvard University. He has written theater, music, film and book reviews for publications such as New York, Esquire, the Hudson Review, National Review, Opera News, the New Leader, Commonweal, the New Criterion and the New York Times Book Review. Simon has won the George Jean Nathan Award and the George Polk Award for Film Criticism, and is the author of John Simon on Theatre: Criticism 1974-2003 (Applause Books).

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Michael Sommers writes about the New York theater scene for the Star-Ledger of New Jersey and other Newhouse Newspapers. He is a former editor of Back Stage and Theatre Crafts magazines and a regular contributor to the Best Plays series of annuals. He is a judge in the Theatre World and Clarence Derwent awards, and a past president of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle.

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Terry Teachout is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, the music critic of Commentary and the author of “Sightings,” a biweekly column for the Saturday Journal about the arts in America. He also writes about the arts on his blog, “About Last Night” (terryteachout.com). His most recent books are All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine (Harcourt) and A Terry Teachout Reader (Yale University Press). He is currently at work on Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong, to be published by Harcourt in 2008.  

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Linda Winer is chief theater critic of Newsday, which she joined in 1987. She has taught critical writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts since 1992 and has been the host of the “Women in Theatre” series on CUNY-TV since 2002. She was chief theater and dance critic of the Chicago Tribune from 1969-1980, a critic for the New York Daily News from 1980-1982 and USA Today from 1982-1987.  Her criticism has won two first prizes from the American Society of Features Editors, two New York Newswomen’s Club Front Page Awards, the New York Newspaper Guild’s Page One Award. She teaches frequently at the Eugene O’Neill Center, has judged the Pulitzer Prize for drama seven times, five times as panel chair.

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Richard Zoglin has been theater critic for Time magazine since 1996. He joined the magazine in 1983 as a staff writer; for more than a decade he was Time's television critic, and is currently a senior editor for the magazine. Zoglin was born in Kansas City and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a B. A. in English and a master's degree in journalism.  After working as an editor and writer in San Francisco and New York, he joined the Atlanta Constitution as its television critic in 1978. He left Atlanta in 1982 to help launch Time Inc.'s new television magazine, TV-Cable Week, He lives in New York City with his wife, Charla Krupp, a magazine editor, author and television style correspondent.  

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