The Critics Say...: 57 Theater Reviewers in New York and Beyond Discuss Their Craft and Its Future (33 page)

David Rooney:
The number of outlets where you can actually make a living as a critic keeps shrinking. When the recession hit in 2008, it really hurt print media advertising. At that point, the migration from print to online publication was already under way. And as print started to become obsolete, the idea that arts critics had to be salaried positions went away. When other aspects of the media and the ad market improved as the economy picked up, criticism didn’t bounce back. The notion of salaried arts critic positions has kind of had its day, and that’s very sad.

Look at places around the country. Seattle used to have four major daily newspapers. Each of those four papers probably had a music critic, fine arts critic, dance critic, classical music critic, pop music critic, theater critic, and film critic. Many of those jobs have disappeared or gone to freelancers. A lot of papers are owned by umbrella companies that are now centralizing those positions among multiple publications. They might have one staffed position instead of several. One staffer can supply film reviews for three or four different papers around the country.

The idea of what a review is has been bastardized by the continuing evolution of the Internet and social media, to the point where you’re invited to write a review of the toaster that you just bought online. Everything is perceived as a review now, so the distinction between a professional critical opinion and a less-informed consumer response has become blurred.

I know people who work at film and television schools, and they’re astonished by the fact that film students no longer read reviews. Back when I was first getting interested in critical writing, they would have all been reading Pauline Kael or Vincent Canby or one of the other big-name critics. There is a whole generation coming up that is not being schooled to look to reviews for opinion. They look to one another, or to social media, for opinion. They don’t really care what the critics have to say. They circulate opinion among themselves by text, email,
Twitter, Instagram, Facebook
. All of that has encroached on what was traditionally the reviewer’s turf. It doesn’t mean that reviewers don’t have authority anymore, but it does make it harder for them to stake a claim.

Every year, I go to the New York Drama Critics’ Circle and see that more jobs have fallen through the cracks. One day,
Bloomberg
suddenly decided it didn’t want arts coverage anymore. What’s that about? It’s happened all over the place. Jobs are disappearing.

It makes more sense for media corporations to just hire freelancers. That way, they don’t have to deal with vacation pay, health insurance, retirement plans, and benefits. I don’t know if readers notice the difference. I don’t think it necessarily changes the quality of the writing because there are some pretty fantastic part-time theater reviewers. Being full-time or part-time does not in any way distinguish a talented writer from an untalented writer, or a perceptive critic from an unperceptive critic, but I do think it is part of a steady erosion of the profession. The more those voices are eliminated from full-time staff (whether it’s a trade paper like
Variety
, or a consumer publication, or a wire service like
Bloomberg
), the less authoritative the critical voice becomes. It means that anybody stepping in to fill that breach really has to work harder to define themselves—to establish a style that fits with that of the publication and still have some kind of personal voice.

If you want to work in arts criticism these days, it almost always has to be a sideline to a paying job, or you have to be incredibly ambitious and energized and have endless stamina to push and push and push and pitch and get your coverage in as many outlets as possible.

Alexis Soloski:
When I started out, this seemed like a reasonable career choice for a young middle-class woman. There were, if not legions of opportunities, at least a number of them. There are so many fewer positions now. I’m very glad I teach and do other things. I don’t know what the critical landscape will look like in another 10 or 20 years. There’ll always be someone at the
Times
. Theater is a big enough industry in New York that we’ll need that. We’ll always have professional theater criticism, but I imagine we’ll see a lot less of it going forward.

Elisabeth Vincentelli:
I’m living through the extinction of the dinosaurs. Going forward, only very few outlets will be able to have full-time paid critics. It’s not just us. It’s music critics and movie critics, too. We may still have critics who review one or two shows a week, or who write a review every other week, but the critic for a daily newspaper who sees everything, who goes through that exhausting grind, is going to disappear.

Practically speaking, holding a day job and writing on the side is really difficult, and I know because I did that for years. With theater, unlike a book or a CD, you have to be at the shows, and they’re in the evening. That means you don’t have enough time to think about the show. Being a full-time professional critic gives you the freedom to write what you need to write and not fear that a publicist is going to blacklist you.

A full-time critic becomes a familiar figure, and that creates a benchmark. You find critics you trust, whose tastes you understand, or who articulate their analysis of a show forcefully and in a stylistically satisfying manner. With that disappearing, it’s very depressing.

John Simon:
Print publications are gravely threatened. They are having a terrible time, and a lot of people are getting fired. There is a great plague killing off critics across the whole land. I don’t know when exactly it started, but it’s a relatively recent development. And if they have to save money and cut down on things, theater criticism one of the most expendable things as far as they’re concerned. Any day, theater critics may be sacked, and there’s nothing much they can do about it.

It doesn’t even have to do with the positive or negative reviews they write. They might get fired for no good reason at all. Or, in some cases, half a good reason, which is almost as bad as no good reason. If you’re a severe and tough critic, and suddenly you don’t have a job anymore and are looking for a new job, then the fact that you have been a very severe critic becomes a serious danger. It results in being turned down by 75 publications, as I recently was. There’s the danger of somehow prostituting yourself, or feeling obliged to be more positive when you really don’t want to be, and trying to make sure you’re staying in the good graces of your readers and editors.

Also, there is a general kind of stupidification in the land. People who should know things and be able to do their jobs properly do it poorly and inadequately in every way, and that extends to everything from plumbing to drama criticism.

Rob Weinert-Kendt:
Apathy and not being read are the things that frighten me the most about the future of theater criticism. Even the people who are passionate about theater don’t read criticism or care about it. That is also true of criticism in other fields.

When
Backstage
cut theater reviews altogether, it was a horrifying wakeup call.
Backstage
had a mandate to cover every show it possibly could, more than any other place as far as I know in New York and L.A. It was a service to the community. But who was reading those reviews? Who was the audience for them? It’s related to the challenges a lot of theaters are experiencing all over the country. Who’s their audience? Who’s going to be their audience next year or 10 years from now?

The number of people who have full-time employment and are receiving health coverage to cover theater is probably under 10. There’s Peter Marks in D.C., Chris Jones in Chicago, the two guys at the
Times
, Charles McNulty in L.A., Robert Hurwitt in San Francisco. There’s a really small list of people who get paid to mainly do criticism. That trend has been going on since I’ve been in the business. Often, there is a main critic, and everyone else is freelance, and the freelancers either work at the paper already or have a day job. It’s reflective of how theater is economically. No one goes into theater for the money, and no one goes into theater criticism for the money. That’s not a joke. It’s not even remotely funny. There’s just no money in the coverage of theater.

Robert Faires:
Theater critics are an endangered species. We get less space than we used to. We’re expected to speak in the vernacular, the shorthand of the day. It’s got to be short and sweet and no more than a tweet. It’s very hard to pack a lot of critical insight into 140 characters. Over the last 15 years, my space has been contracting. I find it harder to generate the same critical impact that I used to. A lot of my writing is devoted to telling people, “This really is important, and you need to pay attention.”

Helen Shaw:
There aren’t any theater critic jobs. That’s a problem because professionalization has a real value. There used to be 30 theater critic jobs in New York, and now there are maybe 15 jobs. There are five jobs at the
Times
, a few jobs at
Time Out
, one and a half jobs at the
Voice
, one job at
New York
magazine, one job at the
Wall Street Journal
. There’s the
Post
. There’s the
Daily News
. I think you can get to 15. Some of those are not full-time jobs. They’re opportunities where you need to have another job on top of that to support yourself. We’re losing good critics because we don’t have enough places to put them.

Roma Torre:
All of the television networks used to have theater reviewers: Jeffrey Lyons on Channel 4, Dennis Cunningham on Channel 2, Stewart Klein on Channel 5, Joel Siegel on Channel 7. About 10 years ago, there was a critic at one of the major TV channels (none of the above mentioned) who sat behind me at
Our Town
with Paul Newman. She said to me, “What do you think of
Our Town
?” I gave her some thoughts, and she said, “I can’t write this review. It’s such a stupid play.” And this was their designated theater critic. I thought, Oh my God. They might as well not have anybody. That person didn’t last long, and nobody replaced her. That was the end of theater criticism at that particular channel.

With the dumbing down of television, there’s a sense that theater is only for the elite, and that the average New Yorker doesn’t care that much about theater, at least not enough to warrant paying a critic. That doesn’t make sense to me because whoever does the film reviews can also do the theater reviews. They just don’t think it’s necessary anymore. But theater is so integral to New York City. How many people come to New York because of Broadway? So many of the local news channels are run by non–New Yorkers who really don’t appreciate what New York is all about. One nice thing about NY1 is that everybody at the top of our management grew up in New York City. They understand what New Yorkers appreciate and what they don’t.

David Cote:
The readership of criticism is shrinking in favor of social media or corporate-controlled opinion channels. How many critics have lost their jobs in recent years? People seem to have less and less time and interest in theater criticism. It’s all very depressing. I guess the biggest challenge is finding a way or a platform to be honest and feel useful and to attract and keep loyal readers.

Jesse Green:
The
New York Times
will always have a theater critic, probably two critics plus a lot of stringers. I don’t think
New York
magazine will ever stop covering theater. I don’t think the major tabloids will completely stop. But the fewer people that have full-time jobs to do this, the narrower the coverage will be. You’ll still get coverage of Hugh Jackman coming to Broadway, but you’re going to have a hard time getting coverage of a new play by a young author in a basement in SoHo. I don’t even cover that, but somebody does. But for how much longer?

There’s also a general lack of interest in the theater, or at least a lack of ability to discover and maintain an interest in theater because of its cost. Put that up against the immediacy and availability of other forms of entertainment and the long-reputed decline of literacy. At this point in our civilization, people may not want to read 1,100 words about
Titus Andronicus
. The theater world has not done enough to show new audiences why they should part with their money. I have a niece and a nephew in their twenties who will drop $150 on a concert. So when we talk about how horrible the ticket prices are on Broadway, it’s still the kind of money that kids are willing to spend if they’re convinced there’s a reason to. Part of what I want to do is convince people to go to good theater, though I don’t want them to have to pay full price. That’s the biggest systemic threat.

Jeremy Gerard:
There’s an insidious belief among publishers that entertainment writing and criticism should go hand-in-hand with advertising dollars. So if it’s not something that generates advertising, like a friendly feature, why rock the boat? It’s not just in theater criticism. Look at the crisis for reviewers of classical music, or the almost nonexistent profession of dance criticism. Things that don’t generate advertising revenue are facing tremendous challenges.

Richard Zoglin:
Newspapers and magazines want to seem hip. They’re all going for younger audiences, while theater is perceived as being for an older audience.

Ronni Reich:
We’re all now very much aware of online traffic and how many page views we’re getting. That has an impact on advertising and on your value to a news organization.

Marilyn Stasio:
We’re losing our strength because everybody’s a reviewer these days. There are too many of us. When the field is overrun with people, it devalues it. We’re in an age in which everybody thinks they know everything. So the impulse is to say, “What does the reviewer know? I could do that myself.”

David Finkle:
Theater is not revered in the way that it was, and that’s reflected in the shrinking of theater coverage in many places and the loss of jobs. Look at what happened at the
Observer
. They let their theater critic go. Here’s a paper that says, “We’re interested in New York City, and in everything that makes New York City interesting,” and it dropped its theater critic. What does that say?