‘Champion of the arts’ and longtime Herald theater critic Christine Dolen dies at 74
Christine Dolen, the Miami Herald’s award-winning theater critic for more than 35 years and a longtime voice for the performing arts in South Florida, died Sunday morning at her Davie home.
Dolen was 74 and had idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a progressive lung disease, said her husband, former Sun Sentinel arts editor John Dolen.
“When I think of her, I think not only of her talent, and her warm companionship, but her kindness,” he said. “As an arts editor myself, I was amazed to go with her to plays and see how she could write furious notes in the dark and be able to read them at the end and, in earlier days, turn a sparkling review around in 45 minutes to send it into the paper on deadline. Those two things really amazed me.”
Christine Dolen was born into an artistic family — her dad, Bill Hindman, was a stage actor — in Columbus, Ohio, on June 23, 1950. As a theater critic, she opined on, explained and detailed countless productions at Florida regional theaters including Actors’ Playhouse, Zoetic Stage, GableStage, Coconut Grove Playhouse and Maltz Jupiter Theatre.
Revealing ‘Rent’ and Nilo Cruz
She also hit the road to cover Broadway and Off Broadway shows in New York where she introduced readers in Miami to stage productions including Jonathan Larson’s “Rent.” The musical targeted younger theater audiences that she called “a blueprint for theater’s future” after attending its February 1996 premiere at New York Theatre Workshop two months before the April opening at Broadway’s Nederlander Theatre.
“I have spent more than half my life in aisle seats, watching and analyzing the magic that theater artists work so hard to create,” Dolen, an early supporter of Pulitzer-winning playwright Nilo Cruz, wrote in her farewell column in December 2015.
Cruz, she told readers, declared he wanted to be a poet after reading an Emily Dickinson poem as an 11-year-old at Melrose Elementary School in Miami, two years after arriving from Cuba on a Freedom Flight with his family in 1970. He studied theater at Miami Dade College’s Wolfson Campus in the early 1980s.
In 2002, Dolen called Cruz a “storyteller of infinite craftsmanship and poetic power” for his play “Anna in the Tropics,” which was born in the tiny 104-seat confines of New Theatre’s old space on Coral Gables’ Laguna Street.
Cruz won the biggest honor for that work, the 2003 Drama Pulitzer, making him the first Latino playwright to win drama’s highest honor, she wrote.
“She was one of those people in my life, in my career, who actually changed my life,” Cruz said in a phone conversation with the Miami Herald on Monday. “She started following my work when I was an artist in residence at the Public Theater in New York. She actually flew to New York to see a play that I was presenting there called ‘Dancing on Her Knees.’ Over the years, after that initial visit, she continued to follow my career.”
That connection to Cruz and his writing, and her visits and reporting on his productions in New York and New Jersey, would lead him to develop his most important work on Florida stages and later, lead to the Pulitzer, he said.
“She was bringing attention to my work because during that time I was living up north. Her articles brought my plays to Florida to the first theater that produced my work at Manalapan, Florida Stage,” Cruz said.
“Christine was the one who actually reached out to Misha Berson who was the American theater critic for The Seattle Times. Christine was writing a profile on my play, ‘Anna in the Tropics,’ and she was invited to come to the reading of the play and she loved what I had written. After the play was presented at New Theater she contacted Misha, who was going to be one of the people that was reading plays for the Pulitzer — one of the judges. She recommend it for her to read my play for her to make a recommendation for the Pulitzer. So, it’s ‘Anna in the Tropics’ that changed my life and I owe Christine so much,” Cruz said.
MORE: As the curtain falls on life in an aisle seat, a theater critic remembers
“Since 1979, when I became the Miami Herald’s drama critic, I have seen, reviewed and written about literally thousands of plays and musicals — most of those in South Florida, but plenty of others in New York, London, Paris and Canada and at regional theaters all across the United States. Honestly? I feel privileged to have documented the evolution of theater in the region, review by review, story by story,” Dolen wrote in her 2015 column.
Bruce Springsteen’s personal greeting
Before her run as the Miami Herald’s voice on theater, Dolen, then Christine Arnold, was the rock music critic for the Detroit Free Press in the early-1970s. She said some of her favorite adventures were flying with members of Led Zeppelin, including singer Robert Plant and guitarist Jimmy Page, on their personal jet for interviews and taking a young and fledgling performer named Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band to the circus in Detroit right after the band’s first album, “Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.,” was released in January 1973.
She kept a postcard Springsteen sent her right after the circus that had the LP cover image on the front side and his inscription scrawled in black ink on the back: “Dear Interview Lady. You are pretty. Bruce.”
Dolen joined the Miami Herald in the mid-1970s as a pop music critic for a few years before assuming the theater role.
Dolen’s honors
“I had the privilege of sitting at the desk next to Christine’s for many years, and later, I went to many plays with her. I doubt that I could even count them up. That proximity gave me a steep insight into her quiet — she was in so many ways modest and self-effacing — brilliance and into her deep obsession with both theater and journalism. I’ve never encountered anyone like her,” said former Herald architecture critic Beth Dunlop.
“Her preparation was epic. She read the play. She listened to the music. She interviewed the playwright. She interviewed the director. She spoke with the actors. Her level of knowledge was daunting. I mean daunting. Her love for theater had no boundaries,” Dunlop said.
For her work introducing readers to the best — and, yes, warning away from some of the worst — Dolen was honored as one of only two dual winners of the Carbonell Awards’ George Abbott Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts, in 2001 and 2023. The award is given to honor excellence in resident professional theater and the arts.
“She was a champion of the arts, and she loved theater,” said Broadway and concert director Richard Jay-Alexander. “She was very revered in theatrical and critique circles. She was also a damn good writer.”
Dolen also earned the Green Eyeshade in criticism from the Atlanta Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. She won a first place in arts writing in the Missouri Lifestyle Journalism Awards. American Theatre Magazine named her as one of a dozen of the country’s most influential theater critics in 2011.
Wary of the spotlight
Dolen, with her leading role looks, dazzling smile and theatrical background, didn’t pursue an acting career because of her self-consciousness, she told a reporter from Florida International University’s Lee Caplin School of Journalism & Media.
“I just don’t like to be on a stage and have the sensation of people looking at me,” Dolen said in a 2022 FIU story. “In high school I discovered I could write, so I thought this was a great way of combining two of my passions.”
For someone who covered heavy dramas and rollicking musicals like “Rent” and “Hamilton,” Dolen’s soft-spoken manners proved a fascinating contrast.
“I’m sure she was capable of being angry and all the other stuff that human beings are capable of, but I never saw an inch of that in her. Chris was just very gentle. I never heard her raise her voice. Even when she was frustrated, I just thought she was wonderful,” said her former colleague, retired Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr., a 2004 Pulitzer winner for commentary.
“My signature Chris story has to be how she took me and my family in after Hurricane Andrew in 1992,” Pitts said.
Hurricane Andrew ravaged South Miami-Dade, destroying the rented and uninsured Pitts home as the family of seven ran from room to room to seek shelter from the Category 5 winds.
MORE: What Hurricane Andrew did to us on Aug. 24, 1992. See it in pictures, video and words
“That, to me, says everything about Chris,” Pitts said.
The Pitts brood, including adolescents and youngest daughter Onjel, then 2, the same age as Dolen son Sean, moved into Chris and John Dolen’s three bedroom home for about six weeks, Pitts’ wife Marilyn recalls.
“It was the most generous thing ... that’s ever been done for me.” Pitts said. “We bonded.”
Legacy after the Herald
For her retirement from the Herald, Dr. Seuss’s Grinch — in costume from a Christmas season musical performance at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts that Dolen had favorably reviewed — arrived unannounced in the newsroom office to wish her well. Dolen continued to serve as a judge for the Carbonnel Awards. She wrote freelance theater reviews and profiles for local arts nonprofit ArtburstMiami until April 2024.
“Chris’ magic was her ability to make readers, both theater lovers and those who may have never seen a show, care about theater because she was so passionate about the craft in her writing and her presence. Our editing-writing sessions were a joy,” said Artburst editor Michelle Solomon.
Curtain call
Dolen’s friends, colleagues and the South Florida theater community shared applause for the critic.
“Simply put, it’s the end of an era. Brilliant arts journalist, great supporter of South Florida theater, and dear and true friend. The world will be a little less bright moving forward,” playwright Michael McKeever, producing director at the Miami-based nonprofit Zoetic Stage, wrote on her Facebook page.
“Christine was a compassionate, dedicated, and deeply appreciative supporter of South Florida theater,” said Lawrence and Barbara Stein, founders of Actors’ Playhouse at the Miracle Theatre, and Artistic Director David Arisco, in a joint statement.
“A once-in-a-lifetime storyteller, mentor and friend, let our industry forever celebrate her legacy by holding our standards as high as if she were in the audience. South Florida theater is better because of Christine,” added Actors’ Playhouse General Manager Brooke Noble.
“She was, and always will be in my mind, the consummate pro — thoughtful, talented, wrote with grace, blessed with decency and integrity,” said David Lawrence Jr., the Miami Herald’s publisher during a chunk of Dolen’s time in the newsroom’s feature department.
And finally, from Dolen herself in her farewell column: “Thank you to the artists whose work made my ‘job’ such an engaging, endlessly fascinating pleasure. Being the Miami Herald’s theater critic has felt like being in a graduate school that never ends. Except now, it has.”
Survivors and services
Dolen’s survivors include her husband John Dolen; their son Sean; sisters Kathy Brooks, Dorothy Hindman and Beth Safien; and brother Cap Safian.
A memorial service will be planned for a later date.
Miami Herald reporter Howard Cohen worked alongside Dolen in the Features department reviewing pop music and the arts. She asked him to become one of her backup theater critics from the 1990s forward.
This story was originally published February 2, 2025 at 7:55 PM.
