The Critics Say...: 57 Theater Reviewers in New York and Beyond Discuss Their Craft and Its Future (30 page)

Roma Torre:
Did the performer disappear into the role? Did I stop looking at the person as an actor, and start seeing that person as the character? They have to immerse themselves in the part. That’s why so many of us were raving about Audra McDonald in
Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill
. She totally became Billie Holiday. She morphed into that human being. The standard problem with a novice actor is indicating. But on Broadway, you rarely see that.

Steven Suskin:
When you have a performance that grabs you, you’re not looking at an actor. You’re looking at the character. Take Mark Rylance in
Twelfth Night
. It wasn’t just this very good actor playing this role. He was so real that you couldn’t even start to analyze what he was doing.

Jesse Green:
Are the actors contributing to a coherent vision, as set out by the director? I’m less interested in acting as display or entertainment in and of itself. I’m talking here in terms of a serious dramatic work. If you’re reviewing a musical comedy or a one-person show, that’s a different story, and the “performative” aspect of the performance—the showbiz, if you will—becomes more central.

With plays, I’m looking at the way the actor is able to contribute to the overall point of view of the text, as interpreted by the director. Second, but equally important, is how convincing they are in creating a character that I believe could exist, and who would behave in the way that the playwright intended. You often get a playwright asking for characters to do things that are not credible. Certain actors can make that work, and those are really exceptional performances. Generally, actors can’t do more than the author allows them to do, but they need to do everything that the author allows them to do. I’m looking to see how well they walk that line.

I’m also looking at what everyone else looks at. What are their technical skills? If it’s verse, how well do they seem to understand the poetry, as it’s expressed in the way they speak it? In comedy, some people have an amazing ear that can split milliseconds and sense the temperature of the audience as it rises and falls to a micro-degree. But the first thing to look for is whether are they helping to tell the story that the playwright and the director want to tell.

John Lahr:
You look at the way a performer meets the challenge of the part and expresses the feelings behind it. It also has to do with the boldness of the performer and their willingness to find a kind of vulnerability. When I worked on
Elaine Stritch at Liberty
, Elaine just thought she was being charming, but I knew that she was bringing all this baggage with her. She was being very brassy and funny. But behind all that, you could see this terrible, dark shadow, which is what made her so subliminal and compelling.

Michael Riedel:
I look for charismatic people—people who come onstage and you think, Wow, that’d be a great person to hang out with. I don’t just mean beautiful people. Nathan Lane is no Hugh Jackman. But when he comes onstage, you don’t want to look anywhere else.

Peter Marks:
Some actors have a level of presence and magnetism that’s innate. They’re just right for a part. In the original production of Warren Leight’s play
Side Man
, Frank Wood played a very blank man who was kind of unknowable and enigmatic. It was a marvelous distillation of who that man was. I’ve noticed that in other performances of his. There is a kind of vacant quality that he brings. It’s him. He’s not a chameleon. Sometimes you find that an actor can transform himself or herself from play to play, and you admire the actor more the second time around because you realize how much work they’ve done to get to this other character. Sometimes it’s also technique. It’s a very specific skill to be able to plant yourself on a stage and take in both the audience and the reality you’re in, and to make all those things seem natural.

When I saw Julia Roberts in
Three Days of Rain
, I thought she couldn’t play a character. She just didn’t have the skill set, and it was unfair to make her do it. Then you see someone like Laura Benanti, who knows how to use herself on a stage. I reviewed her back in the late 1990s when she replaced Rebecca Luker in the Broadway revival of
The Sound of Music
. She was a bit raw, but I noticed what was good about her. She’s loosened up since then.

Ronni Reich:
Is a person believable and captivating within a particular role? Do I have a sense that they are acting, and should I, depending on the type of work it is? Do they have the proper range, the proper qualities for the part, in the way they use their voice and body? What is the particular impression that they make? Some of it is charisma. Some of it is personality…. With Shakespeare, you look at the way the actor approaches the language and the nuances within it.

Terry Teachout:
You want to be transported. You can see a certain kind of performance, and be constantly aware of the fact that it’s a performance, but still be excited by it. There are other performances where the actor seems to vanish. It’s a very mysterious thing. Even having done this for 11 years, and even after becoming involved in the craft of making theater, what I find most amazing and mysterious of all are the actors. They’re the ones who put in the hardest labor. They’re doing something that I can’t do. I did my best when I was young, but I was never a very good actor. I marvel at good acting. I think we’re supposed to be astonished by it. I would say that the average level of acting is better than the average level of playwriting.

MATT WINDMAN
: How do you capture an actor’s performance in your writing?

Zachary Stewart:
It is difficult because the actor’s craft is the most intangible of the theatrical arts, but I often mention a trait that is memorable in the performance (diction, posture, appearance, intensity).

Charles Isherwood:
Walter Kerr was famous for being able to give these incredible “you are there” descriptions of performances, and that’s something I strive after constantly. My colleague Ben Brantley can do that very well, too. It’s about being able to retain the image in your head of a particular moment in an actor’s performance. It’s something that you keep challenging yourself to do better, knowing all the while that you’re going to be defeated. The really exciting performances can’t be captured in words. That’s why theater can be such a powerful experience. It’s only happening live for the people who are in the audience. You just do your best to capture it.

Ben Brantley:
Ideally, what a critic wants to communicate is his or her visceral response to an individual performer. We all have very visceral responses to actors. We have visceral responses to people in general. It’s almost like a social relationship that you develop over the course of two hours. You feel like you’ve gotten to know the person. Why are you fascinated by this person? What makes this person unique? What kind of physical sensations does this person produce in you?

David Cote:
Sketching the essence of performance—like Al Hirschfeld in words—may be the hardest thing in theater criticism. I guess you can focus on a small detail of the face, body, or voice. I think it’s about adjectives and extraordinary detail.

Alexis Soloski:
I probably use too many adjectives and overuse words like “visceral,” “spirited,” and “poignant,” but I have a pretty good sense memory from years of actor training. When I’m back at my desk, I try to remember how the performance made me feel, and I work backwards from there.

Frank Scheck:
You have to feel your way through a performance and convey what the performance made you feel. It’s a good test of your writing ability. You inevitably find yourself relying on stock phrases like “compelling,” but sometimes a performance is so unusual that it does enable you to write about it in an interesting way. If there’s a performance that’s special enough, you try to honor that performance. It also gives you a hook for the review. Nathan Lane, when he was starting out, was a revelation. It was like what you imagine it was like to watch Bert Lahr. When someone excites you on that level, writing about them is fun.

Howard Shapiro:
How do you describe the food you’re being served and make it leap off the page into somebody’s mouth? I often describe the way people act with a part of their body that may not be their voice: their eyes, their posture, what they relate by the way they cock their head, other stuff that strikes me. We are lucky to work in a language that has a really broad range of adjectives. At the end of the theater season, I sometimes sit back and say, “Okay, I’ve used up all my adjectives. I need a couple weeks off.” And then I kind of regenerate.

Michael Schulman:
Acting is much harder to talk about analytically than playwriting. Unfortunately, I don’t feel like I have the space to do it in a meaningful way.

Peter Filichia:
It’s very hard to write about actors who aren’t particularly distinctive. If they aren’t distinctive, how can I write about them distinctively? I remember my girlfriend telling me, “You won’t believe how many paragraphs Frank Rich wrote about Robert Lindsay in
Me and My Girl
.” When I went to see the musical, I understood perfectly. That was one of the greatest performances I’ve ever seen in a musical. I would have had no trouble writing a few paragraphs on why he was so spectacular.

Steven Suskin:
You can use a lot of words to describe a performance, but simply finding the right phrase is ideal. In my book
The Sound of Broadway Music
, I talk about how composer Jerry Bock played a score for a prospective orchestrator who said, “Well, I kind of hear elephants on tip-toe,” and Jerry gave him the job. I try to come up with a picture in words that captures what I want to say.

Terry Teachout:
Detail and metaphor. I try to create a word portrait of the actor’s appearance. I think this is as close to writing about abstract music as a theater critic gets. There’s no formula. It’s the part that gives the review its color and life.

MATT WINDMAN
: How do you evaluate direction?

Helen Shaw:
We all tend to review a director on the basis of his most recent show, rather than the one we’re actually looking at. We write the review we meant to write the time before.

Zachary Stewart:
Directors coordinate the entire production, so I look for a cohesive vision for the work encompassing performance, design, and text.

Ben Brantley:
You shouldn’t be thinking about direction while you’re watching a play. Direction should be seamless, unless the point is that it’s meant to put a frame or quotation marks around things. You look for momentum, a kind of variation in tempo, a play that doesn’t lag. You look for a sense that the director has served her or his cast well, that they haven’t hung the actors out to dry, that the director steered them from making mistakes, which is sometimes hard when the actors are big stars.

Charles Isherwood:
Sometimes the best direction is direction that you don’t notice. Obviously, the director is in control of shaping all of the performances onstage to some degree. The adage that “90 percent of directing is good casting” is not wholly true. But even if it is, the director is the one doing the casting. His responsiveness to the text, and his way of communicating what he feels about the text, can be read in all of the performances onstage to some degree.

I’m sure some directors get very frustrated if they don’t get enough credit, or if they’re blamed for certain things, but critics are not in the rehearsal room. We don’t know who made what choice. Something may be an actor’s choice, or maybe it was made in collaboration with the director. You don’t know, so you try your best. It’s easier with classic plays since you’ve probably seen other productions. Sometimes what a director’s trying to do is glaringly apparent, especially if you go to Europe.

Chris Jones:
There are directors who are able to create, who catch every detail of a play, who are not lazy, who pay attention to specifics, who have a strong a point of view, who create an arc that makes an evening feel complete (even if the play itself has no apparent arc at all), who get out of the way of their fellow artists.

Christine Dolen:
You can tell what the director did from the overall tenor and style of a production. He or she has to sign off on what everyone onstage is doing.

David Cote:
I look for a director who zeros in on what the play is about, who works with the play, who brings clarity. I also look for directors who can blow the dust off classics.

David Sheward:
Direction is a combination of showmanship, strength of vision, and knowing when to pull back. Sometimes the direction calls attention to itself. Sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn’t. It depends on what’s necessary for the play.

Elisabeth Vincentelli:
If you were to talk to the director before you review their show about what they’re doing, you’d be reviewing their intentions or their private personalities. The director would say, “Well, what I’m really trying to do is this and that,” but that’s not what you’re reviewing. You’re reviewing the results onstage. You’re not reviewing what’s in their head. You’re reviewing what they’ve accomplished, what’s onstage. Sometimes it’s very clear what they’re trying to do and what their aim is. Other times, you have no idea what they’re trying to do. You’re reviewing something that’s confused and aimless, and you are not in the business of trying to read minds.

As a critic, you’re not reviewing the creative process. That’s not possible. You’re reporting on the result. Sometimes that’s unfair because they didn’t have the money, or they didn’t have the time, or someone made them work with a star they didn’t want to work with, but that’s tough. People don’t buy tickets with an asterisk saying, “We really tried, but this is what we ended up with.”

My views on direction are very much influenced by having grown up in France. I saw Ingmar Bergman’s
King Lear
when I was 19 or 20 years old in Paris, and it was a shock to my system. I tend to really enjoy a European-style production. I am very pro-director. I think directors need to be very hands-on and creative. I really think the director is as important as the author. In the United States, critics tend to side with the author. The respect of the author takes precedence here, and directors tend to be a little too reverent of the material. I like to see directors go at a text very forcefully, and I think that’s a European approach. I often think American directors don’t go far enough in tackling a classic text. I wish they would be a little bit more inventive. British directors can be quite inventive. But at the same time, I am very unimpressed by the Anglophilia that runs rampant in New York theater circles. It’s insane.