travsd

R.I.P. Robert MacNeil

PBS’s Robert MacNeil (1931-2024) passed away back on April 12.

On the Newshour, Jim Lehrer, like most of MacNeil’s friends and colleagues, used to call him “Robin”, but I’ll refrain from taking that liberty. I don’t usually memorialize straight-up news reporters here, but I have a couple of reasons for fudging it in this case.

One is MacNeil’s nine part educational tv series The Story of English (1986) and the accompanying book. I am a huge fan of both, and I especially recommend it to actors who want to learn and understand accents. Over the years I have gotten increasingly granular in the realm of regional English accents — I’m no Henry Higgins yet, but I have definitely improved and can generally navigate the dialects of the mother country now almost as well as the ones of the U.S. This show largely sent me down that path.

My other reason: MacNeil was chairman of the board of the MacDowell Colony from 1993 to 2010. This means he had just taken the reins when I stayed there in early 1994, as chronicled here just a couple of days ago.

MacNeil co-anchored the Newshour with Lehrer from 1975 to 1995. It was my primary source of tv news during the second half of that run, and for a number of years thereafter, after Lehrer took over. We lost Lehrer back in 2020.

As if you couldn’t deduce it from his dry Canadian manner, MacNeil was from Nova Scotia. Surprisingly he began his tv journalism career not at the CBC but at ITV in London, later moving to Reuters, and then NBC. Both MacNeil and Lehrer, along with Bob Schieffer, Peter Jennings, and Dan Rather were reporting in Dallas on the day of the Kennedy Assassination. The tragedy proved the making of all their careers. From 1971 to 1975, MacNeil helmed Washington Week in Review, where his coverage of Watergate further served to cement his reputation in broadcast journalism, resulting in his elevation to anchor of the Newshour.

MacNeil also played the Player King at that 2000 version of Hamlet with Ethan Hawke (he played him as a newscaster)! If there’s ONE play for a fan of the English language to make a cameo in, that’s the one!

Published by travsd

Writer and performer Trav S.D. (www.travsd.com) is best known for his books "No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous" (2005) and "Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube" (2013). He has written for the NY Times, the Village Voice, American Theatre, Time Out NY, Reason, the Villager and numerous other publications. Trav has been in the vanguard of New York’s vaudeville and burlesque scenes since 1995 when he launched his company Mountebanks, presenting hundreds of acts ranging from Todd Robbins to Dirty Martini to Tammy Faye Starlite to the Flying Karamazov Brothers. He has directed his own plays, revues and solo pieces at such venues as Joe’s Pub, La Mama, HERE, Dixon Place, Theater for the New City, the Ohio Theatre, the Brick, and 6 separate shows in the NY International Fringe Festival. In 2014 he produced and directed the smash-hit "I’ll Say She Is", the first ever revival of the Marx Brothers hit 1924 Broadway show in the NY International Fringe Festival.