Jeff Smith
Jeff Smith has been a theater critic for the Reader since 1980 and also writes the local history column, “Unforgettable: Long Ago San Diego.” He has a Ph.D. in literature and critical theory from the University of California, Irvine, and wrote his doctoral dissertation on Shakespeare. He was the original writing director of two University of California freshman composition programs: the Humanities Core Course, at Irvine, and the Revelle Humanities/Writing Program at UCSD. Over the years, Jeff has dramaturged dozens of shows. Favorites include Sam Shepard’s Tooth of Crime, Peter Barnes’s Red Noses (both at the San Diego Rep), Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (North Coast Rep), Things May Disimprove: Samuel Becket One-Acts (L&L Productions), and Shakespeare’s Hamlet (New Village Arts).
Recent Stories
The Coldest Wind
Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2010
At first it looks as if Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers (1991) will repeat the coming-of-age theme in his Brighton ...
Death Over Life
Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2010
The idea behind Duncan Sheik and Kyle Jarrow’s new musical has potential: What if only certain characters sing? And what ...
Mania with Meaning
Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2010
David Rabe set Hurlyburly, a three-hour emotional maelstrom, in the Hollywood Hills, early ’80s. As I watched Ion Theatre’s snappy, ...
Jack Sprat and His Wife
Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2010
In the bottom circle of Dante’s Inferno, Satan is a gigantic, three-headed monster waist-deep in a lake of ice. His ...
Standouts
Wednesday, Dec. 30, 2009
Greatest achievement of 2009: though double-teamed by a rotten economy and the swine flu scare, our theaters survived, though many ...
Hallucinatory Bouillabaisse
Wednesday, Dec. 9, 2009
In 1953, Tennessee Williams sent the equivalent of a neutron bomb to Broadway. He wrote Camino Real to demolish theatrical ...
Clyde and Bonnie
Wednesday, Dec. 2, 2009
I must admit a bias. Long before way back when, the Pacific Theatre in Santa Cruz audience-tested movies on Tuesday ...
Boughs of Folly
Tuesday, Nov. 24, 2009
And now for something (almost completely) different: for decades, the San Diego Rep staged A Christmas Carol during the holiday ...
Brothers Back and Forth
Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2009
Link and younger brother Booth have virtuoso hands. To hear him tell it, Link was “the Stink,” the “be all ...
Word Scenery
Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2009
If she’s right, Tiffany Stern has cracked a theatrical mystery: how companies rehearsed — or didn’t — between 1567 and ...






