Misha Berson, nationally prominent theater critic and author of the authoritative book Something’s Coming, Something Good: West Side Story and the American Imagination, died late Thursday, Feb. 13, “very quickly and unexpectedly,” at her Seattle home, her husband, Paul Schiavo, said.
“Although the cause of her demise is not known with certainty, it appears to have been a sudden and major heart attack,” Schiavo wrote on Facebook in announcing her death.
Berson, who in recent years has written frequently for Oregon ArtsWatch, began her arts journalism career in San Francisco, where she spent a dozen years as theater critic for the San Francisco Bay Guardian after spending time as executive director of Theatre Bay Area and as performing arts director of the Fort Mason Center. She then moved to Seattle, where she spent 25 years as theater critic for The Seattle Times.
“My first week as Seattle Times drama critic, back in 1991, I got lost en route to a show,” Berson wrote in a farewell column in the newspaper in 2016.
“A longtime San Franciscan and a Seattle newbie, I had a confusing city map but no GPS, cellphone or brightly lit marquee to guide me. On the darkened Seattle Center grounds, I finally found Seattle Repertory Theatre and dashed in to review Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author — by, yes, the skin of my teeth.
“So began a job that lasted longer, and was more fulfilling, dynamic and central to my existence, than I’d ever anticipated.”
Over the years I saw and talked with Misha infrequently: never, it seemed, often enough, but always with great pleasure. She was a writer of national scope who served several years on the theater jury for the Pulitzer Prize, one year as jury chair. I would run into her at openings at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where she was a key national critic writing about the festival’s work, and sometimes in Portland or Seattle when we were covering the same events. Her conversation was always stimulating, she liked to laugh, and her writing was clear, clean, and imaginative, following the art where it took her.
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“Misha was, as most of you know, a person of extraordinary vitality, endowed with great love for life,” Schiavo wrote in his appreciation of his wife’s character and her work. “Those qualities flowed both from and into her work. As a writer on theater and drama, she was a keen and insightful observer, yet never in a detached, analytic way. Rather, her devotion to the art form was passionate and visceral, born of her deep love of language, narrative and stagecraft. Steeped in theatrical tradition and mindful of its virtues, she nevertheless remained open to, and supportive of, innovative concepts and practices. She knew the Greek tragedies, was thoroughly acquainted with the Shakespeare canon, yet enjoyed and appreciated Broadway musicals. … Always she sought in her writing to convey her enthusiasm for theater and her conviction of its importance to society, and to encourage her readers to engage more thoughtfully with it.”
Misha retired from The Seattle Times but not from writing or the theater. Her byline could be found in American Theatre magazine, Variety, Yahoo Entertainment, the (Toronto) Star, and elsewhere. Several years ago she began writing as a freelancer for Oregon ArtsWatch, and I discovered the deep pleasure of being her editor. For ArtsWatch she wrote about Seattle theater and other arts, from visual to opera, and on several occasions about what was happening on Broadway.
Her most recent ArtsWatch piece, on Jan. 14 of this year, was on the Broadway tour of the musical version of David Lindsay-Abaire’s Kimberly Akimbo, which played in Seattle before scooting down the freeway for its Portland run. Before that, in November 2024, she wrote about Seattle’s holiday-season shows; and in October 2024 she profiled Dámaso Rodríguez, the former artistic director of Portland’s Artists Repertory Theatre, who had taken over as artistic director of the larger Seattle Rep and made his directing debut there with Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, a play he had also directed to acclaim at Artists Rep. You can read more of her ArtsWatch stories here.
Misha had been planning a pre-Tony Awards trip to New York this spring and would have written about her discoveries there for ArtsWatch.
In addition to her West Side Story book Berson was the author of Between Worlds: Contemporary Asian-American Plays and a pair of books about San Francisco theater in its early days: San Francisco Stage: From Gold Rush to Golden Spike, 1849-1869 and San Francisco Stage: From Transcontinental Railroad to Great Earthquake, 1870-1906.
“Misha’s artistic affinities extended also to music, film and fiction,” Schiavo wrote about his wife. “She had nearly encyclopedic knowledge of popular music and a particular reverence for jazz vocalists. She, herself, loved to sing and did so with a wonderful sense of style. She was fortunate to perform occasionally with some of Seattle’s best professionals, but she also deigned to sing with me. One of the treats of my life with her was to accompany her in performances and, more recently, in home recordings of songs close to her heart.
“Misha was an inveterate film viewer and was especially interested in film noir. A lifelong reader, she ended nearly every evening with the latest novel that had come into her hands. But in addition to her intellectual pursuits — more accurately, as an adjunct to them — she loved to travel, to cook, to be in nature. The daughter of a sports writer, she was a die-hard baseball fan and recently came to enjoy football, especially when the Seattle Seahawks were involved.”
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All in all, Misha Berson embraced life.
“(M)aybe my best qualification for the job was restless curiosity,” she wrote in her Seattle Times farewell column. “Art never stands still, and you have to follow it. It fails, succeeds and surprises, with manifold interpretations of love, lust, revenge, politics, science, history, war. Paraphrasing Maya Angelou (who borrowed from the Roman dramatist Terence), nothing human is alien to theater.”
