“Smell of the Greasepaint, The Funds of the Crowd”

by Patrick Healy 


[In another article on inside theater, the New York Times reports on innovations in financing commercial productions.  This one started in London (where the laws are different) and is called “crowdfunding,” and it’s on its way to the U.S. and Broadway.  The days of the big, powerful individual producer has been gone for a while, but even the producing conglomerate or consortium may be on its way out, if Patrick Healy’s report is an indication of things to come on the Great White Way.]


LONDON — As an up-and-coming theater producer, Jamie Hendry didn’t have many investors when he started raising money for a musical based on the children’s novel “The Wind in the Willows.”


What his show did have was a famous title and a celebrity script writer, Julian Fellowes, the creator of “Downton Abbey.” And their publicity value came in handy given how Mr. Hendry was trying to raise money for the show here: by appealing to the masses.


He raised about one million pounds ($1.7 million) last winter by selling equity stakes in “Willows” in relatively small units of £1,000, £2,500 and £5,000 through an online campaign. Any British citizen could buy in with a debit card by visiting Mr. Hendry’s website, which included a plainly worded prospectus dotted with images of Toad and Mole, characters from the story. He had the money in three months from 400 people, and he now has a list of 10,000 others who signed up to learn about investing in the future. “Willows” hopes to open in the West End in the fall of 2015.


Call it entrepreneurship or gimmickry, but Mr. Hendry’s strategy was London theater’s most ambitious attempt at crowdfunding — and a method that will soon become an option for New York producers. Proposed changes to United States securities rules, which could take effect by this fall, will make it far easier for Americans to raise money the way Mr. Hendry did. 


“The old-time producers with wealthy investors are a dying breed,” said Mr. Hendry, who is 29 and studied computer science and management in college. “Who’s going to put millions of pounds into a commercial musical when those people are no longer with us? We have to find ways to expand support for theater.”


Under the proposed United States rules, theater artists and producers would be able to publicize and sell equity stakes in plays and musicals online, which is now generally prohibited. The proposed rules would also expand the pool of potential backers.


Current rules make it cumbersome to enlist so-called nonaccredited investors, or people who earn less than $200,000 a year or have a low net worth: those who might be risking their life savings on a play or musical, say, given that 75 percent of Broadway shows flop. The proposed rules would make it easier for them to invest limited sums and allow Broadway and Off Broadway productions to raise up to $1 million a year through crowdfunding websites registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission.


Under the current system, most producers have long made private equity offerings to wealthy associates and friends, many of whom have invested in theater before. Broadway plays regularly cost $3 million to produce, and musicals tend to cost $8 million or more, and investors usually put up at least $25,000 apiece; the amounts are considerably less for Off Broadway. (The equivalent amounts in London are often one-third of Broadway’s numbers.) 


“In American theater, we now have a powerful club of producers who work with wealthy investors to put on shows they like, and younger people don’t have access,” said Crystal Skillman, a New York playwright who has earned strong reviews for Off Off Broadway plays like “Geek!” and “Cut.” “Being able to recruit our own investors online could become revolutionary.”


Ms. Skillman and her husband, the comic book writer Fred Van Lente, are among the thousands of theater artists in the United States and Britain who have increasingly turned to crowdfunding websites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo for financing. But people donate though these platforms; they are not purchasing equity in shows. 


Ms. Skillman said that she and Mr. Van Lente planned to look into selling equity in shows once the proposed securities rules take effect. 


Broadway has had only one major attempt at crowdfunding: the 2011 revival of “Godspell,” in which 700 people invested $1,000 or more and made up about 55 percent of the show’s $5 million budget. The “Godspell” strategy was hamstrung, however, by the securities rules: Ken Davenport, the lead producer, said he could not make online sales as Mr. Hendry did, and recruiting nonaccredited investors involved red tape and legal expenses.


“I would crowdfund again, if it was the right show — ‘Godspell’ was about community, and we had a community of investors — and if the rules do become lighter,” said Mr. Davenport, who is going the traditional route of recruiting accredited investors as a lead producer for the Broadway show “It’s Only a Play” this fall. 


“I just find it ridiculous in this country that we prevent people from investing in Broadway if they are not accredited and well connected to producers, and yet anyone can travel within 60 miles of their homes and bet their life savings at a casino,” added Mr. Davenport, who writes a blog called The Producer’s Perspective.


The “Godspell” approach has not caught on, because most Broadway producers look down on crowdfunding, citing the presence of their pools of experienced investors and the administrative headaches that Mr. Davenport had. But “Willows” could emerge as a new model, especially for Off Broadway as well as London. The producers of the current West End revival of “The Pajama Game” raised about $340,000 late last winter from 218 investors through the equity crowdfunding site Seedrs; the money accounted for 15 percent of the show’s capitalization. The limited-run production is scheduled to end in September and will probably close at a loss, although the producers declined to confirm that.


Other British producers are interested in licensing Mr. Hendry’s online platform, he said; he declined to name them. But several London producers said crowdfunding seemed like a tool for producers who needed cash or a stunt to raise the profile of younger ones like Mr. Hendry, who has also been a producer here on the Beatles’ tribute show “Let It Be” and the musical “Legally Blonde.”


“Jamie gave a very posh workshop of the musical at the Savoy Hotel, but it remains to be seen if his approach will work and if the show will indeed open,” said Michael Codron, a producer who has been mounting shows here and on Broadway for more than 50 years.


“When I started out, I had a group of people — agents, other producers, people I got from my accountant — who regularly invested with me, and I was sufficiently autocratic that I didn’t have to listen to their opinions,” said Mr. Codron, who was responsible for major premieres of works by Tom Stoppard, David Hare and Harold Pinter, among others. “Now, I usually take a deep breath and write my own check to get shows on, because there’s too much paperwork with investors today. Crowdfunding sounds like even more bureaucracy.”


Mr. Hendry said he had raised “a significant chunk” of his $11 million show budget, chiefly from traditional investors, including some in the United States. As for his online investors, most of them are affluent or middle-class professionals in their 40s, 50s and 60s from London and surrounding counties, and 91 percent of them had never invested in theater before, according to a survey by Mr. Hendry’s office.


“The game is on in London and New York to find the investors of the future,” he said.


[This article was originally published in “The Arts” section (sec. C) of the New York Times on 28 July 2014.  Patrick Healy has a New York Times reporter since 2005 (when he started reporting on politics) and has been covering theater for the paper since 2008.  His beat extends from news, features, and profiles about Broadway, Off Broadway, elsewhere in New York, and then to the national theater scene.]

                                                                                                                

 

Reviewing the Situation: 'Spider-Man' & the Press

On 8 January, Charles Isherwood wrote a column in the New York Times about reviewing previews. His comments were directed at the argument between the press and the producers of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark because some reviewers—Linda Winer of Long Island’s Newsday and Jeremy Gerard of Bloomberg News, in particular—had published criticism of the production. It was a topical issue because Spider-Man, as you all know, had been running in previews since 28 November 2010 and had recently postponed its opening once a fourth time, this time from 11 January to 7 February, making it a potential record-breaker for Broadway shows in previews. (Isherwood asserted that the Times would honor the official opening, but that the culture editor would reexamine that position should the opening be further delayed. As we know now, that's what transpired.) As a former review writer, I’ve been contemplating the question a little since it arose. The debate seems to be predicated on the dichotomy of reviewing a play in previews because they’re extended and the tickets are at full price versus not reviewing because the play’s not finished and the producers haven’t declared it ready for scrutiny. What no one seems to feel is that this is a false dichotomy because there’s a third option: to write a feature that’s not a review. Though it can still discuss the work as it stands now, a news report can also talk about the delayed opening, the lack of notification that the performances are previews (that is, dress rehearsals), that tickets are selling for full price ($180-$290 for Saturday night orchestra seats) for an unfinished product, and that it’s a money pit. That’s what I’d do. (In fact, that’s what I did in essence when I published an article in the Village Voice about the work on Blue Heaven [”As It Is in Heaven,” 22 September 1992]. Of course, that was at the behest of the director and playwright, and I was attending rehearsals, not a preview—but it’s basically the same idea. I plan to republish this article on ROT in a few days.) It’s simply theater journalism, I think—reporting on a current cultural event, and Spider-Man is unquestionably newsworthy.

Then Ben Brantley published a review of Spider-Man in the Times on 8 February, the Tuesday after what would have been the opening date before the producers postponed it the fifth time till 15 March. Many other outlets also ran reviews of the production. Most were quite negative, though much of the tone really sounded like sour grapes to me. Brantley actually said that he thought everyone in the audience was there to see an accident, and it sounded to me like he was, too. Maybe I read too much into his prose, but it felt to me as if Brantley, at least, wanted the show to be bad so he could pan it.

(I’m not going to capsulize or comment on the content of the reviews themselves. First of all, since I haven’t seen the play, it wouldn’t be fair and, second, there are plenty of sites on the web where a reader can find articles about the controversy which include quotations. Of course, you can go to the individual publications themselves and read the notices for yourselves. The main publications, aside from the Times, are the Daily News, New York Post, USA Today, L.A. Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Variety, and New York magazine. Like Newsday and Bloomberg News, the Newark Star-Ledger ran a review earlier. Several of the review writers said they expected to re-review the production after its official opening. Several others said they wouldn’t. For my purposes on ROT, it’s enough to note that all the notices were poor to awful. The important point here is that they were written and published.)

The editors and reviewers all say that there was no collusion, according to Patrick Healy in the Times the next day, but the word obviously went out since almost all the press ran reviews. The producers are raising a ruckus over this, for obvious reasons: they think the notices are premature since they’re still actively working on the show. "The PILE-ON by the critics was ridiculous and uncalled for,” declared Rick Miramontez, press agent and spokesman for Spider-Man. “Their actions are unprecedented and UNCOOL!" The day the notices came out, he pronounced it “a huge disappointment. Changes are still being made, and any review that runs before the show is frozen is totally invalid.” I understand this, and I actually support them to a certain extent. In his book The Art of Writing Reviews (http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/the-art-of-writing-reviews/6785272), on which I commented on ROT, Kirk Woodward wrote of reviewing a play in tryouts:

The problem is, of course, that these reviewers bring back judgments on what are essentially works in progress. Someone may evaluate the way you’re dressed once you’re ready, but to pop into the room while you’re half-clothed and say, “That looks awful!” is absurd. No more absurd, though, than to report on a work in its tryout phase.

Kirk was writing specifically about out-of-town tryouts, a practice that isn’t followed much anymore, but the principal still holds—and applies in the current case of Spider-Man. In my ROT commentary on Writing Reviews (November 2009). I declared:

Even when the producers charge the same for a seat at the preview as they do for post-opening tickets, they’re still previews. You’re watching a dress rehearsal, you understand. The cast is still working, and sometimes things haven’t gelled—might even be changed before opening. Reviewers who see a performance before opening night aren’t seeing the finished product.

I still believe that, even in the face of the phenomenon of Spider-Man since, as I also wrote:

In many shows, the first time everyone has gone through the entire play with full tech and costumes the way it’s supposed to be seen by the audience is the final dress rehearsal. . . . In new plays, it’s not unusual for new lines and even new scenes to be inserted within days of opening; new songs can be added to musicals. Because of the labor-intensivity of the rehearsal period plus the union regulations, technical adjustments are often brought in at the last minute: costumes don’t fit quite right yet, set pieces haven’t been tested, lights aren’t focused right. . . . It’s more like the first time a cook makes a new recipe—it’s not really ready for primetime.

The further back from opening night you see a play, the less stageworthy it will be—though by “critics’ previews” the show’s supposed to be “frozen.” That only means no more changes can be made; it doesn’t mean the work is complete. To be fair, though, Brantley did write, “I would like to acknowledge here that ‘Spider-Man’ doesn’t officially open until March 15 . . . ,” thus noting that he saw a preview over a month before the production is now scheduled to open. The rest of the column, however, was phrased just like any other New York Times theater review (except, perhaps, a little more negative than most): there was no way to distinguish this review from one of a production that had completed its previews and had been deemed to be “finished.” In my view, that’s the incorrect approach.

Some in the press (and on the blogs) have described the relationship between reviewers and producers as an implicit contract. The producers give the media outlets free tickets for their shows, usually a pair of the best seats, in exchange for the promise that the writers will only see the performance when the producers want them to and won’t publish reviews until after a specific date, the “press opening.” Some critics of the move to review Spider-Man early have characterized it as a breach of the agreement. Others see it as a signal to re-examine the convention. On Huffington Post, arts journalist Leonard Jacobs cast the contretemps as a way to look at “what constitutes a critic and who decides,” because part of the argument review writers are using to justify publishing early is the fact that blog reviewers and on-line writers, with no sense of the obligation that traditional press writers have, are writing reviews or critiques whenever they buy a ticket and see the show. Isaac Butler, who on 5 January wrote on his blog, Parabasis, a detailed critique of Spider-Man, appended a note to his post in which he acknowledged: “I paid full price for my ticket and I have no deal with producers where they give me free tickets in exchange for waiting to see a show when they want me to. I also think that custom is somewhat arcane and should be rethought.” If blogger-reviewers can publish without limitations, where does that leave the print or broadcast reviewer? Some critics and defenders of the advance publication have debated that such web‑‘viewers such as Butler aren’t “critics” anyway and their posts aren’t “reviews.” (Jacobs pronounced, “Butler's post is quite manifestly a review.”) If sour grapes had been on the menu last 8 February, is it any wonder? The traditional journalists find themselves at the back of the line while all this good stuff is happening on their beat. Part of this response, I’m sure, is also a foreboding that Jacobs explains:

If a blogger-critic can attract thousands of readers a week (it can happen now, and will happen more in the future), and if a blogger-critic can buy tickets for a show and write about it, what will prevent that blogger-critic from generating even more readership, even more influence? What will press agents and traditional-media critics do then? How long will tradition, protocol and reality exist in opposition?

If you subscribe to this fear—and it’s certainly not at all beyond possibility, the way newspapers are shrinking and dropping arts coverage as more and more people turn to the ‘Net for news and information anyway—then there’s reason for traditional journalists to fight for a piece of the action. If the producers and some unspoken agreement that was put in place long before they were born are taking away their ability to cover their beat, why shouldn’t they fight back with the means that are at their disposal?

(I must confess here that this discussion has made me consider my own position. I, too, am a blogger and I write about theater, among other subjects. I don’t consider what I publish on performances reviews, but let’s be honest: they are critical analyses of productions even if they don’t fit any academic or journalistic definition of “review.” Now, I generally avoid previews; I like to see a play when the creators have decided it’s finished. But what if I do see a play before it opens? Would I blog on it? I don’t rush my reports onto ROT; I give myself the leisure of taking my time writing down my thoughts—and I even do a little research sometimes, which takes a bit more time. But would I publish before opening? I suspect I would, since I “don’t write reviews,” and I buy my own ticket, and I don’t write for a traditional media outlet. Those are all the same excuses the pre-reviewers (as Jacobs might call them) are using now, because the Isaac Butlers are already doing it. That may be why I feel kinship with the journalists even as I disagree with their final approach.)

Though I sympathize with the reviewers’ position more than a little, at least as I’ve stated it here, I think both sides are behaving improperly. The retributive tone of the reviews is unbecoming—and may make a reader wonder about the writer’s objectivity and sincerity. Are those really his opinions? Is she just twisting the knife while she has a chance? The Spider-Man reviews that appeared in February made it sound to me as if the reviewers and editors were pissed that the producers were holding them off (and charging full price for tickets—several of the writers stated what they’d paid for their seats), so they’ve taken a kind of revenge by panning the show in advance of its actual opening, hoping to damage it. I hope that’s not true, but that’s how it seemed to me.

Further, the insistence that the show’s cost is a reason to review it early is specious. The waste, if that’s what it turns out to be, might make us angry, but it’s no justification for breaching the producer-journalist compact. It may be worth reporting in context, such as to ask why, with such immense expenditures, the sets are so cheap-jack (if Brantley’s assessment is accurate). But it seems unnecessarily mercenary to harp on Spider-Man’s price tag as a rationale for going to print. (What’s the logic? They’re spending like Bernie Madoff, so I get to take a shot at them early? How does that make sense?)

Another claim used to justify the pre-reviews is that the play’s selling tickets and spectators are flocking to the theater, but they don’t know what they’re buying. Really? Isn’t that just a little arrogant? It presumes, first, that the reviewer is really just a consumer reporter whose responsibility it is to judge a product for sale and advise the paying customer whether it’s worth the price or not. I know that some arts journalists think of themselves that way, but most, I believe, see themselves as reporters covering the special field of the arts, in this case theater. Second, it assumes that the ticket-buyers need the reviewer’s opinion in order to make a decision, that the spectators can’t decide for themselves; and third, it takes for granted that there are no other viable sources of information available to the theatergoer—which is patently untrue since they’ve been arriving at the Foxwoods Theatre in droves even without formal reviews based, I would guess, on the scads of articles, reports, and rumors flooding the press, TV, and the ‘Net all this time. No, what this argument sounds like to me is frustration that everyone else is getting in their licks, and the traditional review writer is being left out. It sounds a little juvenile, doesn’t it?

I’ve proposed that journalists write on the production, even critically, not in a review per se, but in a report on the production, its status, its newsworthiness, and its issues. I don’t object to a writer assessing the quality of the production in such a report, but only as a work in progress. If a show’s been in previews for months, like Spider-Man, some evidence of the artistic work should be visible—and it’d be fair game for “reporting” (as opposed to “reviewing”). I don’t think this freedom ought to apply to a show in the normal run of previews, about four weeks, before opening. Though it seems wrong to write an actual review of a show that’s not finished, even if the official opening has been delayed for months because of problems, I think writers can say what they saw at the preview and describe the problems, as well as the assets, that are being presented to paying audiences. It’d be acceptable, for instance, for the writer to point out moments or aspects of the show that look promising, even though that promise isn’t fulfilled yet. I think a writer can couch this in terms that make it clear that work is still in progress and that the current state of the production is not its final form. That way readers can determine if they want to see the show now, in its interim condition, or wait till opening and see it finished. They know where they and the writer stand.

Linda Winer’s Newsday column on 25 December last year is a perfect example of what I have in mind. She reported on the aspects of the production that have been in the news (“four premiere push-backs . . . , four high-profile injuries, 19 previews at full price . . . , and public investigations by state and federal safety agencies”) and she commented on the current state of the show (“safety measures are being secured and director Julie Taymor is said to be making much-needed changes to the meandering book”). Winer also remarked on the reviewing debate (“it seems that critics are now the only interested parties who can't see the bride before the wedding”). So she was behaving like a reporter on the theater beat, but she didn’t avoid making critical comments (“the surprisingly conventional Broadway-pop score by U2's Bono and the Edge”; ”Joshua Kobak [the flying Spidey], and his daring (especially in a fight scene with Patrick Page's terrific Green Goblin) was a highlight of the show”). Like a news reporter, too, Winer wrote about some non-performance elements of the experience, like audience reaction (“. . . he admired the sets and the special effects”; “. . . he was wowed by the stunts, but acknowledged that ‘the sense that something unsafe might happen is spectacular.’”) And to complete her approach, Winer acknowledged she was describing a work still in progress: “I understand that is the official purpose of previews.” Winer’s article, while including critical appraisal, was a report; it was comprehensive in its coverage, forthright and open, well written and even witty—a perfect model for what I think reviewers should have aimed for in their pre-reviews (though no one else did, from my perspective).

As for the producers, they may be relishing all the coverage, even if it’s been negative for the most part. (No publicity is bad publicity, I guess.) And maybe that’s one of the reasons they’re running in previews for so long. I remember a Papp production of Timon of Athens in 1996 that ran a month in previews and didn’t officially open until a week before it closed in order to keep the press out. Circle in the Square began previews of Hughie starring Al Pacino on 25 July 1996 and didn’t open until 22 August for a scheduled closing date of 31 August (though the theater added an extension until November). In the commercial theater, producers of Home Sweet Homer with Yul Brynner, knowing it wasn’t a good show, stayed on the road for a year before coming to Broadway and suffering from the reviewers’ opprobrium. (After 11 previews, Homer opened and closed on 4 January 1976. I think it may have gone back on the road, trying to outrun the New York reviews. I saw the show at the Kennedy Center in Washington—which had produced it—before it came here, and it was pretty awful.) In 2006, the producers of the stage musical Lord of the Rings tried to run their show, which was getting terrible reviews I recall, all over the place, mostly outside the U.S.—it may have been a Canadian product. I assume they lost a lot of money (and I don’t know if they’re still running somewhere like Canberra or Auckland), but my guess is that they knew the show would be lambasted in the New York press, so they kept it out for as long as they could to make money before the inevitable dénouement; they never did get into New York in the end. Considering how much they’re spending on Spider-Man, its producers obviously need to recoup as much of the cost as they can before they let the press affect their box-office appeal. (I don’t know if the economics works for them, with $65 million at stake, but I can guess that that’s their strategy. They’ve also been using focus groups to get spectator feedback—like a TV producer or a candy manufacturer.) Spider-Man isn’t doing out-of-town tryouts (they say their elaborate tech makes that impractical), so they’re using previews for the same thing. Unfortunately for the producers, previews in New York City don’t actually prevent the New York press from getting into the theater; it only means that convention is supposed to prohibit the reviewers from publishing before the play opens. Obviously that only works for a limited time. They got caught in February; we’ll have to see if anything comes of the publication.

With the wasted money—not to overlook wasted talent and energy—I don’t have much sympathy for the producers on this. Everything I’ve read, not just the reviews, tells me this is an unworthy effort. (If, as some say, Taymor’s working as if this were a movie, not a stage play, it’s kind of shameful since she’s a product of the stage, not film. Linda Winer, by the way, asserts Taymor’s intent is “to compete with arena rock, the Spidey movies and video games.”) The photos with the Times review showed characters in cartoon/comic book costumes. That’s more reminiscent to me of Disney on Ice than a legit stage musical. Taymor’s reinterpretation of the Lion King cartoon figures was brilliant—but she used stage conventions and traditions (intercultural ones to a great degree) to accomplish that, and that was fantastic. But this is almost like live-action CGI—the designers just translated comic book characters to 3D. It’s not interesting to me, theatrically speaking. The writing sounds like it’s just a pastiche of scenes with no cohesion, and until the February reviews, no one said much about the music that I’d read. The names most associated with Spider-Man, along with Taymor, are Bono and The Edge, the composers. Why hadn’t anyone written about their work? It made me suspect it isn’t very good—at least not for the purpose it’s intended. (My suspicions seem to have been right: Brantley subsequently dismissed the music without really describing it and even Jay Lustig, a pop music reviewer who wrote the Star-Ledger’s early notice of the production last January, didn’t say much about the U2 team’s contribution. Peter Marks of the Washington Post wrote half a paragraph panning the score and Charles McNulty gave it a whole ‘graph of bad-mouthing in the L. A. Times.)

If the producers are going to throw away $65 million on this kind of muddle and then diddle the press (not to mention the spectators) the way they have, I don’t feel particularly well disposed toward them. I still think the reviewers ought to have held off on running actual reviews and opted for something more reportorial, as Winer did. The producers don’t deserve complete indemnity, especially since, as it seems, they’re benefiting from the other coverage at the same time, but given the (perhaps unlikely) chance that Taymor, et al., might manage to fix the mess, they deserve the shot. Maybe the distinction is too small to matter, but the way I look at it, at least, is that a review is a final judgment, while an interim report is an honest appraisal of where the work is right now. Linda Winer has proved it can be done right, and her approach should be honored and emulated.

[When stories concerning Spider-Man started to appear, I began thinking about whether there was some aspect of the production about which I wanted to write. I found I wasn’t terribly interested in the show itself despite its reported cost, and even the safety question, the subject of much of the news coverage, didn’t move me to offer an opinion. When Charles Isherwood wrote his column in January about the early reviews, I thought again about writing something for ROT, but I wasn’t sufficiently engaged in the issue to feel that I had anything different to say than was already being published. When the debate heated up, however, with the publication of the February reviews in the Times and other periodicals, I was moved to express an opinion of my own that I think is a little different from those that have been published. So, I’ve added my voice to the conversation—which is, of course, how this process is supposed to work.

[For readers who are interested, here are the sources of the articles mentioned, referenced, or quoted in my ROT article: Charles Isherwood, “Review A Preview? Untangling A Web,” New York Times 8 Jan. 2011, sec. C (“The Arts”): 1, 9; Linda Winer, “Shedding a little light on ‘Spider-Man,'“ Newsday, 25 Dec. 2010, http://www.newsday.com/columnists/linda-winer/shedding-a-little-light-on-spider-man-1.256926 (Winer’s article isn’t accessible unless you subscribe to Newsday); Jeremy Gerard, “Spidey Flails in Taymor’s Tale of Spider Woman,” Bloomberg 26 Dec. 2010, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-27/spidey-green-goblin-flail-in-taymor-s-tale-of-spider-woman-jeremy-gerard.html; Ben Brantley, “Good vs. Evil, Hanging by a Thread.” New York Times 8 Feb. 2011, sec. C (“The Arts”): 1, 7; Patrick Healy, “’Spider-Man’ Early Reviews Set Off A Storm,” New York Times 9 Feb. 2011, sec. C (“The Arts”): 1, 5; Leonard Jacobs, “Ensnaring Theatre Critics in the Spider-Man Web,” Huffington Post 14 Jan. 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leonard-jacobs/ensnaring-theatre-critics_b_806101.html; Isaac Butler, “Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark,” Parabasis [blog] 5 Jan. 2011, http://parabasis.typepad.com/blog/2011/01/spider-man-turn-off-the-dark.html; Jay Lustig, “'Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark' – a review,” Star-Ledger [Newark, NJ] 18 January 2011, http://www.nj.com/entertainment/music/index.ssf/2011/01/spider-man_turn_off_the_dark_-.html; Peter Marks, “'Spider-Man' on Broadway: No superpowers needed to sniff out this stinker,” Washington Post 7 Feb. 2011, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/07/AR2011020704088.html; Charles McNulty, “Theater review: 'Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark' at Foxwoods Theatre,” Los Angeles Times 7 Feb. 2011, http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2011/02/theater-review-spider-man-turn-off-the-dark-at-foxwoods-theatre.html. A couple of sites that I looked at but didn’t name are: John Simon, “Spiderman Birthpains,” Uncensored John Simon [blog], 29 December 2010, http://uncensoredsimon.blogspot.com/2010/12/spiderman-birthpains.html; and Mark Kennedy, “'Spider-Man' Musical Reviews: Too Early To Critique?” Associated Press, on Huffington Post 8 Feb. 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/08/spiderman-musical-reviews_n_820088.html. Some other pertinent sites include: David Cote, “Tune In: David Cote on WQXR's Arts File Friday,” Upstaged [blog], on Time Out New York 5 Jan. 2011, http://newyork.timeout.com/arts-culture/upstaged-blog/672707/tune-in-david-cote-on-wqxrs-arts-file-friday; and Jeff Lunden, “Angry Reaction as Theater Critics Cross the Line on 'Spider-Man,'” Hollywood Reporter 28 Dec. 2010, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/angry-reaction-theater-critics-cross-66191.

[After I wrote this article, the New Yorker published John Lahr’s review of Spider-Man (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/theatre/2011/02/28/110228crth_theatre_lahr). Furthermore, a brief notice appeared in the New York Times reporting that the producers had hired a music constultant for the score. Included in that short announcement were unconmfirmed reports that Spider-Man’s producers were talking to a script doctor and a co-director, and that the opening date might be postponed for a sixth time. Later, the producers announced an expanded creative team, a three-week shut-down of preview performances in April and May to revise the play, and a delay of the opening until 14 June 2011. The cost of the production is now reported to have climbed to $70 million.]

The Power of the Reviewer—Myth or Fact?: Part 2

[This is the second and concluding part of my report on the power of reviews to close or perpetuate productions. As we’ve seen, with judicious planning and selling, producers can overcome the effects of bad reviews. Here are some of the ways they do that.]

COUNTERMEASURES: MARKETING

If reviews have real power to drive audiences into or out of theaters, then there ought to be little producers can do to counteract this effect. Theater history teaches that this is probably not true, since there have been dozens of shows panned by reviewers that have gone on to become popular successes. Many of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s works have been long-running audience-pleasers after receiving cool critical appraisal. There have also been plays, like Wilson’s Joe Turner and Steppenwolf’s Grapes of Wrath, that closed quickly after receiving good notices.

The data seems to indicate that shows can overcome mixed and poor reviews, but seldom outright pans. The More study indicates that “the pans are strongly associated with the shortest runs.” Of the plays that received unanimously bad reviews, seventeen, or 51.5%, closed within a week, and the average was 41 days. This isn’t surprising, assuming that unanimity among the reviewers might suggest that the public, too, would find the play bad. But what of the middle ground—shows that receive neither pans nor raves? Producers acknowledge that such shows can be run against mediocre press. Norman Kean expected mixed reviews for A Broadway Musical (a single regular performance on 21 December 1978) and he was prepared to run the show under those circumstances, and other shows ran successfully after mixed press, The Wiz (1672 performances, 1975-79) and Deathtrap (1793 performances, 1978-82), for instance.

What keeps these plays afloat when others founder? According to Clive Barnes, “it . . . boils down to the procedure known as marketing, or the gentle art of luring posteriors into seats.” The producers are prepared to sell a weak show in various ways that can overshadow reviews. Alexander Cohen related that his production of Baker Street from 16 February to 14 November 1965 “was pretty bad, but we did a merchandising job on that show which was enormous. It ran for a little more than a year on the strength of the merchandising . . . .” According to Cohen, 6 Rms Riv Vu (247 performances, 1972-73) “wouldn’t have lasted until intermission” if it hadn’t been for marketing.

The first hedge against failure is a big advance sale. The bigger the advance, the longer a show can run at a box-office loss until it finds an audience—if there is one. That saved both The Wiz and Deathtrap until word of mouth caught up with the box office; the lack of a big advance sank A Broadway Musical. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera was sold out for nearly a year before it even opened in New York in 1988, indemnifying it even against pans across the board; the success of Metamorphosis over its luke-warm reception was also partly due to the $1.4 million advance. Miss Saigon, imported by mega-musical promoter Cameron Mackintosh, had a $39 million advance when it opened in April 1991, and was pulling in a weekly gross of $710,000. In its sixth season, it was still running near capacity despite “widely divergent” notices. Though an advance sale doesn’t guarantee success after poor notices—Ballroom, a flop in 1978-79 (116 performances), had a two million-dollar advance, and still closed quickly—it’s so important, according to Bernard Jacobs, the Shubert’s late president, that

[m]ost shows that close immediately are either inadequately budgeted or have spent monies in excess of what they’ve budgeted to the opening night. If a show is properly financed, it will have enough money to survive for at least a few weeks in order to see if it will catch on.

Advance sales require an advance press. Paid advertisements are the mainstay of this end of the business, and television has come to play a large part in this area. The famous case of Pippin (1944 performances, 1972-77) marked the beginning of the big television commercial for musicals. Warren Caro of the Shubert Organization described the incident:

[Pippin] started off in a rather uncertain way, then came to be highly successful for a period, and then took a big drop. We thought that was going to be the end of it. But the producer came to us, saying that he thought the way this show should be conveyed to the public was through television advertising, not through the usual, stale newspaper advertising. So we created a marvelous television commercial which increased sales spectacularly and really had the effect of turning that show around from a downgrade run to the most successful musical on Broadway.

More than advertisements are necessary to presell a show, however. Before any reviewer sees the first performance, the play must be brought to the attention of the prospective theatergoer. News items, some manufactured, some real, sell a production to its potential audience even before its official opening. A case in point is the 1991 opening of Miss Saigon. There was so much press coverage of the controversy over casting British actor Jonathan Pryce as a Eurasian; the consequent struggle among producer Cameron Mackintosh, Actors’ Equity, and the Asian community; and Mackintosh’s threat not to open the show at all, the production was a box-office bonanza independent of the critical response, which was mixed on the show but high on the individual performances. Good press agents can also arrange tie-ins with stores and businesses and other publicity stunts to attract or keep attention on their shows. The 1988 Off-Broadway musical Suds, for instance, connected with TWA, then a major air carrier, which featured a one-hour recording of the show’s songs in its in-flight soundtrack, and Procter & Gamble, which bought 2,000 tickets for an employee incentive program. The increasing need for publicity beyond newspaper ads and television and radio spots created a demand for a new member of the theatrical team: the promoter. More than just press representatives, promoters concoct stunts such as giving free tickets to the 1989 production of Lend Me a Tenor to people who sang an aria, awarding free admission to the 1000th performance of the original 1987 Off-Broadway production of Driving Miss Daisy to anyone named Daisy, hosting an “I Am Rappaport” evening at I’m Not Rappaport in 1985, holding a frog-jumping and “huckleberry” pie-eating contests for the 1985 Broadway début of Big River, and offering discount coupons for 1987’s Teddy and Alice in supermarket ads. These are often silly gimmicks, but they create publicity and attract audiences, particularly those that aren’t dependent on reviews.

Later efforts have borrowed from Hollywood marketing techniques. 1990’s Accomplice showed a one-minute trailer at 250 movie houses proclaiming, “Not coming to this theater; not coming to any motion picture theater . . . .” and Miss Saigon taped “The Heat Is On: The Making of ‘Miss Saigon,’” made in 1989 from the London production, which aired on New York television. All these efforts, if judiciously applied to a show that has an audience somewhere, can help it overcome poor reviews, but experts estimate that they have only three to four weeks in which to turn things around at the box office. Given time “to let the notices cool off,” as advertising executive Harry Golden put it, the public can be made to forget bad reviews, then a well-planned publicity campaign can reverse the negative perception.

David Merrick may have been, in former New York Times reviewer Frank Rich’s estimation, “the master of . . . producer’s cunning in our day.” He delighted in tweaking reviewers and theater journalists, once posing as an audience member after a performance of Cactus Flower in Philadelphia in 1965 so he and press agent Harvey Sabinson could be interviewed on television by Tom Snyder. After praising the show, Merrick gave a signal to another press agent who cut the power line, blacking out the broadcast. To generate interest in his production of 42nd Street, Merrick postponed its official opening, kept the date secret from the public, abruptly scheduled or canceled previews, and finally, on opening night, announced from the stage the death of director-choreographer Gower Champion, a fact he had kept secret all day from both the public and the show’s cast. Later, when 42nd Street moved from the Majestic Theatre across 44th Street to the St. James, Merrick had the chorus girls do their “We’re in the Money” tap routine across the street on the huge coins used onstage. Meanwhile, he managed to keep both marquees so that 44th Street was bracketed with 42nd Street logos. After the show moved, when Phantom of the Opera had become the hottest ticket in town, Merrick began holding the curtain at the St. James for fifteen minutes to lure disappointed ticket-seekers at the Majestic into 42nd Street. To promote this, dancers roamed Times Square with sandwich boards proclaiming, “David Merrick is holding the curtain for you” and singing, for the matinee (the lyrics were altered again for evening performances):

Come and meet
Those dancing feet
If you come past two
You won’t be blue
‘Cause we start at two-fifteen!

An indefatigable showman, Merrick kept 42nd Street in the public eye and running for 3,486 performances over eight years (1980-89), now the twelfth longest run in Broadway history.

The presence of a big-name star, even one from such a non-theater world as ballet, can only help attract theatergoers. Baryshnikov’s non-dancing debut was a huge selling point for Metamorphosis, attracting audiences from many unusual sectors of the public; Legs Diamond’s run despite devastating criticism was likely due to the presence of late pop singer Peter Allen. (Ironically, after Allen’s death in 1992, the musical The Boy From Oz, 2003-04, based on his life and music, opened to poor reviews itself but ran for 364 performances on the strength of the draw of Hugh Jackman, the star who played the singer.) Joe Turner’s failure might, by contrast, be attributable to its lack of stars to help transfer its great regional success to Broadway. Star power, in fact, is an important marketing asset. In contrast to Joe Turner, Wilson’s Fences ran for 526 performances for its initial Broadway production in 1987 and 1988, grossing $11 million in its first year, a non-musical record. It closed precipitously three months after setting that record, however. What happened? Fences, which won New York theater’s triple crown—Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award, and New York Drama Critics Circle Award—was sold and made its reputation based on the mesmerizing performance of James Earl Jones as Troy Maxson. When Jones was replaced in February 1988 by Billy Dee Williams, the production began to fail almost immediately, closing at the end of June. The same phenomenon occurred with D. L. Coburn’s The Gin Game which opened in 1977 with Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy as the elderly, card-playing couple. Cronyn left the show first and was replaced by E. G. Marshall in June 1978; Maureen Stapleton came in for Tandy in September, and the play closed in December. In neither case were negative reviews responsible for the drop-off in attendance, but the departure of first-rank stage stars impeded the producers’ abilities to sell the show. As we shall see, star power also made Sunset Boulevard a hit in 1994 but ultimately brought the production down not so much because the first star performer, Glenn Close, left the show—she left in June 1995, almost two years (and two leads) before the New York production’s announced closing—but because Andrew Lloyd Webber couldn’t find enough available female stars of Close’s stature and talent to keep filling the role. More recent productions foundered, according to common wisdom, because of the lack of big names among the cast (the Neil Simon revivals in 2009; Next Fall, an Off-Broadway transfer with excellent notices, in 2010; and Neil Labute’s reasons to be pretty, a success Off-Broadway in 2008 and a Broadway flop in 2010; Finian’s Rainbow in 2009), even with good reviews or previous track record. (There are also many accounts of shows that did well even with star names in the cast.)

Even with a sufficient advance in the till, other means are necessary to make the public aware of the show and bring them into the theater. Among the marketing techniques producers use, James M. Nederlander listed theater parties, subscriptions, half-price ticket booths, and “two-fers.” “Another merchandising gimmick,” he said, “is to book a play for four or five weeks and then start advertising ‘last four weeks’ or ‘last three weeks.’” Gerald Schoenfeld added to this list credit-card sales and telephone reservations as ways of making it easier to come to the theater, and Warren Caro included benefits sold to organizations, mail-order and group sales, and Ticketron. Newer measures include Internet sales, direct-mail marketing, marketing research, and the programs of the Theatre Development Fund which, among other services, operates the TKTS booths at Duffy Square and lower Manhattan, sells discount vouchers, and provides a 24-hour telephone information service (and now a cell-phone app for information about what’s available).

In the mid-1980’s, producers began using techniques borrowed from manufacturing. One such technique, intended “to figure out how to woo an audience,” is market research conducted before a show opens. Producer Marty Bell of 1986’s Precious Sons, credited as the first production to try this, acknowledged, “We wanted to get a handle on the audience so that whatever the critics said wouldn’t matter.” Bell and co-producer Roger Berlind surveyed potential theatergoers before deciding on ticket prices and advertising targets. Unfortunately, the show’s producers made several wrong calls based on the research, such as targeting the wrong prospective audience, and the show ran only from March to May. Still, the idea of using pre-show market research caught on and has become part of the web of techniques used to counter reviews.

Another approach of recent seasons has been specific-market targeting: selling a show directly to a particular audience through specially chosen outlets and media. This tactic came to the fore in 1988 with the marketing of productions to black audiences. The producers of Fences, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, The Gospel at Colonus, and Sarafina! adopted “extraordinary measures” to attract a special audience: “hiring marketing experts with experience in reaching black corporations, schools, churches and social clubs, . . . sharply reducing ticket prices, . . . suggesting sermon subjects to ministers in churches that have sponsored group visits to Broadway.” Michael David, producer of Gospel, especially “worked the gospel shows in Harlem” to reach his target audience. David also established an outreach office to “help to bring in the ‘other’ audience to Broadway—not just blacks, but Pentacostals, Hispanics, Jews, students.” According to Richard Bruno, head of Gospel’s outreach program, they even cross-referenced passages from the show with Biblical verses to help ministers prepare sermons.

The church community played a crucial role in this scheme. When the Lincoln Center Theater Company transferred Sarafina! to Broadway in 1988, Director of Marketing Thomas Cott acknowledged they, too, made contacts there. Furthermore, along with taking ads in the black press, LCTC broadcast a commercial in which the cast sang “an infectiously joyful version of the Lord’s Prayer.” Lincoln Center used the same strategy when it opened the rediscovered Zora Neal Hurston-Langston Hughes play, Mule Bone, on Broadway in 1991. To address another overlooked segment of the potential audience, the producers of Rent, the 1996 rock up-date of La Bohème that was the season’s biggest hit, aggressively marketed the show to the young, urban, and hip. Ten-dollar tickets were offered to those who lined up outside the theater’s box office, a sure way to create a crowd since the show was otherwise sold out, and the show was advertised in subway trains—not on the platforms like films and other Broadway plays—with visually arresting placards taking up whole cars.

Not all of these efforts translated into long runs. Fences ran over 500 performances in 1987 and ‘88, but apparently because of its star’s draw, not the marketing of the play itself; Joe Turner closed after just over 100 performances, and Gospel only ran 61 performances and 15 previews. Only Sarafina! was a long-run hit despite an unknown cast and author, South African Mbongeni Ngema, running 81 performances and 36 previews at Lincoln Center’s Newhouse Theater and 597 performances and 11 previews at Broadway’s Cort Theatre. Mule Bone was scheduled for a limited run, so there’s little correlation between its reviews, which were mediocre, and the length of its run. According to Anne Cattaneo, literary manager for Lincoln Center Theater, their targeted black audiences responded to the company’s outreach despite the poor notices in the mainstream, that is ‘white,’ press. This assertion, however, is hard to prove. Nonetheless, the tactic having previously proved useful, it was tried once again. Rent, of course, didn’t need to overcome reviews. It was universally praised in the press, both in its Off-Broadway try-out and its subsequent transfer to Broadway. It also received perhaps unwanted publicity when the young creator, Jonathan Larson, died suddenly on the eve of Rent’s triumphant Off-Broadway opening. The tactics, nonethelss, all have become part of the producers’ arsenal to defeat bad notices.

Professional marketing firms to “help producers pinpoint who their audience is and how it evolves” have become a permanent part of the commercial scene now. Exploring new or untapped resources and outlets for advertising, using targeting strategies more familiar to toy companies or automobile manufacturers, and focusing on non-traditional audiences, firms like Fourfront, which handled Bring In da Noise, Bring In da Funk and Full Gallop on Broadway and touring companies of A Chorus Line and Master Class, reach a “younger group and present [a client’s] image in a fresher, more arresting way.” Commonly, their aggressive marketing techniques bypass the usual forums and attract potential spectators who don’t regularly read theater reviews in the mainstream press such as cable television viewers, readers of niche magazines and alternative-press publications, and commuter-rail riders. Ads and other features on the Internet, whose audience often doesn’t read newspapers, are also becoming more common even for mainstream commercial theater.

Fifty years ago, a play could survive if it played to a few thousand customers a week—perhaps 75,000 in all. The break-even number’s now risen to nearer a half to three-quarters of a million. Such costs now prevent the producers and backers from gambling on a risky play or accumulating the necessary advance sale to keep a moderate but promising play running long enough to overcome negative press. The increasing costs also result in higher ticket prices, causing potential playgoers to think long and hard about what they will spend their theater dollars on. According to the Shubert’s Schoenfeld, the audience base for commercial theater shrank because of the overall cost of going to the theater. The result is a stronger reliance on good reviews, known as “money reviews,” for success, but not because the reviewers have usurped so much power. The situation’s arisen because of the people who control the economics of the industry, including the unions, stars, producers, and real estate owners.

Another marketing tactic that producers have been using for some years has compounded the reliance on reviews and reviewers. William Hawkins, who was the review writer for New York’s now-defunct World-Telegram and Sun, blamed the press agent who

more than anyone else epitomizes the process by which the Critic has been forced into his position of influence over the theatre. He is the “Master of the Quote.” Quotes seem to sell more tickets these days than any other single element of the theatre.

The “quote ad” has put the producer right under the thumb of the reviewer—a situation the journalist didn’t create. According to City University of New York professor Glenn Loney, himself a critic, this particular phenomenon is relatively new to the business of theater. David Belasco used quotations in his publicity, but they weren’t excerpts from reviews; he made them up himself and ran them unattributed (“Miss X is wonderful!”). Producers didn’t begin quoting heavily from the reviews until the 1930’s, and the practice didn’t become common until the 1940’s. There is, of course, the now-infamous 1961 case of David Merrick and Harvey Sabinson, producer and press agent for Subways Are for Sleeping who found seven average New Yorkers with “exactly the same names” as the major daily newspaper reviewers, treated them to elaborate dinners, got them to praise the mediocre show in “the most laudatory phraseology,” and then published a big newspaper ad quoting them under the headline, “7 Out of 7 Ecstatically Unanimous about Subways Are for Sleeping.” The trick was that Merrick had to wait for Times writer Brooks Atkinson to retire before he could pull off the hoax “[b]ecause in all this world there is no other man with that name.” (Most of the papers caught the ruse before publishing, but the Herald Tribune didn’t and ran the ad in the early edition on 4 January. In the interest of integrity, the hoaxers ran photographs of the substitute critics along with their quotations, and many readers and some critics were amused at the joke. Others were incensed. The real reviews were mixed, but Subways still managed to stay afloat until July before closing.)

The quote ad has, by now, become so common that no producer can sell even the most popular, critically acclaimed production without excerpts from the reviews in his advertisements and commercials. In fact, quote ads are generally the only way non-musical plays are advertised on television. (Ironically, despite the Shuberts’ claim that Alexander Woollcott wrote biased criticism of their shows, he demonstrated during the suit that they’d been using quotations from his reviews in their advertising. The confusion, by the way, arose because, until the New York Times gave Woollcott a byline after the controversy with the Shuberts began, his reviews, like most others at the time, appeared uncredited.) Today, the practice of using press quotations is so common that New York has a law to protect reviewers from blatant out-of-context quotation. During the 1984-85 Broadway season, there was a suit regarding Lawrence Roman’s Alone Together because of just such misuse of quotes in its advertising.

IMPLICATIONS

In the final analysis, a play opening to generally good reviews usually doesn’t need much merchandising, and a play that opens to generally bad reviews may not be salable—though there are exceptions to both of these axioms. As the More study indicated, the reviewers’ influence, if it exists at all, is at the two extremes. In the middle, where most plays stand, reviewers have little definable influence. Whatever influence they do have there can be countered with judicious business and marketing tactics.

Furthermore, if the statistics from the various audience studies have any validity, there’s additional indication that reviewers may not have the power usually credited to them. The New York Cultural Consumer, though only dealing with non-profit theater, stated that only 17% of the audience surveyed rated reviews an important influence on their choices, and that only 9% relied on reviews for their theater information. Even the League of New York Theatres and Producers’ study showed that, though more than half the Broadway audience read reviews, only 20% felt they were a major influence on their choices. Of that number, even fewer—16%—agreed with the statement, “I usually follow the critics’ views when deciding to see a Broadway show,” and only 2% agreed “completely.” That suggests very strongly that even the most susceptible audience—commercial theatergoers—may be far less influenced by reviewers and criticism than most people believe.

None of this is conclusive, but it does raise some interesting questions. The studies and surveys are inadequate to determine with even the remotest certainty how much reviews influence attendance, and they don’t deal at all with how those reviews are used. The opinions of journalists and producers regarding the putative influence of reviews are nothing more than perpetuation of the myth, and have little real value in determining the truth and extent of the influence. The very fact that shows close because of bad reviews begs the question, since producers close their shows on the assumption that audiences will stay away because of the notices. Economics notwithstanding, the producers have rarely tested the theory and allowed word-of-mouth to work, though there’s anecdotal evidence that it can.

This issue has in no way been satisfactorily examined; exploring the actual effect of reviews on real audiences requires extensive inquiry and follow-up. With proper funding, a survey of commercial audiences should yield some statistics that would be both enlightening and valuable.

[Most of the data regarding commercial productions and their audiences concerns the Broadway theater. Besides the fact that there are simply more commercial shows there, they’re also more susceptible to the influence of reviews because of the competition for essentially the same audience. Still, much of the information that pertains to these productions is also true, though perhaps on a smaller scale, to other commercial shows. With regard to the reviewer and the critic, despite my personal feelings about the distinction between the two, unless otherwise noted, both terms here refer to the writer or broadcaster of daily notices about current theatrical productions.

The Power of the Reviewer—Myth or Fact?: Part 1

[A number of years ago, I became curious about the proposition that producers closed shows when they got bad reviews because they believed that that meant audiences would stay away. I decided to see whether this belief was real or apocryphal. I combed through the literature and the field studies of arts that relied on published or broadcast reviews, I found all the surveys and statistical analyses I could. I have from time to time rechecked the record to see if new studies or surveys have been published, but the last time I updated my data, George Wachtel, then Director of Research for the League of American Theatres and Producers (now the Broadway League), informed me that there’d been no industry-wide studies of press or reviews since the League published its 1980 study. In other words, however old my statistics are, they’re the newest available. Here’s Part 1 of my report.]

THE ISSUE

In “Reviewing a Play Under Injunction” (4 April 1915), the New York Times reported the following incident:

Beginning the day after there had been printed in The New York Times an unfavorable review of “Taking Chances,” a new farce presented on March 17 [1915] at the Thirty-ninth Street Theatre, Alexander Woollcott, dramatic critic of The Times, received several indirect notifications that he would thereafter be excluded from all theatres under the control of the Messrs. Shubert.

. . . .

Last Thursday evening the Shuberts executed their threat against Mr. Woollcott by excluding him from Maxine Elliott’s Theatre when he presented purchased tickets entitling him to orchestra seats.

Woollcott, arguably the most famous theater reviewer of his day, had bought tickets to Edward Locke’s The Revolt because the Shuberts, the most powerful producers in the country, had already ceased sending press seats to the Times for him. When the producers prevented a legal ticketholder from entering the theater, legislation was proposed in Albany making such action illegal. This may not have been the first case of a producer taking action against a reviewer, but it may have been the point at which their adversarial relationship solidified. Within days after J. J. Shubert and two house managers physically blocked Woollcott from seeing the play, the reviewer, backed by his paper, got an injunction prohibiting the Shuberts from keeping him out of their theaters and sued them under the Civil Rights Act of 1871. Times publisher Adolph Ochs canceled the Shuberts’ advertising, sued them for “prior restraint of the press,” and awarded Woollcott more space, a byline, and a raise. Within a few weeks, the injunction was lifted, Woollcott and the Times eventually lost their suits, and the Shuberts were able to bring pressure in Albany to defeat legislation prohibiting them from denying entry to any law-abiding person, but by that time the damage to the producers’ cause had been long done. All the New York papers lined up behind the Times, and Woollcott was thrust into the forefront of New York theater journalism and the paper began its rise to its present-day prominence.

Despite the Shuberts’ eventual victory in court, the battle ended badly for the producers: “The power of New York theater critics . . . was confirmed by the time the curtain came down and the Shuberts conceded,” reads one subsequent report. The question is, How did reviewers get this power, and is it based on fact—or assumptions shared by the producers and the general public? How much, in fact, do theatergoers rely on reviews to decide about going to a show?

THE POPULAR BELIEF: THE PRODUCERS

Of one effect there’s no doubt: producers do close shows because of poor critical response. Producer Joseph Kipness said simply, “I found there’s no sense fighting if you get lousy reviews. You can’t fight it,” and former New York Times review writer Brooks Atkinson wrote, “When the notices are particularly bad, most producers close without further exploitation” of the show’s audience-drawing potential. The presumption is that bad reviews will stop people from coming to the box office. The problem is that it is a presumption. It has seldom been tested, since most badly reviewed shows close so quickly no one can see them. It’s simply “conventional wisdom” that bad reviews kill ticket sales.

So sure are producers that reviewers can damage a play’s run that several in recent years have taken to a new tactic—or a variation of an old one. In an echo from the 1915 Shubert-Woollcott clash, some non-commercial producers have begun to run shows in previews, to which the press isn’t invited and, by convention, cannot write about, virtually until the show’s scheduled to close. Some theaters outside of New York City adopted a policy of inviting only local reviewers to productions and actually refusing seats to New York-based or national writers. The message is, of course, that these producers are so sure that reviewers’ opinions will adversely affect the success of their shows that they have become irreconcilably hostile even to their presence among the theaters’ audiences.

The curious thing about all this certainty is that it has been questioned very little, either by the producers themselves, or by independent research.

Hundreds of audience surveys are, of course, conducted for every type of presentation, but few deal with the commercial theater audience, and even fewer ask about reviews as anything more than a way of finding out what’s playing. Most are quite old—little of the data has been updated since the 1980s—and none delve deeply into the matter, not so much of whether potential theatergoers use reviews, but how they use them. This leaves a great gap between the actions of the producers and the provable facts upon which those actions should be based.

THE POPULAR BELIEF: THE REVIEWERS

The other side of this issue—what the journalists believe their power is—is addressed in the United Church of Christ 1969 survey, “Criticism and Critics in the Mass Media” by the Louis Harris organization. This survey didn’t address the audience’s use of reviews, but it did examine the reviewers’ own opinions about their influence, concluding that “the critical profession believes they have considerable impact . . . .”

To the broadest question, whether or not the reviewers think “the public really pays attention to criticism and is affected by it,” 87% said yes. Only 5% said that the public pays no attention to criticism, and 8% said that it “depends on circumstances.”

When the reviewers were asked if they have too much, too little, or the right amount of influence on the public, most naturally responded, “the right amount.” However, in the national sample, 30% felt that they have too little; 11% felt they have too much.

“Overall, then,” the report concluded, “critics and editors see criticism as having impact on the public educationally, economically, and in terms of political and social attitudes.” It must be noted, however, that these were the reviewers’ subjective responses on their own work. There’s no proof that the public really agrees with these opinions; even many prominent reviewers don’t agree on their influence. Rocco Landesman, then editor of Yale/Theatre (now Theater magazine) and now Chairman of the NEA, wrote that “Drama critics . . . have an inordinate amount of power within their field, for no other art depends so heavily on the brief quotation for the ad and marquee.” Even the late Nation review writer Joseph Wood Krutch asserted, “That the professional reviewer wields enormous immediate and practical influence is plain enough from the growing tendency of managers to close, at once, any production which has received generally unfavorable notices.”

On the other hand, a considerable number of important review writers don’t feel they have much power or influence. The late New York Times reviewer Walter Kerr, for instance, was once asked, “[W]hy are producers so taken with the ‘myth’ of critic power? ‘Because,’ he says with a laugh, ‘they are fools.’” The late Clive Barnes, arguably the most influential reviewer when he was writing for the New York Times (he was reviewing for the New York Post at his death), said at the time he held the Times post:

I don’t think we make a play fail. A play fails because it fails. There are so many other factors in a run apart from the critic’s notice. . . . The reason a play fails is because the producer took it off.

THE POPULAR BELIEF: THE PUBLIC

The debate between journalists and producers about the power of reviews could go on forever. The only judgment that matters must come from the public who reads or hears the reviews, and then decides to go or not to go to the theater. This is where there’s so little information. Many people believe that the reviewer has great power over what runs and what doesn’t. In The Season, a survey of Broadway in 1967 and 1968, William Goldman wrote that “the critics’ importance . . . is enormously variable from one kind of play to another. But, in any case, their influence is considerable . . . .” Despite this statement, Goldman’s estimation indicates the conflicting reactions among the general public: elsewhere in The Season he wrote that the Broadway reviewers “are individually meaningless in their importance to the theatre.” He even cited a study showing that only “20% of New Yorkers and 10% of out-of-towners say they’re chiefly influenced by the notices. . . . It’s probably fair to estimate roughly that one person in six [16.67%] attends a production because of critical enthusiasm.”

According to the study Criticizing the Critics, little research has probed this question, but one report confirmed “that critics’ opinions were a relatively unimportant factor in people’s decisions to go to a play or film.” Another Harris study, for the Associated Councils of the Arts, recorded “that about 60 percent of the more than 3,000 people interviewed said critics’ reviews were of minor importance in affecting their choice of entertainment fare.” In a survey of the way audiences hear about a performance, statistics showed that only 28.9% rely on newspaper stories, including reviews. This, however, isn’t the same as basing a choice on a review, and the survey didn’t single out reviews as a separate category.

The truth of the assertion that reviews lack influence is suggested by several cases of Broadway shows. First, in June 1988, August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone closed after playing 105 regular performances, despite “almost universally enthusiastic” reviews and designation by the New York Drama Critics Circle as the best play of 1987-88. Producer Elliot Martin reported, “I read the notices on opening night and I presumed there’d be a line the next day around the block. But it didn’t happen.” Word-of-mouth, apparently, wasn’t “uniformly favorable.” The same was true of the Steppenwolf stage adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which received “overwhelmingly favorable” critical response and won the best-play Tony in 1990 but still closed after a scant 188 performances and 11 previews. Conversely, when Mikhail Baryshnikov opened in Steven Berkoff’s adaptation of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the play got generally “mediocre reviews.” Despite this, and “the usual disinterest in more serious drama,” it set box-office records in March 1989, playing to 93.9% of capacity. In more recent seasons, Broadway and Off-Broadway have both seen plays which, despite receiving excellent notices, had foundered at the box office because there were no star names in the casts.

Possibly the ultimate ruling on this question comes from a theatergoer on line for discount seats at the Theatre Development Fund’s TKTS booth in Duffy Square. Asked by a reporter if she knew who was David Richards, the New York Times’s chief review writer who’d just resigned his position, she asserted that she didn’t. Furthermore, she said she didn’t “really go by [a reviewer’s] opinion.” When it came to theater advice, she’d “rather hear it from a friend of mine.” Probably for this woman at least, aside from word-of-mouth, the half-price ticket was more of a motivating factor in her decision than the published views of any reviewer.

THE DATA: AUDIENCE SURVEYS AND STUDIES

Most available audience surveys and consumer studies that dealt with theater at all frequently saw it as one element in a broad spectrum of entertainment or cultural outlets. A few surveys did ask if reviews are an important factor in the spectators’ decisions about seeing a show, but none went further to determine how prospective theatergoers use, read, or base decisions on them. If reviews have the power to close shows, the logical presumption is that would-be spectators read them and then follow the recommendations of the reviewer. Where, however, is the proof of this contention?

The most useful audience survey was A Study of the New York Audience of the Broadway Theatre, prepared for the League of New York Theatres and Producers (now the Broadway League). This 1979 study divided the theater audience into four components according to theater-going habits. Among “Traditionalists,” described as “older” and “veteran theatregoers,” reviews were both a major source of information and a major influence. This group made up only 24% of the Broadway audience, however. The largest portion of the audience was the “Entertainment Seekers” who made up 35% and were the “oldest group” who’d been “attending theater over 10 years.” Reviews were neither a prime information source nor a major influence for this group, but they attended theater less often than the Traditionalists.

The group most nearly related in size and attendance frequency to the Traditionalists were the “Theatre Enthusiasts” who made up 23% of the audience. These were “younger” and “below average in years of attendance”; they “read reviews, but [are] not strongly influenced” by them.

The smallest group, 18% of the regular audience, were the “Dispassionate Theatregoers” who were also the “youngest group,” many of whom were “new patrons” of theater. The study found that reviews were a minor source of theater information for this group. In all, less than 20% of all theatergoers rated reviews a major influence on their choices.

In an audience survey by the League in 1990 at a performance of City of Angels, 46% of the respondents said they got their theater information from reviews, but only 34% said the reviews were a major influence on their decisions. The largest group, 58%, was influenced by “a friend”—in other words, by word-of-mouth. “A friend” was also the source of theater information for 66% of the polled audience.

Another interesting and useful study wasn’t an audience survey at all. In 1977, More magazine published a ten-year study of reviews by the then-major New York theater journalists to establish a statistical connection between the critical response and the length of a production’s run. The study hypothesized:

[I]f the critics had no power, then there would be no correlation between their reviews and the length of run. Shows panned by the critics would be just as likely to have long runs as they would be to close Saturday night. Conversely, if the critics had absolute power, then every play panned would close the morning after and every play raved would make a fortune for its backer.

In fact, they found that

when the critics expressed a strong negative or positive opinion about a play, there was a marked correlation with the length of run. Of all the pans written by all the critics that we examined, nearly three quarters of them were of plays that closed in less than 50 days.

The statistics for the opposite end of the scale weren’t so clear: only 32% of the rave reviews went to plays that ran 500 days or more. Where the reviews were mixed, the results were even less significant, giving the very clear impression that “it is at the extremes that [the reviewers] exercise what power they have.” The study determined that, all the reviews taken together, the difference between how well plays do when they’re panned or raved is significant. Significant enough, particularly at the negative end, to warrant the conclusion that the reviewers wield more power than they’re willing to admit. (Though there’s no concrete evidence to support this, it seems possible that theatergoers put more reliance in pans than raves, avoiding the former but not necessarily flocking to the latter. Of course, it’s easier to point to a show that was closed because of its reviews than to one that ran because of them, and though a short run’s obvious, a long run’s somewhat harder to define.)

There is, however, a flaw in the study’s logic. These statistics only prove an apparent correlation between the reviewers’ response and the length of the show’s run; it may be a case of post hoc, non propter hoc. The authors didn’t consider the obvious possibility that producers, faced with bad notices and convinced of the reviewers’ influence, simply closed the shows. Neither did they entertain the possibility, however slim, that the shows ran or closed not because of the reviews at all, but because the potential audience decided independently that they were good or bad shows.

[Return to ROT for the conclusion of my report on the power of the reviewer. I’ll pick up with some examples of the marketing techniques that producers use to sell their shows in the face of poor notices. Look for Part 2 in the next few days.]