The Critics Say...: 57 Theater Reviewers in New York and Beyond Discuss Their Craft and Its Future (24 page)

Howard Shapiro:
Every season, there are a few reviews that really stand out. When I finish them, I think, That’s just what I wanted to tell people, and I hope people see this play through my eyes.

Elisabeth Vincentelli:
I can’t think of anything off the top of my head. One of the things about working at a daily newspaper is that you have to crank out so much that it’s hard to keep track.

Charles Isherwood:
Spring Awakening
and
August: Osage County
are two of the most exciting reviews I’ve written. I wrote about them more than once, which is challenging. Those are good examples of new works I really felt I could have a stake in. Ultimately, it’s not about me, but it’s so rare to find new talent or new plays that you really think have a chance to cross over from the small group of people who regularly go to the theater to a major audience. I think both of those plays have a lot to say about contemporary America and what it is to be human.

Chris Jones:
I like my review of
August: Osage County
, which was the first major review of that play, and helped propel it to all it became. I also like my review of the David Cromer production of
Our Town
that moved Off Broadway. That was an extraordinary production, and I was able to somehow get people to go see it. When a show is that good, you really have to give it up for it to get people to go. There’s no point in namby-pambying around if something is unmissable. If you believe that someone will be the poorer for not having gone to the show, you have to write with great passion, and that’s very difficult to do without repeating yourself.

Christine Dolen:
Anna in the Tropics
had its world premiere here in a very small theater of about 100 seats. I had reviewed other plays by Nilo Cruz before, and I felt the play raised him and his work to a new level. In the way I wrote about it, I hope I captured his unique style and poetic sensibility. And, of course, it was really gratifying to see it go on to win the Pulitzer Prize.

Michael Dale:
When Suzanne Somers brought
The Blonde in the Thunderbird
, her exceedingly self-indulgent solo bio-musical, to Broadway, I called my review “Springtime for Somers: A Gay Romp with Suzanne and the Thighmaster on Broadway,” and wrote from the point of view of someone who thought the show must be a satire of bad theater.

David Cote:
My
Rabbit Hole
review—even if I was a little unfair in some ways. I used a mildly negative review to scream about how I was sick and tired of these bourgeois, overproduced living-room dramas about the tragedies of Westchester homeowners. A lot of people downtown really celebrated that review.

John Simon:
Private Lives
as played by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. That is one of my funniest reviews, and I like it for that reason. There also is a review I did of an extremely, violently homosexual movie—I mean really 101 percent homosexual—which I liked enormously, and I gave it a good review. I like the review not because it’s all that special, but because it disproves what so many people think about me—that I’m homophobic—which I don’t think I am. I don’t like uniforms. I don’t like a play that makes much of being very Christian, or very Jewish, or very macho, or whatever. For example, I have nothing against Alan Cumming for acting extremely homosexual on the stage as long as it fits the play, and as long as it’s well-done.

Michael Musto:
I reviewed
The Rocky Horror Show
when it first came to Broadway. I thought it was total trash, and I was proud of my honesty in saying so. I don’t think the piece found its stride until the movie version.

Michael Portantiere:
I’m proud of the fact that I’ve had an extremely negative reaction to certain kinds of shows, including almost all of the European pop operas (or whatever you want to call them) and most of the jukebox musicals.

Peter Marks:
I was very proud of my review of the musical
If/Then
in D.C. I had many different things to do in that review. The producer was hoisting onto me the tryout run of a $10 million Broadway musical. When you’re reviewing a tryout, you have a responsibility. They’re asking you, “How do we move this along?” They’re not saying, “We want to know if we should bring this to New York.” This was already announced for Broadway, so my job was to be as clear as I could about what I thought worked and what didn’t work. I thought I did a very successful job at that. I don’t think they did a very successful job at solving the problems, but it might have been impossible to do that in three months. They needed to go back to the drawing board.

Frank Rizzo:
Sleep No More
had its world premiere in Cambridge. I was reviewing it for
Variety
, so I had to deal with an industry audience, but also capture what was going on, what that experience was like, what I thought of it, and what it might mean to the marketplace. That was a real challenge.

Adam Feldman:
I often go back to my review of the musical
Caroline, or Change
, which opened at the Public Theater in 2003 and moved to Broadway in 2004. It is, in my opinion, the best musical of the past 20 years. It did not get the critical reception that I strongly feel it deserved. There were a few of us that loved it, and it’s gotten great reviews pretty much everywhere it’s been ever since because the cast album came out and people had time to process it. But when it opened, it was not properly received in New York. I went up to bat for it hard in the magazine and elsewhere. That’s an exciting place to be: fighting for something that you think is really terrific and at risk of being overlooked. I’m also proud of my negative reviews. There’s a review of a Frank Wildhorn musical called
Wonderland
that people still bring up to me because it was written in verse—some awfully good light verse, if I may say so myself.

John Lahr:
I’m currently putting together a collection of reviews that I’m pleased with. When I got the job with the
New Yorker
, I had bounced around long enough to know my good fortune. From day one, I was determined to not waste an hour of my time—and I didn’t. I worked like hell. There’s no single review I like above the rest.

Richard Zoglin:
My writing about Alan Ayckbourn. I think he’s the best living playwright. I’ve written a couple of pieces about him when his stuff wanders through New York, and I feel like I’ve made a good case for him.

Dan Bacalzo:
I’m proud of the review I wrote of
Dogeaters
at the Public Theater for
Theatre Journal
, which is an academic publication. I was able to go into a lot more depth, do a cross-comparison between the novel and the stage adaptation, and talk about some of the political issues in the Philippines. I couldn’t do all that in a review that had to come out immediately.

David Sheward:
My review of
You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown
on Broadway with Kristin Chenoweth. She was such a talent, and she stood out without overwhelming the show. Recognizing somebody who has gone on to a very big career certainly makes me glad that I could be a part of that. I wasn’t the only critic to recognize her, but I was a part of that official voice saying, “She’s special.”

David Finkle:
I wrote a review of a production of Ibsen’s
Ghosts
that was done Off-Broadway with Amy Irving and Daniel Gerroll. It was very badly directed.
Ghosts
was such a seminal and shocking play in its time that this director thought he needed to find a way to make it shocking again, so he had the actors deliver their lines without emoting, and I wrote about that. I understood how these actors were doing things they didn’t want to do. Within a month, I got a letter from Daniel Gerroll where he said, “It’s so helpful to have a critic understand what actors go through.”

Zachary Stewart:
After I wrote a review of the recent Encores! revival of
Zorba!
, Jack Viertel (the artistic director of Encores!) sent along some very kind words about the review, even though it was not the most glowing assessment of the show. That felt very gratifying.

Terry Teachout:
Because I travel, I was the first person in New York to really spot David Cromer and see how good he is. I saw a show of his in Kansas City and reported on it in the
Wall Street Journal
. I’m very proud that I was able to say to the readers of the
Journal
, “This is a very important artist. This is someone whose name you should know.”

Michael Riedel:
I have a good track record in terms of picking the winners and losers. My stuff on
Spider-Man
was pretty on the mark. Before anyone else had written anything about it, I had a sense that it was going to be the fiasco that it turned out to be. When
The Lion King
came out in Minneapolis, I knew it was going to be really big, and that it would bring people to see really see Disney in a whole new light. I think some of the profiles I’ve done over the years are quite good. I’ve become fairly adept at writing a little send off to showbiz people that have died. Because I’ve been around a long time, I’ve gotten to know a lot of them, and I have some insights into their personalities. I don’t just use the same anecdotes that everybody else recycles from the old clips.

MATT WINDMAN
: If you had the chance, is there any review you would rewrite?

Hilton Als:
All of them. I always get that feeling as a writer.

Michael Riedel:
If I said it at the time, I meant it. I don’t spend a lot of time sifting through my old stuff. Once it goes to the printing press and hits the stands, I don’t dwell on what I wrote yesterday. I barely dwell on what I wrote an hour ago.

Ronni Reich:
I’m usually writing with less than 24 hours in which to turn in a review, and I do sometimes feel that I haven’t considered a show from every angle. Maybe I dismissed something I shouldn’t have, or I was too harsh, or I gave some things the benefit of the doubt when I shouldn’t have. Hindsight is 20/20.

Michael Dale:
Probably anything I’ve ever written in April, when there’s typically a mad rush of a couple dozen shows racing to open before the award deadlines.

Don Aucoin:
I can’t think of a review where I felt completely differently 24 hours later. Under the pressure of a deadline, I might overpraise or underpraise a performance or some other aspect of a production. It’s important to steer away from categorical language like “greatest,” “best-ever,” or “worst-ever.” That’s where you get into trouble.

John Simon:
I’ve written so many reviews in my life that I’ll be damned if I can remember whether I’ve been fair in all of them. There must have been a handful of cases where I underpraised something that deserved a more positive review. I often realize that after a while.

Leonard Jacobs:
There are times when I’d like to make a 90-degree turn, but not a 180-degree turn. I don’t go from completely loving a show to suddenly hating it.

Steven Suskin:
From years of working backstage, I know that a show can play better after it opens, especially if it’s experienced a lot of changes during previews, but we can only judge what we see when we see it.

Ben Brantley:
Sometimes you come closer to saying what you intended than other times. At the moment you’re writing the review, you can only write about what you saw and how you saw it at that time. You might see the same show a month or a year later. By that time, you’ve changed, but the cast may have also changed. That’s one of the great things about theater. It’s never the same from night to night. You bring a different perspective to it, and who you’re watching brings a different perspective to it, too.

David Finkle:
When I was younger and thought sarcasm was so great, I might’ve gone too far. I remember being unnecessarily cruel about somebody in one review. There’s no need for cruelty in a review. You can make your point without being cruel.

Chris Jones:
There was a review of an early Sarah Ruhl play, back when no one had heard of her, when she was about 22 years old. I blamed her for something the director had done. And 10 years later, she reminded me of it, and told me how much it had crippled her and hurt her. I was wrong. I attributed it incorrectly, you might say, so I would like to redo that one. There are also some shows I overpraised, and some shows where I was too sparing in my praise, but the Sarah Ruhl play is one where I screwed up. It’s the one that sticks out in my mind. It was a choice that the director had forced on the playwright, but there I was blaming her.

Elisabeth Vincentelli:
I gave the most recent Broadway revival of
Follies
two and a half stars out of four. I was really harsh on it because I had this Platonic ideal of what the show could be, and I felt the production fell short. I was really kind of nitpicky and harsh. But I kept thinking about the show, so I did something that I rarely do and asked the publicist if I could see it again, and I wrote another review of it on my blog.

Elysa Gardner:
I banged out my review of Audra McDonald in
110 in the Shade
, and it was a visceral reaction to the show. It really flowed out, and I felt good about it at first. Then I read some of the feedback, and people who were big fans of Audra seemed to think I had a problem with her. I thought to myself, Yes, maybe I do, but that’s relevant to the review. After the fact, I thought that maybe I shouldn’t have channeled so much energy into asking why this woman is the bees knees to so many people. I probably went on too much about that when I could have described other aspects of the production.

Howard Shapiro:
There are a few plays I wish had more time to think about before writing about them, including a couple by Tom Stoppard. I think I would have done a better job if I had another hour at the keyboard.

Michael Musto:
There’s nothing I can’t live with. I still maintain that
Wonderland
was terrible and
A Chorus Line
was great.