The Critics Say...: 57 Theater Reviewers in New York and Beyond Discuss Their Craft and Its Future (6 page)

Charles Isherwood:
Because film is such a ubiquitous part of our culture, film critics don’t have as much direct influence. People go to the movies no matter what the critics say. Sometimes you get the feeling that film critics are talking to themselves or to each other. That’s less the case with theater critics. As much as we like to complain that people don’t go to the good shows, people really do look to critics when they’re going to spend $100 or more to go to the theater. They’re not going to slavishly follow any one person’s opinion, but you can feel like you’re having some sort of impact.

Zachary Stewart:
Compared to a mass media critic, theater critics write for a much more boutique audience who can afford to go to the theater and have a desire to do so. This can be quite liberating when it comes to writing with specificity for a targeted audience.

Michael Schulman:
As far as the financial prospects of a movie are concerned, film criticism is negligible. Theater exists in this small community where a
Times
review can make or break you. That puts a lot on the shoulders of one person or two people.

Don Aucoin:
When I wrote about TV shows, I could safely assume that thousands of my readers were going to see the show in question, or that they at least had the ability to see it by clicking a remote control. With theater, you’re speaking to a much smaller, but often more committed audience.

Frank Scheck:
The experience of watching film is different than watching theater, and the art form is different, but the process of writing about them is the same.

Robert Feldberg:
Theater is different than movies. Every Friday, another romantic comedy opens. They’re written according to formula. They’re not even meant to be reviewed. They’re all variations of the same thing. When I was reviewing movies, only one out of 10 movies was really engaging. Movies are aimed at a certain audience for one weekend, like teenage boys or couples or whatever. Theater is much more individualistic. And in the majority of cases, the playwright is trying to create something artistic. Every show you see is likely to be different from other shows, so the writer deserves your patience and attention.

Joe Dziemianowicz:
Stage productions are fleeting. The review is often the only record of the production, its cast, its direction, its look, its interpretation, its vision. Sure, some productions are filmed, and there are books and photographs, but reviews are an essential part of the theater history of any given season.

Michael Riedel:
If you review a movie, everyone else is going to see the same movie that you saw. But if you review
Angels in America
on Tuesday night, the performance on Wednesday night is not going to be the same. You’re describing a live event that’s going to be seen only once. You’re capturing a passing moment. In some ways, your job is to capture it as a reporter.

Andy Propst:
You walk into a theater and sit there for two and a half hours. That’s a whole lot of sensory overload to bring in, distill, and then pump out into words. With a CD, you can savor it once, twice, maybe even three times. A lot of film critics now have the ability to screen a film from home, so they have the same option.

Scott Brown:
Nothing compares to the intensity and immediacy of theater. Nothing compares to the incredible social stress of being trapped in a room with people who are performing for you. It’s different than sitting back in a chair in a screening room, watching something at home, or slapping on a pair of headphones. It’s different to go to a specific location where you’re locked into gladiatorial combat with each other in a weird sort of way. Actors talk about press nights that way. I don’t think there’s anything that compares to that. It’s really thrilling, and it can be very graphic. Theater criticism is more of a contact sport. It’s always going to be taken more to heart by the people who are involved with it.

Chris Jones:
There’s something about staring in person at an artist that creates a more intense relationship than being in a screening room and watching people in a movie.

Robert Feldberg:
Theater criticism is local. If you review a movie, it’s opening all over the country. If you review a play, it’s only of immediate interest to New Yorkers, other people living in the metropolitan area, or tourists who happen to be in New York. Someone might want to see it months later when they visit New York, but it’s happening locally.

Ben Brantley:
Because theater, either rightly or wrongly, is perceived as an art form in jeopardy, a certain amount of cheerleading is required. We also have to work a little harder at getting people to pay attention or be interested. You probably have to be a little clearer, a little less self-referential, than you might be in other disciplines. If you read art forums, they’re very academic and hermetically-sealed.

Richard Zoglin:
I really have to really justify why a show deserves space in
Time
magazine. I’m writing about something that most of my readers can’t see right away because they don’t live in New York. I can’t do a piece just because there’s a show opening this week.

Linda Winer:
Classical music critics don’t get to write about new work very often. On the other hand, the work they get to write about has stood the test of time. They spend more time bathing in real art—in masterpieces. What I’ve always loved about theater criticism is how often we get to bump up against new work. Of course, we’re currently getting more and more revivals. My husband has said that my job as turned into “comparing this Willy Loman to that Willy Loman.”

Frank Scheck:
Music is more subjective because there are musicians you like and ones that you don’t like. If you don’t like the music, you’re not going to like the concert, so you have to step back and just evaluate the music on its own terms, and whether or not it’s working for the people who appreciate that type of music. If I’m reviewing
American Idol
in concert or the Jonas Brothers, I’m not the target audience. You have the same scenario in the theater, too. There are some shows that are not geared to your sensibilities, so you have to evaluate them on their own terms. For example, is it working for the teenage girls?

John Simon:
The good thing about music criticism is that you really have to know a lot about music. Anyone can write drama criticism. Indeed, it often happens that way, where someone who’s been writing obituaries for years suddenly gets the drama critic job. It’s absurd, but there you have it. But with music criticism, you have to put in someone who, however peculiar or questionable his opinions may be, has a solid knowledge of music, and that requires discipline and learning and some kind of mental level that not every Tom, Dick, or Harry has.

Terry Teachout:
In the case of music or art, the difference lies in the words. Ned Rorem has a neat line on this: “Critics of words use words. Critics of music use words.” If I’m writing about a symphony, I have to find a way to translate the event into words, but without using the kind of technical language that I might use if I were writing for musicians. There is no paraphrasable content in a symphony or a plotless ballet. But a play is about something, and it is written in words, and it usually has some kind of intellectual content. That makes writing about theater easier than writing about abstract music or a painting. There are more ways to go at it. You have more hooks to hang your hat on. But because I’ve written about art forms where verbal content is nonexistent or less important, it’s loosened up the way I perceive what happens up in a play. It causes me to be more aware of certain kinds of nonverbal aspects of a theatrical production that other critics might not notice.

Helen Shaw:
I have written about dance, and trying to explain just a movement through language is so bloody difficult. With theater, you can always hang your hat on the interplay between text and image. It’s a dialogic art. It invites us to write about it. It wants us to have a dialogue with it. You’ve been sitting in a room for two hours with these combating voices, and then you get to add your voice to the fray.

Linda Winer:
In terms of difficulty, writing about dance is somewhere in between writing about theater and writing about music. With dance, you’re writing about something abstract, but you have arms and legs to talk about, and you’ve got so many pictures that you can create in your writing. Creating pictures about what the violin may have been meaning is meaningless with music.

Eric Grode:
I once got a job offer to be a theater, dance, art, and classical music reporter and critic. I would be grotesquely underqualified for that job. In fact, I don’t know if anyone exists who can handle all those different things.

Matt Windman: How did you become a theater critic?

Peter Filichia:
One day in college, I was walking up a flight of stairs, and this guy I knew from high school saw me and said, “Hey, I’ve just been made editor of the school paper. I remember from high school how much you love theater. Why don’t you write reviews for us?” I had never thought about it. I didn’t know yet about press tickets. The first show I reviewed was the Broadway production of
Hair
. I paid with my own money to see it: $7.50 for a third row orchestra seat at a Sunday matinee.

Then I got a freelance job working for a new publication called
Boston After Dark
, which was essentially the
Village Voice
of Boston. I was 23 years old, and like today, they wanted people with a youthful slant. Because they were just starting out, paying the writers was a struggle. And when I went to get paid, they’d always say, “We can’t pay you this week.” I gave an ultimatum and threatened to quit if they didn’t pay me. And when they didn’t pay me, I quit. Next to my marriage, it was the biggest mistake of my life. It took a while before I realized that I wouldn’t get free tickets anymore. And more importantly, my name wouldn’t be in front of the public. I vowed that if I ever got the chance to do this again, I would not blow it over money.

Seventeen long years pass. It’s now 1987. I’m walking down the street, and on the newsstand I see
TheaterWeek
, volume one, number one. I immediately bought it and thought, They must be looking for writers. I went over to my girlfriend’s house and said, “I’m going to call them tomorrow, and I’m going to write for them.” She said, “You’re crazy. They’re not going to pay you any decent money. Why don’t you call up the
New York Times
? They’ll definitely give you a freelance assignment.” I said, “Yes, but only every now and then. What I want is a regular gig.”

I went to see the editor-in-chief of
TheaterWeek
. He said, “You don’t want to write for us because we don’t pay enough.” I said, “The money isn’t important. I just want to get my name out there.” I truly believe that if you do what you love, eventually, the money will come. Of course, the free tickets were nice, too. I got an assignment, and then I kept getting them. The people who succeeded the original editor-in-chief kept me on, one of whom was Michael Riedel. It was Michael who asked me if I wanted to write a column, and I kept doing a column until the paper went out of business in 1996.

In 1993, the position of New Jersey theater critic opened up at the
Star-Ledger
. Michael Sommers, who had been the New Jersey theater critic, was being promoted to the New York spot. When I went in for the interview to be the New Jersey critic, they said, “The reason we want you is because you are positive. We want the arts to grow in New Jersey. We don’t want a mean critic. We want somebody who is really interested in seeing theater flourish in this state.”

Richard Ouzounian:
I was born and raised in New York. I’m 64 years old, so I was a kid during the days when there were still seven daily papers in New York. My dad, who ran a bar, would bring home the four morning papers when he came in every night. We also got the three afternoon papers. Somewhere along the way, I started reading theater reviews in the papers, and I realized that someone got paid to see plays.

I wrote reviews in high school and college. At the time, there was a very reputable television critic, Leonard Harris, who taught a course in arts criticism at Fordham University, where I went to college, and I took it. I realized that no one was going to hire a 20-year-old theater critic, so I became a theater practitioner. For roughly the next 20-odd years, I worked as a director-writer-actor across Canada. I was very lucky. I got a lot of jobs as an artistic director when I was very young, and I wound up running five major theaters.

By the time I was 40 years old, I had two kids and had discovered that my younger son was developmentally challenged, so I thought I should get a permanent job. I didn’t immediately go over to the dark side, but I started doing work in TV and radio. I did a weekly radio show that was broadcast across Canada where I would play musical theater songs, set them in context, and talk about them. It’s what inspired Bob Martin to create the character of Man in Chair in the musical
The Drowsy Chaperone
. Then I got a weekly theater critic slot in Toronto on CBC, our equivalent to NPR, and it became very popular and powerful. I realized that when Garth Drabinsky opened his first production of
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
with Donny Osmond. The major daily newspapers in Toronto all hated it, but I liked it. And the next week, a full-page ad appeared with my quote across the top. I thought, This is pretty good: a brand-new career in my forties.

In 2000, as I turned 50, the theater critic of the
Toronto Star
, the country’s largest paper, walked in one day and said, “I’m tired of this. I want out.” It was the same day that my department at TVOntario, my major employer, got slashed, and I was without a job. The arts editor of the
Toronto Star
called me up and said, “I listen to you on the radio. Have you ever thought of doing it in the newspaper?” And I said, “That was actually my childhood dream.” So at the age of 50, I became a daily newspaper critic.