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.]

A Broadway Baby

On Sunday, 13 June, Vanity Fair and GQ contributing editor David Kamp reported in a New York Times “Cultural Studies” column that “the musical-theater idiom has regained its currency, and is enjoying what may be its greatest popularity among young people since the pre-rock era.” When I read that, it heartened me. According to Kamp, young teens and preteens, including boys, are going to theater in large numbers; kids in general accept their friends who go to theater more than previous generations; and applications for places like Stagedoor Manor, the summer theater camp in Loch Sheldrake in the Catskills, have increased (also among boys) by large numbers. If Kamp's right and this isn't just a bubble, that's really encouraging. One thing Kamp doesn't say, however, is whether there's any evidence that this increased interest in theater is occurring beyond the New York City area. Stagedoor Manor does report, according to Kamp’s article, that the rush of new campers is coming from all over the country and beyond. The column, "The Glee Generation," puts the responsibility for the rise in interest on the Disney TV movie High School Musical and on the TV series Glee for making it acceptable.

A new generation of young theatergoers would be a great development. As most people who have any interest in theater know, the audiences for live theater is aging and shrinking all over the country. It’s not just on Broadway, where ticket prices have climbed well into the three-figure range, that this problem is visible; and it’s not entirely because of the current economic downturn that people are staying away from theater—though that crisis has exacerbated the decrease. Live theater, in competition with movies, cable and broadcast TV, DVD’s, rock and pop concerts, the Internet, and iPods and other portable devices, has been losing audience for years, much to the concern of producers, theater owners, rep company artistic directors, and boards of directors. Every time a new presence in theater, especially musical theater, shows up, like Jonathan Larson with Rent in 1996 and Paul Simon with The Capeman in 1998, there’s hope across the theater world that maybe a new, youthful sound will bring young theatergoers into the half-empty houses and get them to line up at the ticket windows. We’ll never know what Larson might have accomplished after the immense success of the rock-oriented Rent because his tragic death the night before the Off-Broadway opening cut short any influence he might have had to bring along other new composers; and the failure of Capeman put an end to any draw Simon might have had to encourage other pop composers to give theater a try. Spring Awakening (2006) and the revival of Hair (2009), two other rock-infused hits, have brought spectators to the theater, but haven’t inspired imitators. Kamp, however, does note that Hair along with this year’s American Idiot have been among the biggest attractions for young theatergoers. These enthusiasts aren’t like the “bused-in tourists” of past seasons, Kamp observes, shepherded to the big musicals on the Great White Way because that’s what you do on vacation in New York City. These young spectators, he says, are “true believers for whom love of musicals brings happiness, transcendence, and, strangely enough, social acceptance” If Kamp is right, “We’re raising a generation of Broadway babies,” as he puts it.

The emphasis on the inclusion of boys in this new development is not only impressive—girls have always been more drawn to theater, as anyone who’s ever tried to cast a play in middle or high school can attest, and they are much more likely to be accepted by their non-theater friends if they are—but very encouraging as well. Not long ago, as recently as 2007, the Times reported that teen and tween girls were the target demographic of theater promoters who were campaigning to build new audiences. The enthusiasm of the girls alone, the producers saw, wasn’t enough to keep shows running into hit territory. If Kamp’s observations are correct, we may now be seeing the brothers of those girls following their sisters into the theater right behind them.

I don’t know if “The Glee Generation” is accurate or not—though I fervently hope it is. It doesn’t bother me at all that the young people Kamp’s encountered, who include his own 14-year-old daughter, are focusing on musicals right now. Anyone who’s ever bought a ticket for a Broadway show knows that the musicals are the most popular entertainments offered by the theater, followed by comedies. (Most theater spectators are entertainment seekers; true theater enthusiasts have always been a smaller proportion of the audience. I’d guess that the disparity is even greater for musicals.) If musicals are the hook that gets young people into the theater, it’s all good. My own interest in musicals when I was little expanded into a much broader interest in theater by high school. I suspect that that’s how it happens for most habitual theatergoers: we begin with the musicals—I even started with Gilbert and Sullivan—and move on to more challenging fare as our tastes and our intellects mature. It’s like drug addiction in a (benign) way: when we start, the light fare of musical theater satisfies our desires, but then we need more to accomplish what the musical used to do alone so we add the straight comedy, then the drama, then, finally, Off-Broadway and experimental theater. (Some traditionalists don’t ever get to that last stage, I think. But the line of progression is the same, even if it stops short.)

I grew up loving what used to be called musical comedy. If I didn't see them on stage when I was a kid, I saw the movies (as I did with Damn Yankees and Oklahoma!) or I listened to the albums, which my dad had from his youth. (Dad took my mom to the original Oklahoma! on one of their early dates. He had a collection of cast albums that went back to the ‘30s. Some were even 78’s! I still have his cast albums of Kiss Me Kate and Carousel, among others.) I literally grew up on that music—and when I was little, I knew (and could actually sing) all the words to all the songs. I’d actually come out of the theater singing the score. I saw all kinds of theater at home in Washington, including Shakespeare, but my first Broadway experiences, when I came to visit my grandparents, were musicals. Fiorello! was my very first show on Broadway; I saw My Fair Lady a little later, but it still had the original cast. When I was teaching upstate, a bus-and-truck tour of MFL came through and played at the college theater. All the theater students went, of course, and I met one of mine in the lobby during intermission. "It's really good, isn't it?" she said, adding, "Of course, she's no Audrey Hepburn." I chuckled to myself and responded, "Yes, and Hepburn was no Julie Andrews." I smiled, both at the student and to myself. To her, MFL was an old movie with Audrey Hepburn—using Marnie Nixon's voice—and Rex Harrison; to me, it will always be a Broadway experience with Julie Andrews and Harrison. Those great performances I saw as a boy have become enduring: Harold Hill is always Robert Preston, Maria von Trapp is always Mary Martin—not Andrews, by the way; besides Guenevere and Liza Doolittle, she's always Cinderella (from the original 1957 television broadcast)—Fiorello is always Tom Bosley, Don Quixote is always Richard Kiley, Pseudolus and Hysterium are always Zero Mostel and Jack Gilford, J. Pierrepont Finch and Bud Frump are always Robert Morse and Charles Nelson Reilly, Fagin is always Clive Revill, Fanny Brice is always Barbra Streisand, Charity Hope Valentine is always Gwen Verdon; and, of course, Mrs. Lovett will always be Angela Lansbury. (I missed a few of the big ones: I didn't see West Side Story or Cabaret until the movies.)

Back in ’06, I watched Broadway: The Golden Age on PBS. It’s a 2003 documentary by Rick McKay in which he compiles many interviews, including archival footage, with the greats of Broadway theater going back to its . . . well, “Golden Age.” Some of the reminiscences of the stars' earliest introductions to theater and to Broadway and Times Square were very reminiscent of my own experiences at a similar age. When I used to come to New York City to visit one or another of my grandparents and before I ever went to a Broadway play, we'd go to Times Square. Both my parents were New Yorkers and their parents lived here when I was little, so we’d come to New York for visits. My mom’s dad liked Ruby Foo’s on West 52nd Street, and we also ate at Mamma Leone’s on West 48th, all in the Times Square area in those days. (Neither was especially good, but they were family-friendly and kind of a show themselves.) Just like the interviewees all said, it was a mesmerizing and indelible experience. The lights, the billboards, the theater marquees, the hokum (the Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum!), the crowds—and that Camel sign with the smoke rings! (I always wondered how it did that.) It just wasn't quite Real. The Great White Way—you could tell why they called it that. In the '50s it hadn't gotten sleazy and dangerous yet, and it was like a bizarro Disneyland. The experience of seeing it for the first (and second and third) time at that age—I wasn’t 10 when I first went to Times Square with my parents or my grandparents—is hard to forget. In fact, it’s the kind of image that’s been immortalized many times, once, appropriately enough, in the “Times Square Ballet” from a Broadway musical from that legendary era, Comden and Green’s On the Town (1944). Frank Rich, a native Washingtonian like me (and about the same age, too), described what he called “that ecstatic baptism, that first glimpse of Broadway lights, of every Broadway theatergoer's youth” in an old review of Jerome Robbins’ Broadway:

For any child who ever fell in love with the Broadway musical, there was always that incredible moment of looking up to see the bright marquees of Times Square for the first time.

The moment occurs as Mr. Robbins's show ends. The three World War II sailors of ''On the Town,'' winding down from their dizzy 24-hour pass through the pleasures of New York, New York, come upon a dazzling, crowded skyscape of twinkling signs heralding the smash musicals Mr. Robbins staged between 1944 and his withdrawal from Broadway in 1964. Some of the theaters (the Adelphi, the New Century) are gone now; some of the shows are forgotten. But the awe that seizes those innocent young sailors of 1944 overwhelms the jaded Broadway audience of 1989, too . . . .

Like many of the theater greats in McKay’s documentary, I saw my first theater in my home town. Washington happened to be a minor stop on the pre-Broadway circuit—not New Haven or Philly, but we got some try-outs—and a major stop on the post-Broadway tour. Before the Kennedy Center opened in 1971, Broadway shows played at the National, originally built in 1834 (the current building dates to 1885). (Ford's Theatre, which operates today as a booking house, was just a museum and historic site in my childhood; it didn't operate as a theater for over 100 years after Lincoln's assassination.) We also had some other theater, including visits by the D'Oyly Carte company and the American Savoyards (as I admitted, I loved G&S in those days) and we went to summer stock shows just like the ones the actors described in The Golden Age. I even saw Mary Martin and John Raitt do Annie Get Your Gun at the Cape Cod Melody Tent in Hyannis one summer. (We almost always went there at least once during the summer back in the '50s. I still remember being astonished at a production of The Wizard of Oz there when, after a tornado generated by the techies, the lights came back up—and there was Dorothy's house on stage, on top of the Wicked Witch, her legs sticking out from under one side! It was impossible! How did that house get there? It was magic!) Then I saw my first shows on Broadway when I was about 10.

I was lucky enough to catch the end of what McKay called the Golden Age. I say that not so much to brag, but out of amazement that I saw some of it before it disappeared. The interviewees in the documentary all named some of the performances they saw that stayed with them or influenced their own later work. Almost all of them named Laurette Taylor’s 1945 turn as Amanda Wingfield in Glass Menagerie, then they went on to list other seminal performances: Ethel Waters in Mamba's Daughters (1939); Marlon Brando in Truckline Café (1946), Candida (1946), and Streetcar (1947); Julie Harris in The Member of the Wedding (1950); Kim Stanley in Bus Stop (1955) and A Far Country (1961); Geraldine Page in Sweet Bird (1959); and James Earl Jones in The Great White Hope (1968). Most of those were well before my time (except GWH), but I had a list of my own: the best individual performances I’d seen. Jones’s Jack Jefferson was on it; so was Zero Mostel in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (which I saw at the National where it premièred in 1962), Gwen Verdon in Sweet Charity (1966), Stacy Keach in Indians (which I saw at Arena in D.C. where it began in 1969), Alec McCowen in Hadrian VII (1969), Ben Vereen in Pippin (1972), Virginia Capers in Raisin (1973), Jim Dale in Scapino! (1974), Henry Fonda in Clarence Darrow (1974), Anthony Hopkins in Equus (1974), Donald Sinden in London Assurance (1974), Meryl Streep in A Memory of Two Mondays/27 Wagons Full of Cotton (1976), Cronyn and Tandy together in The Gin Game (1977), and Pat Carroll in Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein (1979). (I don’t keep the list anymore—it was only in my head anyway—but I’ve seen two or three recent performances that I’d add if I did.) In The Golden Age, when Tony Roberts, I believe, described the time he saw James Earl Jones in GWH, he was describing my own experience at that show. (I also saw GWH at the Arena, where it originated, before it transferred to Broadway’s Alvin Theatre—now the Neil Simon.) I was flabbergasted.

I also had favorite actors whose stage work I just liked a lot, even if they didn’t fit on my List of Greats. I first saw Jerry Orbach in Carnival! (1961) with Anna Maria Alberghetti and he became a special favorite of mine. (Later, when I trained to become an actor, I often used the songs he sang in his shows in my voice classes.) Also in that cast was another favorite of mine: Kaye Ballard, who sang the maddest love song on any Broadway stage: “Always Always You.” Her character was a magician’s assistant and she sang of her devotion to him while in a box into which Marco the Magnificent was thrusting swords! An image like that tends to stick with you. Other favorites included Kay Medford, Stubby Kaye, and Howard da Silva—I tended to go for the character actors, it seems. They all had personalities that shone through in all their appearances and there are lines I can still hear them saying, like Kay Medford: “Don’t worry about the coat. Three mink stoles you’ll have when the train pulls out.” (That’s from 1960’s Bye Bye Birdie in which she played Albert Peterson’s mother, Mae. She was lying across railroad tracks at the time.)

I’ve seen some good and even great revivals, and the later actors offered terrific performances which I enjoyed, but like that MFL upstate, the originals I saw when I was little are permanently engraved in my memory. In a recent column, Times reviewer Charles Isherwood wrote, “You cherish some performances so strongly that you may not want to let any other memories get in the way,” but that hasn’t been my problem. I welcome new interpretations that may stand alongside my old memories—but those oldies will always remain the bellwether, though not a barricade. In 2004, I saw the revival of Camelot presented by Arena Stage. This production was more than creditable overall—there were even some neat casting and costuming coups—but I had the misfortune of having seen the real, true original in ’60 with Andrews, Burton, Goulet, and McDowall. Nothing can ever really compare to that no matter who does it, especially since I was still a kid—that impression of the big, Broadway show, with all those stars and that story (I had loved The Once and Future King), is absolutely ineradicable. I can't hear those songs without hearing the original voices. The same’s always so for MFL, Sound of Music, Music Man, and all the Golden Oldies that I got to see. (Cyril Ritchard is the voice I hear for Captain Hook, too, but I only saw the Mary Martin Peter Pan on TV when I was almost 14.) I also saw many plays in which the whole cast formed a remarkable ensemble (Hair, Moonchildren), and others in which the stand-out artists were the playwright (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Six Degrees of Separation) or the director (The Wiz, The Black Rider); I remember those vividly, but never kept even a mental list of them.

During the week of 16 August this year, PBS broadcast the current, Tony Award‑winning revival of South Pacific on Live From Lincoln Center. Needless to say, I made a point of catching it. (I’d never seen this classic musical on stage until 2003 when I saw a production at Arena’s Fichandler Stage.) Now, I can't be very critical about those classic musicals—I love them too much from my childhood. They're like theatrical comfort food to me—I hardly see any faults. During an intermission interview with the daughters of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Alan Alda, the evening’s host, admitted, “I’ve seen this production three times. I blubber every time, as soon as the orchestra starts . . . the overture.” Well, me too! As soon as the musicians sound their first note, I become just “as corny as Kansas in August.” There’s no help for me. Then in a conversation with director Bartlett Sherr and Lincoln Center Theatre artistic director Andre Gregory, Alda also remarked, “As beautiful as this is on the screen, to be in the room with them” is better. I know that’s true, but watching this show alone in my living room allowed me to indulge my almost uncontrollable impulse to sing along—something the Arena expressly admonished us not to do there, "no matter how hard you find it to resist”! This is one of the scores I learned from my dad’s cast albums (not from the 1958 film, which I didn’t see until some time later), so I was surprised to see that I still remembered most of the lyrics. Oh, I can’t carry the tunes anymore, especially the women’s songs—unlike when I was a boy soprano and could actually sing—but there I sat, croaking along with the women’s parts, the men’s parts, the leading roles, the character roles, the solos, the duets, the ensemble numbers. It made no difference—I was a one-man backers’ audition!

I often feel that some musicals are nearly perfect for what they are. I think South Pacific fits that description. Nothing seems artificial, the plot and book all fits without seeming forced or contrived, the dialogue is the right texture for the material (Fiddler is sentimental and poignant, How To is brassy and slangy), the songs all come out of the story and advance the drama one way or another, the lyrics are all suited both to the music and the moment. Everything just belongs. MFL was one of those, and WSS. Naturally, the Golden Oldies were, too. That’s why they’re classics. Of course, SoPac isn't just a classic musical, it’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning drama. Based on James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific (which also won a Pulitzer), his memoir of Navy service in the New Hebrides during World War II, the play and its music show humans in conflict, not just war but other, inner tensions. One of these is prejudice and bigotry, a malady from which even the play’s heroine, Nellie Forbush, suffers. When I taught a 9th-grade English class one year and we read Raisin in the Sun, I wanted to talk some about the underlying theme, racism, and the Langston Hughes lines that gave the play its title: “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?” I brought to class a recording of “You’ve Got To Be Taught”; I figured my 15-year-old students wouldn’t be likely to have heard it before. They hadn’t, and the discussion, as much as I could coax 9th-graders to have one, was one of the best I had in that class. The idea that prejudice is learned not congenital was revelatory. That was in the late ‘80s. SoPac still had something to say almost 40 years after it premièred!

I started seeing non-musicals around high school (not including Shakespeare, a few productions of whose plays I saw as a child). The high school I went to before I went to Europe did the usual kind of school theater, but it was the beginning of my introduction to serious drama. We did Billy Budd and O’Neill’s Emperor Jones, which I suppose was pretty adventurous for a prep school in the early ‘60s. Off-Broadway didn't come until college—the 1969 Negro Ensemble Company production of Lonne Elder’s Ceremonies in Dark Old Men at the St. Marks Playhouse in the East Village was my first Off-Broadway drama. (That was my first non-musical OB experience. Ten years earlier, my family went to the Orpheum Theatre on 2nd Avenue to see Little Mary Sunshine, Rick Besoyan’s delightful send-up of old-time operettas.) I’ve mentioned before that the university theater at Washington and Lee was an education for me (“Disappearing Theater,” 19 July), starting with Godot and moving on to Marat/Sade, America Hurrah, Pinter, Ionesco, Boris Vian, Euripides, and of course more Shakespeare. I still loved the old musicals—and the new ones; I saw Hair first in London then again in New York in 1969—but I stopped being wholly devoted to the musical once I got impelled into the wider world of theater. The wonderful thing about theater is that it keeps evolving and growing. That’s true of any art, of course, but theater is the one I know best and love most. I love seeing new ideas of what theater is or can be, experiments with the form. Even if they don’t work, they open up new paths. I didn’t take to Performance Art, or the Happening before that, but I was excited to see what they left for theater artists to take up, adopt, and adapt.

I suppose I’ve gone the long way around my point, but for me, it all began with the musical. If David Kamp has seen a true phenomenon and there are 12-, 13-, and 14-year-old boys and girls out there who are waiting outside the theater entrances for the doors to open on Rent, or American Idiot, or Hair, or Lion King, and they can’t wait till the next musical play opens, whether it’s Spider-Man, Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, or Unchain My Heart—well, I couldn’t be happier. The love of musical theater can lead to a more encompassing love of theater, and nothing could be better than that short of world peace! After all, that’s how it started for me because . . . I was a Broadway Baby.