Review: ‘RIN: Tales From the Life of a Troubadour’ Starring Rinde Eckert at The Kennedy Center

DC Metro Theater Arts
by David Friscic
February 7, 2017

"...Mr. Eckert’s iconoclastic 'performance art' style always produced the unexpected..."

The acclaimed writer, composer, librettist, physician, performer, and director Rinde Eckert delighted and amazed the crowd on Friday evening at the Kennedy Center’s Family Theater. Eckert allowed the audience to enter his seemingly hermetically sealed world of musical language, comedic riffs, rare instrumentals, and anecdotal tales.

Mr. Eckert is the recipient of the Lucille Lortel Award as well as several Drama Desk Awards. He certainly captured the crowd’s attention with amazing verbal wordplay, singing in the highest of registers and playing several musical instruments...

Rinde Eckert. Photo courtesy of the Kennedy Center.

Rinde Eckert. Photo courtesy of the Kennedy Center.

Review: ‘RIN: Tales From the Life of a Troubadour’ Starring Rinde Eckert at The Kennedy Center

DC Metro Theatre Arts
By David Friscic
February 7, 2017

The acclaimed writer, composer, librettist, physician, performer, and director Rinde Eckert delighted and amazed the crowd on Friday evening at the Kennedy Center’s Family Theater. Eckert allowed the audience to enter his seemingly hermetically sealed world of musical language, comedic riffs, rare instrumentals, and anecdotal tales.

Mr. Eckert is the recipient of the Lucille Lortel Award as well as several Drama Desk Awards. He certainly captured the crowd’s attention with amazing verbal wordplay, singing in the highest of registers and playing several musical instruments...

Insightful Reviews of Schick Machine, with text and direction by Rinde Eckert

Insightful Reviews of Schick Machine, with text and direction by Rinde Eckert

Steven Schick at the Peacock in the Paul Dresher Ensemble production of Schick Machine. | Credit: Chi Wang


What’s inside a Schick Machine? There are diagrams and equations, drawn on butcher paper; huge metal sculptures, balls, and hoops, and bells. A deconstructed pipe organ in the shape of a sunburst — called the Peacock — dominates the space. Somehow, Laszlo Klangfarben dreams, these mechanisms will work together in harmony, reconciling past and future, large and small.

Rinde Eckert, Alessandro Sciarroni reviews: Scattered remains

Avant garde theater artist and dazzling jugglers close TBA festival

Oregon Artswatch
By Brett Campbell
October 2, 2016

“There certainly is a lot of stuff here,” Rinde Eckert mused aloud as he gazed around the cluttered stage at the outset of My Fools, his retrospective show that highlighted the closing night of this year’s Time Based Arts Festival. Framed by a desk on one end and a piano on the other, the stage at Portland’s Winningstad Theater boasted costumes, props of various species, a projection screen, MacBook, rows of little cards mounted on sticks that he carried to each “station” on the stage as he performed there, and above all a wide array of musical instruments. All attested to the New York based solo performer’s vast range of skills and artistic creations. For the next hour, we wondered: with all that stuff strewn about, what was he going to do next?

Rinde Eckert performed at Portland’s TBA festival.

Rinde Eckert performed at Portland’s TBA festival.

If anyone is entitled to a Greatest Hits show, it’s Eckert, the supremely versatile singer/writer/instrumentalist/performer/director who, over three decades and more than five dozen works (averaging two per year) has been making some of the era’s most original performance art. We soon realized that the busy stage was meant to evoke the multidisciplinary artist’s fecund career, and possibly his richly furnished mind. So, yes, a lot of stuff indeed...

Concert Review: Rinde Eckert delivers a display of his versatility

The composer, lyricist and multi-instrumentalist offers comic and operatic touches at a USM show.

Portland Press Herald
By Allan Kozinn
September 4, 2016

GORHAM — The University of Southern Maine has an unusual cross-disciplinary project in the works for its new academic year, and on Saturday evening the school presented a concert by the composer, lyricist and multi-instrumentalist Rinde Eckert as a glimpse of what’s in store.

Eckert, who lives in New York and is an estimable figure in the avant-garde music-theater world, will be working with his frequent collaborator, the San Francisco-based composer, guitarist and drummer Paul Dresher, as well as the students, faculty and staff of the university’s music, theater and art departments, on a new work to be presented in April...