The Critics Say...: 57 Theater Reviewers in New York and Beyond Discuss Their Craft and Its Future (40 page)

Most of social media is not liberating anybody. It’s not doing anything for those of us who are in the positions of authority. It’s letting other people have a free shot at us. They think, I’m going to post 140 words on Richard Ouzounian’s
Twitter
feed that will be so brilliant that the world will stop and realize I should be the next critic. That’s not how it goes, and you just wind up wasting your time. I did
Facebook
for a little, but I found it was more of a social exercise than anything else.

I recently had a huge argument about this with J. Kelly Nestruck. It was the time of year when we get leaks about what’ll happen next season at the Shaw Festival and Stratford Festival, and we both happened to get the same leaks on the same night. Kelly tweeted the names of three shows that he heard were being done next season at Stratford. I went out, did a little more homework, and found out who was directing them, how they were fitting in the season, and who would probably be in them, and I wrote a piece online later that evening. That’s journalism. Just tweeting the titles of the plays is gossipy pissing in a barrel.

Twitter
is great for revolutionary movements, to get people stirring in the street. But when was the last time something artistically important happened on
Twitter
? It makes you realize that Ira Glass (from the radio show
This American Life
) randomly said “Shakespeare sucks.” It becomes the scandal of the day, and then it’s forgotten. It doesn’t do anything for real dialogue, and that’s why I don’t waste my time on it.

Robert Faires:
I’m trying to get better at it, but I haven’t used it an awful lot. I’ve tried to up my game in the last year or so, but I’m an old dog for whom that particular new trick is proving harder to learn than I expected. Over the years, I’ve gotten slower, while the pace at which the world is moving has picked up, so I’m at a disadvantage. There are a lot of things I just don’t think of doing because I’m still in the mode I learned way back. It doesn’t always occur to me to get on
Twitter
and throw 140 characters out about something, like letting people know I just saw a show or that a review is coming. I’m hardwired to write in what’s probably the most old-fashioned way possible. I have been trying to break myself of that habit, but what little success I’ve had has been modest.

Don Aucoin:
You go where the readers are, and social media is where the readers are. The
Globe
sends out my stuff on
Twitter
. I also post my reviews on
Facebook
. I’ve got 530
Facebook
friends, and I try to engage them in a dialogue about theater. I’m not boosterish, but if something’s worth seeing, I will say so.

Eric Grode:
I think people should use as many platforms as they can—as long as they have legitimate things to say on those platforms. I can instantly tell which critics are tweeting only because someone at their office ordered them to do a certain number of tweets per week. They don’t get tons of followers because their heart isn’t really in it.

The best thing about social media is that we no longer have a situation where the artists create a piece, the critics come in and pass judgment, and that’s the end of the discussion. I am in favor of the artists having a chance to respond. I am in favor of audience members having a chance to respond. And if the critic decides to respond back, I don’t see any harm in that either. You can easily go down the rabbit hole and spend too much time in that realm, but I think it’s healthy for everyone to be held accountable for their opinions. Social media can be a great outlet to engage with your readers.

Roma Torre:
I’ve been advised (or I should say encouraged?) to tweet a lot. And I do somewhat. But to be honest, I don’t have the time to share any more than what I write in my reviews. I spend a lot of time crafting each review. There’s really no point in saying much more on
Twitter
or
Facebook
. It would almost be like stealing my own thunder. There’s obviously a way to share my thoughts on social media, but I hate to be redundant, and I’m just not into writing anything else unless I have a good reason.

Elisabeth Vincentelli:
I’m not on
Facebook
at all. The whole idea of friending someone on
Facebook
is really hard. It can be such a can of worms when you’re
Facebook
friends with publicists and actors, and it’s just really complicated for me to navigate that. But I am on
Twitter
, and I enjoy it. Somehow it feels different.
Twitter
is more of an open field. Following someone has less baggage than friending. I’ve also gotten embroiled in some
Twitter
wars, which are very fun.

Thom Geier:
I tweet my reviews and theater news as well. It’s part of the job now. For many people,
Entertainment Weekly
is more than just the print edition that’s stapled together and mailed to them, or that appears at the newsstand. People experience
Entertainment Weekly
on their tablets, on our website, on their phones, on
Twitter
. There are many different ways they can access it now, and social media is one of them. It’s a way to draw people who might not otherwise be aware that we cover theater, except for it popping up on their
Twitter
feed.

Steven Suskin:
I feel like I’m always fighting deadlines, so why do more writing on social media?

Frank Rizzo:
I hear from readers through social media. They have wonderful things to say and share, and sometimes it results in other stories. The idea of the critic in the ivory tower is offensive to me. There’s nothing more fun than a good old-fashioned argument about something that we all feel passionate about. What you don’t want to do is become irrelevant. You don’t want to not be a part of that culture.

Jesse Green:
I don’t know about you, but I get instructed by my publication on using
Twitter
and
Facebook
. Jerry Saltz, our art critic, is one of the biggest
Facebook
destinations of any critic in the world. The rest of us are in awe and mystified because we don’t know how to do that. Theater critics are going to have to learn how to leverage their voices electronically, but I’m hopeful that we can figure out a way to do it without cheapening the brand. I’m not there yet. I tweet and post when I have a review. I basically just say, “Here’s my review.” Apparently, that’s not sufficient, but I haven’t figured out what else to do—or perhaps I have and I am just unwilling.

Howard Shapiro:
I was a really early tweeter. I started five years ago, not long after tweeting had started. The
Inquirer
made a decision that we were going to tweet our reviews. I find that
Twitter
is a really good way to tell people about something out there and to lead them to it. It’s helpful for critics to say, “My review is ready.” What you’re really saying is, “You might be interested in reading this.”

Michael Riedel:
I’m not a
Facebook
person. I don’t use
Instagram
. I don’t tweet. I’m old-fashioned. I rely on my sources. I still believe in calling people, talking to people, chatting with people, going over to see people at their offices, hanging out with them at lunch. I don’t think there’s any substitute for that kind of old-fashioned “lay work,” as we used to call it. People are much more forthcoming when you meet them face-to-face.

The big change for me is that I now can only have exclusives for stuff that is deeply under wraps. You can’t really have exclusivity over something that’s very dramatic, that happened in front of a lot of people, because all the people that are there can tweet about it. I’m not breaking those kinds of stories anymore. Back in the day, when I had a really good scoop about something that happened in the theater the night before, I would put it in the paper the next day. I would own that story for the rest of the day, and people had to follow me. But now someone can tweet something that happened at the theater, and then everyone else is following the tweet. There’s nothing I can do about it. It’s the way of the world.

Peter Marks:
I went on
Twitter
three or four years ago. My feed is made up of people in the theater world. It’s made me more human to them. As a result, I’m more relaxed about talking with them. I’ve learned how my reviews land, what about my reviews is useful to other people, and which ones have the most impact. I’ve learned a lot about what’s going on in the theater, and the issues that are most important to the people out there, like how there are so few female directors. You get to hear voices from the groups you’re not a part of.

Today at a newspaper, you have to be your own delivery system. You can’t hope that your review is going to get read just by posting it on a website. I post almost every review on
Twitter,
hoping it will get some readers that way. It’s a clicks thing. I tweet back at people who make a statement about the theater that I don’t agree with, or that I do agree with. I tweet observations about the state of the theater. I tend to limit my tweets to theater. I don’t tweet about politics.

Robert Feldberg:
For a while, we were being encouraged to write blogs, so I did, but I didn’t find it useful professionally. If a sports writer is constantly updating what’s going on with a game, there’s an audience of sports fans for that. With the theater, I’m already expressing my opinion in my review. Other than that, I’m not quite sure what a blog would be like. If there’s some breaking news, I could send something out, but there isn’t much of that in the theater.

Michael Musto:
I resisted it for years, but later found it’s a good way to drum up traffic and increase my audience. I resent when you only seem to be valued by the amount of people that click on your article, but you have to be realistic and realize that if your piece isn’t read by lots of people, then you’re pretty much irrelevant and obsolete. A lot of critics have now found that they also have to peddle their work. They have to hawk it to the masses. It’s demeaning, but that’s the way it is now in the journalistic marketplace. You’re a writer and a self-promoter, and sometimes you’re a bill collector, too.

Jason Zinoman:
As print institutions decline, it becomes more important to have your own personal brand. I just sold a new book. When you talk to publishers, they look at how many
Twitter
followers you have. That’s also true in Hollywood for actors. It’s the world we live in now. I was asked to go on
Twitter
by my editor. I started begrudgingly, and now I’m addicted to it. You need to learn how to use the form. You can reach a huge number of people and have a really interesting dialogue. There are also some downsides. You have to be careful what you say. Things can be taken wildly out of context. You can’t make certain arguments in short form.

MATT WINDMAN
: Was it appropriate for so many theater critics to review
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark
before it officially opened on Broadway?

Eric Grode:
I was in the New York Drama Critics’ Circle when there was a debate about reviewing
Spider-Man
while it was still technically in previews. It seemed to me like a tempest in a teapot. If I remember correctly, the producers asked for a not-unreasonable grace period, which the critics granted, and then they asked for a massive one, like another couple of months, and that’s when critics started bum-rushing the theater. It’s not unusual for producers to say, “We need another 10 days or two weeks because this show is really complicated.” A lot of organizations will honor that. For the most part, critics will be reasonable when they’re given reasonable requests, and they’ll be less reasonable when they’re given unreasonable requests.

Jesse Oxfeld:
If I remember correctly, Jeremy Gerard and Linda Winer were the first to write about the show. I wrote about it soon after that, and then everybody starting writing about it a couple of weeks later. The point when everybody wrote about it was on a date that had been scheduled as opening night before the producers delayed it yet again.

There was a New York Drama Critics’ Circle meeting where the matter was discussed. There was a letter from the show’s press agent, Rick Miramontez (or maybe it was from the producers via Rick Miramontez), asking the Drama Critics’ Circle to agree to abide by their new designated opening date. There was some discussion, and the official answer was that we would make our own decisions with our individual editors. The big question was when the
Times
was going to review it. The
Times
does not allow its critics to be members of the Drama Critics’ Circle. There was a fear that the
Times
was going to go ahead and jump the embargo, and everyone else didn’t want to have to review it after the
Times
. The general reaction was, “My editor is going to be really pissed off at me if we are scooped by the
Times
.”

Michael Dale:
When it became known that the
Times
was going to review
Spider-Man
before it opened, I discussed it with my editor and wrote a column about why I was not going to review the show before I was invited to do so. As a reviewer, I believe I am an invited guest. And frankly, I don’t want to review anyone who doesn’t want to be reviewed. I believe in letting the artists do what they need to do at their own pace and offering my opinion when it’s requested.

David Cote:
With
Spider-Man
, there were discussions among the critics about what to do. Some of my colleagues were zealous and outraged about the embargo situation. They wanted to break in and file a review. I understand that. But at the same time, I believe in the sanctity of the right of artists to develop their work in peace. Of course, the whole thing was decided when certain reviewers went in and tipped everyone’s hand. Then no one wanted to be left out in the cold. I wasn’t so happy about it. Still, it was kind of fun and naughty to buy your ticket and sneak in.