Reviewers

“WHY WE DON’T REVIEW PREVIEWS, AND THE RARE JOYS OF SEEING A SHOW TWICE”

by Lily Janiak

[Some readers of Rick On Theater will know that I try to avoid seeing plays during previews.  The reasons Lily Janiak gives for not reviewing shows in previews are the same reasons I have for avoiding pre-opening performances.  Janiak’s article below was originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle’s “Datebook” on 19 December 2019.]

Our theater critic explains why she needed to see 'Scrooge in Love' a second time.

At preshow curtain speeches, when a company leader takes the stage to welcome audiences, I usually feel excited. A show is about to start! This is what I live for! But before the Dec. 6 performance of 42nd Street Moon’s “Scrooge in Love,” co-Executive Director Daniel Thomas said something that made me feel fear and self-reproach.

“Welcome to the final preview of ‘Scrooge in Love,’ ” he began.

“Preview?” I whispered to my companion, blanching. “I’m not supposed to be here!”

Many theater companies give at least one preview performance before their opening night, which is when they invite the press to attend and review. Previews offer artists a chance to see how choices land for a live audience and then make final tweaks before a show is set, with no more changes from the director or playwright.

As Thomas said at “Scrooge,” a company in previews typically “reserves the right” to stop the show if need be, but most of the time cast and crew run straight through a performance. Audiences, knowing they’re not seeing a finished product, typically pay less for preview tickets, but they have the satisfaction of knowing they might help shape a production in some small way.

Critics aren’t supposed to attend previews, though. It wouldn’t be fair to a company if I reviewed a show before it was ready, and if I had any nits to pick, the company could always say, “Well, if only you’d come later, once you were officially invited!” An opening night is part of a mutually agreed upon contract between artist and critic; violate it, and you risk delegitimizing the whole project of criticism.

Burying my shame and frustration with myself, I started taking notes on “Scrooge” just as I would at any other performance. The show, which revisits Ebenezer Scrooge a year after Charles Dickens leaves him, charmed me at points, but I took issue with big chunks of the script. That criticism, I felt, might not change after opening — Moon first performed “Scrooge” in 2015 — but there was a slight shakiness among the cast that felt like pre-opening jitters. The show  seemed as if it hadn’t stepped fully into itself, as if it were still wriggling its final layer on, fastening its last buttons, which made me dread the prospect of reviewing it.

As I left the Gateway Theatre, I dashed off a note to my editor, explaining my goof. The next morning, we started exploring ways to handle the situation. Would I write the review as I usually would? Should I simply not give the show a rating? At first, I tried drafting an editor’s note that we would append to the bottom of the review. After explaining my mistake, I wrote, “Although 42nd Moon might still change the show, our critic in consultation with her editor decided it was close enough to its final version that she could still review it.”

“Close enough”? That made me shudder.

Paralyzed, I got a new idea. I’d rearrange my schedule and we could swap around the print publication dates of some of my articles. I’d ask 42nd Street Moon if I could see the show again, after opening. Immediately, I felt better.

Readers sometimes ask if I ever see shows twice. “What if there’s one you really love?” I love a lot of theater (it’s part of the job description), but repeat visits happen less than once a year because each revisit comes with an opportunity lost: That’s one more show I can’t see and review at all.

In addition to being on the other side of opening night, my second visit to “Scrooge in Love” differed from the first in still another important way. Now I sat near the front instead of near the back.

Settling into my seat, I felt an ease that often eludes me when attending a show means punching the time clock. This time, I already knew the show’s contours. I could relax and sit back and build on and deepen what came before. I could let new subtleties sink in.

I noticed new things, starting with the garlands lining the lip of the stage, which I couldn’t see before, many rows back. When Will Springhorn Jr. as the Ghost of Christmas Present did a ridiculous bit twitching his pecs, I could see what all the fuss was about. (Crafty chest movements don’t always register in Row J.)

I noticed when the audience didn’t laugh at all at one of Andrea Dennison-Laufer’s lines as the Ghost of Christmas Past, as they had during the preview, even though she delivered it in exactly the same way. I appreciated more just how fully the large ensemble, under the direction of Dyan McBride, envisioned relationships and character arcs for their non-speaking parts.

Ultimately, the criticisms I planned to emphasize in my review still held true from Dec. 6 to Dec. 8. But in some intangible way, the cast seemed more at home onstage, more graceful in their choreography, more at ease in their characters. They looked like they were ready to be reviewed.

[Lily Janiak is the San Francisco Chronicle’s theater reviewer.]

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“OPINION: IT’S TIME FOR CRITICS TO STEP IN”

by Jeremy Gerard

[Producers have long tried to keep theater press from reviewing their presentations.  Sometimes the show is in trouble and other times, the producer just doesn’t want coverage she or he can’t control.  One example of the former was the Broadway début of Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark.  I blogged on the issue of writing about shows that haven’t opened in “Reviewing the Situation: Spider-Man & the Press,” posted on ROT on 20 March 2011.  The article below was posted on the website Broadway News on 2 March 2020, https://broadwaynews.com/2020/03/02/opinion-its-time-for-critics-should-step-in/.]

“Crrrritic!” Estragon sneers as the trumping put-down in the battery of insults he trades with Vladimir in “Waiting for Godot.” You might say that for theater critics, it’s been downhill ever since. And when are critics not crrrritics? That’s easy: When we don’t write rrrrreviews.

Sadly, that’s happening too often these days. When producers announced last fall that Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick would co-star in a revival of Neil Simon’s 1968 comedy “Plaza Suite,” it was news. Married for 22 years, both actors have enjoyed critical and popular acclaim, but they haven’t worked together on Broadway since 1996. In an elegant example of history repeating itself, the revival would have its tryout run at the same Boston theater where George C. Scott, Maureen Stapleton and director Mike Nichols first put the show through its paces before heading south to Times Square.

Most of Boston’s major media showered the revival with enthusiastic features. But no one reviewed it. The critics and their editors were not invited to come until the second-to-last performance, I was told by one of the city’s most prominent critics. Apparently not wanting to appear impolite, they all agreed.

“No reviews” is a trend, spanning from Boston to a recent out-of-town tryout in Los Angeles and even to Broadway. I’m all for producers and the sometimes preposterous lengths they will go to in order to promote and protect their shows. That’s their job. But I’ve often wondered why we, the critics, so willingly go along with their manipulations. Especially when they interfere with the, well let’s call it the journalism part of our job — reporting to our readers and giving context to the cultural news of the day.

Sometimes producers’ manipulations manifest as previews extended beyond the typically agreed upon period of a few weeks. Sometimes it means encouraging fawning features, but telling reviewers the show’s not open to reviews at all. In the case of out-of-town tryouts, it can mean disregarding the local critics’ job of informing their readers — who, after all, are underwriting the tryout period with their ticket purchases.

New Haven, Philadelphia, Washington and Boston share a century-old tradition of being the places where producers wanted their shows to get exposure to audiences and their first notices from legendary critics including the Boston Herald’s Elliot Norton (who had famously advised Simon to bring back the Pigeon sisters in Act II of “The Odd Couple”) and the Globe’s Kevin Kelly. Typically, the critics reviewed shows after just one or two performances in their abbreviated run, setting the course for potential changes before Broadway.

“Plaza Suite” opened at the Plymouth (now Gerald Schoenfeld) Theatre on Valentine’s Day, 1968, after two previews. This time, Broderick, Parker and their tyro director John Benjamin Hickey, in addition to the free pass in Beantown, will have a month of Broadway previews before opening on April 13, for a three-month run that’s reportedly all but sold out.

Across the continent in Los Angeles, playwright David Mamet recently mounted the premiere of his new play, “The Christopher Boy’s Communion,” with a top-rung cast that included his wife, Rebecca Pidgeon and longtime colleagues William H. Macy, David Paymer and Clark Gregg. The venue was the Odyssey Theatre, one of the city’s premiere smaller companies. These are not unknown artists, and the brief run was promoted through feature stories across print, radio and television media. But the critics weren’t invited, and so there were no reviews of this new work by a world-famous playwright that was being seen by paying audiences. None, that is, until Los Angeles Times theater critic Charles McNulty attended the show as the guest of a patron near the end of the run.

McNulty did what critics covering developing work by important artists generally do in these situations: He wrote thoughtfully and sympathetically — telling readers that his was not a formal review and this was a work-in-progress. Paying attention to — and by proxy, alerting our readers to — the work of established and nascent artists is one of the best and most important parts of our job.

Back to Broadway, then, where Ivo van Hove’s revival of “West Side Story” opened Feb. 20 to an unusually divided critical reception (though the most negative reviews were in some of the most influential publications, including two from the Times, as well as New York magazine and The Wall Street Journal). What I found remarkable is that the reviews — mine included, so I plead guilty here — appeared in late February for a show that had been running at the Broadway Theatre since December 10; 78 performances in all. (An injury to one of the principals had added a two-week postponement.)

The preview period included a flood-the-plain public relations campaign. Leading the charge was an extensive, friendly cover story in the Times magazine complete with linked videos of interviews with key players, along with features in the New Yorker and elsewhere. Words extolling the show were selectively extracted from the Times story for quote ads in, yes, the Times. (On Twitter, Sasha Weiss, the author of the Times story, wrote that her quotes were taken “completely out of context” and that the paper had “pulled the ad.” But a Times spokesman told me no ad was pulled, and a new one in Sunday’s’ Arts & Leisure opened with the patchwork quote from her story. Through his spokesman, producer Scott Rudin said that he “stands by the NYT quotes.”)

You may argue that in the case of “West Side Story,” the 1957 musical was being wholly revised by a risk-taking director and choreographer, without benefit of an out-of-town tryout. OK, but that amounted to nearly three months without a peep from us. The customers might reasonably have assumed — I mean, look at all those great photos and videos! — that they weren’t subsidizing a work-in-progress, but seeing a finished show. We should have gone in sooner and been part of the conversation in a more timely manner.

Along the same lines: The mostly heralded production of “To Kill A Mockingbird” has had a new Atticus Finch — Ed Harris replacing Jeff Daniels — since November 5. And yet, well into his fourth month of performances, Harris and other new principal cast members still have not been reviewed by the New York critics. Not long ago, a star of Harris’s stature in a reputed hit show would have guaranteed a second look. You’d think critics would want to weigh in on how the new star holds up — especially since theatergoers are being enticed by quotes from the original production.

Some of my colleagues strongly disagree with my long-held view that we shouldn’t let producers tell us what to cover and when (excluding the time-honored courtesy of a brief preview period that has blossomed to three weeks or even a month). When abuses happen, we should just buy a ticket and write.

In this online era where everyone’s-a-critic, we’re too often the last ones to comment. When Boston critic and blogger Bill Marx was asked by Broadway Journal why he hadn’t reviewed “Plaza Suite,” he said it was “just a commercial venture, a celebrity production for Broadway of a dated Neil Simon vehicle…so why bother?”

Why bother, indeed? Well, two reasons come to mind: One, because even commercial ventures can surprise us (I’ll admit it: I loved “Mamma Mia!”) and two, because we’re journalists: it’s the damned job and we’re privileged to have it. So when we minimize or self-censor, it’s downright dispiriting.

We don’t work for producers or playwrights. We have a stake in assuring our role in the ongoing conversation about art, highbrow, lowbrow and everywhere along the spectrum, and in offering our experience, insight and overview to the readers who are subsidizing our meager salaries. We yield that role not only at our peril, but at the risk of seeing live theater, which we deeply care about, grow ever more irrelevant to the culture around us.

[Gerard’s article above was published before the coronavirus pandemic hit the United States.  Shows and theaters he mentions here closed on 12 March and the Broadway League has announced that the commercial theater of the Theatre District in New York City won’t reopen before early January 2021.  Several shows have already announced that they won’t reopen at all and there will almost certainly be more that will close permanently.

[Jeremy Gerard is a columnist, critic, reporter, and editor at the New York Times, New York magazine, and Bloomberg News, covering arts and  entertainment, news, politics, media, and human rights.  He’s written reporting, criticism, and profiles for outlets including Vanity Fair, the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and the Columbia Journalism Review.  He’s held management posts at Variety, Radar, and Men's Health.]

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“HOW DO THEATRE CRITICS BECOME EXPERTS?”

by Alice Saville     

[This article first appeared in Exeunt, an online magazine whose focus is theater, on 18 November 2019, http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/theatre-critics-become-experts/.]

To deserve a job as a professional critic, you must be an expert.

To be an expert, you must be a professional critic.

Can you spot the problem? These two statements are a distillation of the arguments made by many, many articles decrying the current state of theatre criticism. They create a perfect, closed loop of logic – one which cheerfully shuts out the possibility of new voices entering the charmed circle of valid theatre criticism.

Michael Coveney marked Michael Billington’s recent announcement that he’s retiring with a blog in The Stage decrying the end of expert theatre critics, and complaining that “we shall be plunged into darkness”. Billington has seen an astonishing 10,000 shows, over nearly half a century, and has somehow retained a love of theatre that shines through in his responses to the kind of performances he loves (especially farces and dramas by serious 20th century playwrights). But darkness, really?

Coveney’s concern for the future lies in his fear that other critics aren’t as ‘expert’. He complains that in the olden days, you had to “earn the right” to write about theatre in a newspaper. In an interview with Matt Trueman, also published in The Stage, Michael Billington described his career trajectory. He started reviewing for The Times at the age of 25, after a few years working in regional rep theatre – sometimes as a director, but mostly as a PR. Was he an expert then? How about when he got the Guardian top job in his early thirties? At what point did he morph from person-with-opinions into expert – was he anointed by some divine spirit overnight the second his words were printed in a broadsheet, or was it a more gradual, more arduous process?

Coveney went on to write that “the general cultural shift is towards hiring non-experts to write about theatre. I don’t understand why this happened. No editor, online or in print, would pay for opinions on economics or medicine, or indeed football, from an ignoramus in those fields.”

David Benedict makes a very similar point in his blogpost, also in The Stage: “Everyone’s a critic – but only a few know what they’re talking about”. He complains that there’s a marked decline in expertise in theatre criticism, and that newspapers take theatre less seriously than other fields.

I’m not going to pretend I know anything about the credentials of football writers, but check the Daily Mail’s health pages and you’ll quickly find out people with no expertise in medicine do indeed get a regular platform, and are free to mangle the results of small medical trials into alarmist headlines as they see fit. Journalism is, for better or for worse, the skill of communicating complex ideas to a general audience. Some journalists have done a one-year journalism course, some have a relevant undergraduate degree, plenty more have no formal qualifications. You learn by doing it.

If you’re a ‘journalist’, your most meaningful qualification is your job title and the publication you work for. These things are a magical overcoat that give your opinions the widely perceived status of fact. And they’re ripe for misuse. In his blog, Coveney writes that the only remaining theatre critics worth listening to are two men called Dominic. As a personal opinion, that’s totally legitimate (if puzzling) – like loving pineapple on pizza. But as a statement that’s weighted with the implicit endorsement of the theatre industry’s most widely read newspaper, it’s borderline offensive. And if we also say this is a statement made by an ‘expert’, it’s something we suddenly have to give serious consideration, however ludicrous it might seem.

A 1993 psychology paper made the bold claim that 10,000 hours of practice can make you an expert in anything. Assuming it takes an average of five hours to see and review a performance, that means you have to write 2000 theatre reviews before you know what you’re talking about. But a study that debunked that paper found that some chess players took 26 years to achieve the level that others achieved in two. The more you look at ideas of expertise, the more it falls apart in your hands – and even Coveney grudgingly concedes that “Of course, if you write as brilliantly as William Hazlitt, Kenneth Tynan, Clive James or AA Gill, it doesn’t matter if you know nothing.”

Part of me doesn’t know why I’m even bothering to argue with two blogposts that are essentially just ragings against the dyings of the light; maybe I’ll write something similar in 50 years time, when the writers I love are all dead or hopelessly out of fashion. It’s easy to complain that “everyone’s a critic” if you’re working in the perma-threatened newspaper industry, with a chosen specialism that’s so niche that it’s a step, not a ladder; either you’re up on a platform, or you’ve lost it.

But I think I want to because it’s pieces like these that create a narrative around change – one that needs shaking up.

When Ann Treneman quit her job as lead critic of The Times after two years, she wrote a slightly mournful reflection that noted that other theatre critics were less than welcoming. Only a few people have openly questioned Arifa Akbar’s appointment at The Guardian, but I’d hate the same slight frostiness of reception to meet her first months in the job, as she steps into an exacting, crucial and very public role.

Historically, the status of ‘expert’ has been the property of establishment-endorsed white men, who together act as gatekeepers ready to exclude new entrants. But there’s no mystical Hogwarts-style theatre critic training college where expertise is handed down. You become a theatre critic by writing theatre criticism. That’s something you can do with care, like Michael Billington, or you can do with a vague sense that you’re being dragged to the theatre each night by malevolent dark forces beyond your control, like a couple of other newspaper critics I can think of. And admittedly, it’s a pretty gruelling job; it means having opinions five nights a week, all year round, and writing them up in serviceable prose for midnight deadlines. It’s not really the job for virtuoso writers who might toss it aside to pursue something else. It’s a job whose value is felt cumulatively, rather than in individual shining pieces of writing. And it’s one that means you’re acting as a fine copper wire, connecting a very specific experience in one dark room to millions of people across the world. As Andy Field wrote in his tribute to Lyn Gardner’s now-lost role at The Guardian;

“The tangible excitement (and gut-spasming nervousness) generated by Lyn’s presence is not about one person’s opinion, nor is it even about the potential boost in ticket sales that a positive notice might represent. It’s about the vital portal that she is able to open between your work and the wide-open spaces of our national, even international, cultural and political discourse.”

I’m not sure that ‘expert’ is useful word to bandy around, when it comes to theatre critics. I’m not sure it even means anything. It’s less a term, more of a distillation of a cluster of related concepts. I think when people say ‘expert’ in the context of criticism, they’re really talking about an opaque combination of platform, experience and trust.

Platform – the reach and perceived institutional validity of the place your words appear.

Experience – of writing and thinking about theatre, but also of seeing an omnivorous range of performances – something Gardner’s described as “stocking your larder for the winter ahead, like a squirrel”

Trust – the most nebulous one to define, but it’s something that’s accumulated through consistency, integrity and reasoned analysis.

I get why all these things are valued by producers, artists and audiences. But at the same time, none of the above are prerequisites for having a valid opinion on theatre, and at least two of them are things that pretty much automatically come with getting a job as a professional theatre critic.

If you wanted to, you could redefine who gets to be an expert. Maybe ‘platform’ could also refer to how many people subscribe to your tinyletter or follow your instagram or read your blog. Maybe ‘experience’ could also be lived experience of cultures that sit outside the establishment-endorsed mainstream, or experience of working in the arts yourself, or knowledge built up through study. Maybe ‘trust’ could be about standing up for what you believe in, about writing from your politics and the things that matter most to you.

In mental health, ideas of expertise have been democratised so that service users are called “experts by experience”; breaking down the steep traditional hierarchy between doctor and patient. In academia, there’s a growing scrutiny of the power structures and unspoken assumptions that determine what’s studied and what’s valued, and a move to reach outside institutions’ walls.

But within arts criticism, ‘expert’ is rarely a term that’s designed to be inclusive. Often, it’s a wire fence used to keep new voices out, or a way of undermining people with uncomfortable opinions. By all means complain about job insecurity for theatre critics, or lament the fact that roles that are vital for the theatre industry can be axed at will by newspaper editors who think they’re not valuable. But current ideas of expertise aren’t helping anyone; they’re rusted over, and ready for the scrapheap.

[Alice Saville is editor of Exeunt, as well as working as a freelance arts journalist for publications including Time Out, Fest and Auditorium magazine.]