The Critics Say...: 57 Theater Reviewers in New York and Beyond Discuss Their Craft and Its Future (20 page)

MATT WINDMAN
: After attending a show, what is your typical process for writing the review?

Ben Brantley:
I’m glad we don’t have to file our reviews right after we see a show, which the British critics still do. I like to have at least a little time to digest. By the next morning, I’m usually ready to write. I just sit down at my computer and write the review. How much time it takes varies—probably two and a half hours, but sometimes less.

Leonard Jacobs:
I find it very difficult to write a review immediately after seeing a show. But back in the old days, that’s what the critics did. They would get out of a show and run to the copy desk. Brooks Atkinson would write the review in long hand, while standing up, and hand it to the copy boy. The
Times
would then have it in print by 2:00 a.m. What you were getting in those days was a very visceral reaction. There’s definitely something to be said for that, but I like having some time for perspective.

I’ve walked out of shows in tears. I’ve walked out of shows in a fury. And then two days later, or even a day later, I thought, Was that really worth crying over or being angry over? Time tempers your emotions. Highly emotional reviews tend to be more hyperbolic than I would prefer. Walter Kerr called
Gypsy
“the best damn musical I’ve seen in years.” He wrote that in 1959. It was a great money quote. But from a larger point of view, was it really the best musical? Was it better than
The Music Man
? Was it better than
West Side Story
? Time kind of leavens the bread.

Richard Ouzounian:
I think the worst thing that ever happened to North American theater was when critics stopped reviewing overnight on deadline. They used to write with the passion and immediacy of the moment. Sometimes the judgments would be faulty. Sometimes the critics would have to express themselves in less than gossamer prose, but it’s pretty amazing to read Brooks Atkinson and Walter Kerr and see how well they wrote. I know that Ben Brantley makes a point of attending the first preview he can, and then he has days to think about the show and then write the review, rewrite it, and polish it. I just feel like there’s something missing—and I think the audiences miss it, too.

There used to be an excitement when the reviews of seven Broadway critics appeared at once. When they were all high as a kite on the newest exciting show, the papers vibrated. No wonder everyone would rush down to the box office to buy tickets. It was a time of kinetic excitement and energy in the theater. Now it’s largely about reviews that have been written days in advance and come out online the minute the curtain comes down, and you buy the tickets online. It’s not the same.

I still have really tight deadlines. Unless a show has a very late curtain, my review will be online 45 minutes after the curtain falls. Everybody at the opening night party has their Google alert set to see what I’m going to say. It can wreck a party, or it can be, “Holy fuck, he loved us. We’re set.” The buzz can spread instantly.

Frank Rizzo:
When I get home, I write something called “First Impressions.” It’s just one paragraph. It evokes the old-time reviewer running up the aisle to meet a deadline and write the whole review. In this case, I’m just writing a gut reaction, something engaging and a bit of a tease, which gives the reader a sense of having just come out of the theater. It goes live as soon as I press the button, without any editors. I write the full review the next morning. Whether it’s for
Variety
or the
Hartford Courant
, I usually file the review by the late morning or early afternoon.

Charles Isherwood:
I’m glad that we don’t have to go through the famous Brooks Atkinson routine, where you’re running up the aisle as soon as the show ends. I don’t know how people did that. They still do it in London, and I certainly admire them for it. I get up the next morning, and unless something is impeding me for some reason, I’ll write the review and get it over with. Usually, you’re seeing something else that night, and I hate having things backed up. I get anxious when I have more than one review percolating in my head. After I write it, I let it sit for a day, and then I go back and finish it up.

Everybody struggles with finding the lead. Once you get your lead down, things flow pretty easily. I know people who start a review in the middle, but I can’t conceive of that. I like to start at the beginning. Once I have that, things sort of evolve. Whatever you think is the most salient point—the most newsworthy piece of information about a play—is where you want to start. If it’s a mediocre play that has a truly exciting performance in it, you should start with that. If it’s a revival of a musical that’s far better than the original version, you can start with that.

Marilyn Stasio:
I could never again do what I did in the old days, when I was writing for the
New York Post
. I would run out of the theater at 11 p.m., jump in a cab, dash downtown to that really creepy office, and bang out a review for the late edition. Nowadays, I see the show, come home, and go to bed. And when I wake up in the morning, I have the lead in my head and a pretty good idea of what I want to write. If it hasn’t come to me by the time I wake up, it’ll come to me in the shower. Once in a while, it doesn’t happen, and it makes me crazy because I’ll have to sit down to write without having that firm, assured knowledge of where I’m going.

Michael Dale:
I usually see a show three to five days before it opens, but I often have other reviews to write and other shows to see during that time. The only process is to block out time when I can get it done.

Zachary Stewart:
Depending on the turnaround, I’ll either write a rough draft immediately following the show or the next morning. Then I revise and edit in the afternoon. If I’m reviewing something at the Metropolitan Opera or an Encores! production at City Center, where there are no previews and you attend on opening night, I file my completed review the night of the performance, usually at 1 or 2 a.m.

John Simon:
I can write a review quite speedily. A couple of hours will usually do. I don’t like to compose on the computer. I almost always write first in longhand. It then takes time to put it into the computer. I believe in weighing every sentence I write as to whether it’s worthy of being called literature. I may not succeed, but that’s the intention. I want to write something that could be read 50 years from now, even by people who are not that much interested in theater, and read with pleasure, amusement, and enlightenment.

Helen Shaw:
To write a review, I have to go to a coffee shop where there is no Internet. Otherwise I will go down terrible wormholes of reading interviews with the show’s director until I’m well past my deadline. If it’s a longer piece, I tend to write from the middle. If it’s a short review, I usually write it in a single burst. The way I get over any writer’s block is to write about the set design because I have a background in that. The set design gives me a hook. Those paragraphs don’t make it into the final draft, but that’s where I start.

Chris Jones:
I probably review more shows than anyone else in the country. In a typical week, I review five or six plays. Most often I write the morning after I see a show, but sometimes I’ll write the same night because of a deadline at the paper. Usually, I get up and come into the office, or I sit in my hotel room in New York, and write the review. If it comes really quickly, it could take me 90 minutes. If it doesn’t, it could take three or four hours. I don’t write the middle of the review and then go back to the top. I get my lead down, and then I write it straight through.

Once it’s written, the review goes online, and then it runs in the newspaper. I rarely look back at a review because by the time it’s published, it’s the next day, and I’m on to the next show. Sometimes I write more than one review in a single day. That, of course, is one of the great disconnects with the people you review because they’re probably working on just four or five projects a year. Sometimes I won’t be able to remember a review that someone confronts me about. It’s because we see so much. I move on very quickly. For me, it’s just a review. But for the people I review, it might be the only thing they do that year. That’s just the way it is.

Christine Dolen:
I attend shows on opening night. Most theaters in Florida have either no previews or only one or two previews. If a show is only going to run for a week, they won’t bother with previews. I get up the next morning and write the review. Then it’s posted online, and it appears in the paper the following day. Back when I was under intense deadline pressure, when I had to file immediately after a show, I could write a review in 45 minutes. Now I usually take several hours. I never liked filing right after the show ended. I felt like it wasn’t fair to the artists, the readers, or me. The readers deserve more than having me run backstage to sit in a little office to write the review in 45 minutes.

Andy Propst:
I have the script by me as I write. I sit down at the computer, let it fly, and hope that inspiration takes me. I don’t know what I really thought about a show until I’m done writing the review. There are certain pieces that fly out because I feel so passionately about them, and there are others where it’s like sweating bullets because there’s so much to talk about and discern about what was working, what wasn’t working, and where things went wrong.

Elisabeth Vincentelli:
I like writing at my desk at the
Post
because it keeps me on my toes. I do have to file by a certain time. Sometimes I have to write the review the next morning, and that’s kind of annoying. But if I have a few days, I’ll do a first draft, let it sit overnight, and then return to it the next day and rewrite it. I’ll also print it out and reread it. It’s amazing all the things you see when it’s printed out, as opposed to on the computer screen. I often make edits on the printout and then rewrite it on the computer.

Frank Scheck:
Hopefully, I’ll start off the review in such a way that it writes itself. You have to find a way to make it flow. Occasionally, when you go back and read it, you think of something else worth mentioning, and you’ve got to find a way to put it in. In other cases, you find that you’ve got to cut something.

Jeremy Gerard:
Variety
wasn’t interested in the classic inverted pyramid style of writing. You basically had to spill the beans at the top of the review, both in terms of what you thought about the show and what you thought about its prospects for commercial success. And once you had that, you really had to challenge yourself to keep the reader interested. I learned that you can do that and still say a lot.

Michael Schulman:
I usually see things on the weekend, and my reviews are due on Monday, so I can write them on Saturday evening or Sunday afternoon. It takes me about half an hour to write a review. Later on, I might make changes for clarity or to the flow of the language. The
New Yorker
has very detailed fact-checking. My editor sends everything that’s factual to the publicist, and then it’s copy-edited.

Rob Weinert-Kendt:
The process of writing a review is like any other process of writing. I focus a lot on the lead and what my opening will be, and then I move through that and try to come up with a thesis statement, a larger view. I try not to write by a formula. I can tell when some critics do that.

Robert Faires:
When I sit down to write, I spend a lot of time digging into my own reactions. I want to know not just what I felt, but
why
I felt it. I will peel away reactions and responses like the layers of an onion until I really understand the core of what my experience was. That’s what I want to write about. That’s what I find interesting when I read reviews. Once I get down to that level, the performances and the directorial work and design work look very different, and I can write about them with a specificity that doesn’t feel like the stereotypical rant or rave.

Roma Torre:
I write my reviews while I’m on the anchor desk. It can be supremely frustrating because I’m constantly being interrupted, and it interferes with my thought process, but I’ve gotten used to those things. I now almost work better if I’m sitting at the anchor desk and being interrupted. It forces me to focus and write more efficiently and quickly, and that’s something I didn’t do so well in the early days. I used to labor over reviews. They would haunt me right into my sleep.

Steven Suskin:
I don’t have any kind of specific process in terms of handling a review. I start thinking about it before I write. The hardest part is figuring out how to start it. Once I have my lead, I can move along pretty well. It usually takes as much time as I have. If I see a show tonight and the review has to go online by tomorrow before 3 p.m., then that’s how much time I have. If I see a show tonight and it doesn’t open for a week, I have a lot more time, so I can write it and then go back and rewrite.

Jesse Green:
I generally avoid writing the review until I have to, but that’s not a process so much as a peccadillo. The way I actually form the reviews is idiosyncratic. I figure out what the big thing is that I want to say. In the first sentence or two, I want to engage the reader in that theme. In a short review, you really only have space for one major idea. You have to know what that idea is as you start, and you have to stick to it. You only get one chance at your first slice. Then I just write it through. By the time I’m at the end, I know it’s the end because it sounds like the end. Then I’ll go through the review again—cleaning it up, adding details, making sure the argument tracks. That’s usually all that I have time for. Once it’s in good enough shape, or when my time runs out, I file it. Sometimes my editor has questions, usually just about little word choices, and occasionally about logic. Once I’ve dealt with those, the review goes online—perhaps as little as 10 minutes later—and I’m on to the next show. When the online version is picked up for the print edition, I usually have time to improve it.