Larry Stark

Larry Stark (born August 4, 1932 in New Brunswick, New Jersey) is an American journalist and reviewer best known for his in-depth coverage of the Boston theater scene at his website, Theater Mirror. In newspapers and online, Stark has written hundreds of reviews of local productions and Broadway tryouts from 1962 to the present. His Boston readers have given him such labels as "head theater angel of Massachusetts" and "Dean of the alternative theater critics."

Between 1950 and 1956, Stark studied English at Rutgers University, leaving New Jersey for Cambridge, Massachusetts in January, 1957. In 1956-57 he co-edited the publication Stellar with Ted White, who recalled:

I lavished more care on the package than I did on the contents. The contents were good. Larry Stark was a good editor -- much better than I, then -- and when he dropped out I'd learned enough from him to keep up the standards, but the material was mostly by other people.

In the summer and fall of 1957, Stark acted in two Harvard stage productions and then worked backstage at Cambridge theaters for the next five years. In 1962, he began doing theater reviews for MIT's The Tech under the pseudonym Charles Foster Ford. During this period he used a basement mimeograph machine to print the work of local poets with his Larry Stark Press, notable for publishing Peter Guralnick's first book in 1964.