The Critics Say...: 57 Theater Reviewers in New York and Beyond Discuss Their Craft and Its Future (8 page)

Alexis Soloski:
A lot of us, at some point, were actors, directors, or playwrights. As an undergrad at Yale, I trained as an actor, while also studying the history of ideas. My major in college was the humanities—basically Western thought—and there were some nice crossovers, like the aesthetic theories of Lessing, who was a dramaturg in Hamburg. I was also dragooned into reviewing plays for the school paper, including undergraduate work, plays by Yale School of Drama students, and productions at Yale Repertory Theatre and the Long Wharf Theatre.

When I was a senior, one of my professors, Marc Robinson, who used to write for the
Village Voice
, came to me and said, “The
Voice
needs a theater intern.” I said, “I’m a work-study kid. They don’t pay their interns, and I can’t afford to take the train back and forth to New York twice a week.” When I went home, I remembered how I used to run to the library to get the copy of the
Village Voice
every Wednesday. It was very much my resource. It had a focus on experimental and avant-garde art and theater, which was what I was interested in. I called Professor Robinson’s office voicemail at two in the morning and said, “Of course, I’ll do it.” I signed up for some science experiment that tested my startle reflex and made enough money to start taking the train back and forth. After a couple of weeks, the editor at the
Voice
started assigning me very short pieces. Once I graduated, I started copyediting, and eventually, I became a writer there.

Chris Jones:
I started out as an academic. I got a PhD in theater 35 years ago. I taught classes, directed, and lived the life of a college professor. But when I was still very young and in graduate school, I started covering out-of-town shows for
Variety
. I became fascinated by the whole nature of touring theater. To this day, I have a real interest in and affection for the idea of taking your show out on the road, even though that business has become a pale shadow of its former self.

About 12 years ago, Richard Christiansen, my predecessor at the
Chicago Tribune
, retired. The job became open, and I thought, This is an amazing theater city, and there are very few of these jobs. So I quit everything else. I gave up tenure and the academic life and became a journalist. And here I survive, despite all the frustrations of the profession.

David Rooney:
I fell into journalism almost accidentally. I studied film and had a lifetime interest in theater. During my high school years in Australia, I got involved with theater companies. I flirted with the idea of becoming an actor, but I made bad choices with my audition pieces for the National Institute of Dramatic Art. Everybody said, “Don’t do Tennessee Williams,” and I did Tom in
The Glass Menagerie
. Everybody said, “For your Shakespeare piece, don’t do Romeo,” which is exactly what I did. It wasn’t to be, and now I’m relieved that it didn’t happen. It’s too much of a struggle.

When I first left Australia, I traveled around the United States for a year. I spent six months in New York and discovered the city’s wonderful theater landscape. Then I moved to Europe and spent 20 years there. I had friends working in theater, so I saw pretty much everything in the West End and beyond. I came to New York once a year during those two decades and caught as much as I could.

After I moved to Italy in 1990, I started working for
Variety
as a freelancer. I took over as the Rome bureau chief in 1993. I had little journalistic experience prior to that. I had written a handful of book reviews for
Time Out
while I was in London and some pieces for an Australian independent film publication. I started covering European and North American film festivals. After 14 years there, I was looking to leave Italy, and Peter Bart, the editor-in-chief at
Variety
at the time, offered me a transfer to New York as a film reporter and reviewer. A year later, Charles Isherwood left
Variety
to go to the
New York Times
. Peter knew I had a passionate interest in theater and liked my reviewing style, so I became the chief theater critic and theater editor.

David Cote:
I was an actor doing experimental plays at venues such as La MaMa, P.S. 122, and the Ontological-Hysteric Theater at St. Mark’s Church. While I was doing that, I became angry about the lack of media coverage of Off Off Broadway, so I co-founded a self-produced pre-blog called
OFF
. That was in 1996. It was basically manifests and reviews, photocopied and stapled and left for free at downtown theaters. In 2000, a position opened up at
Time Out New York
for a theater writer. Jason Zinoman knew me from Off Off Broadway, and that’s how he contacted me. I had never written a formal theater review before. I learned the journalism ropes at
Time Out
.

David Sheward:
I wanted to be an actor, so I got a job at
Backstage
, thinking that I could find out about audition notices. I started doing reviews there, and then I became an editor, and that gradually became the focus on my attention. I was at
Backstage
for over 20 years.

Michael Dale:
I became a critic totally by accident. About three months after starting a blog about attending theater, I got an email from the editor-in-chief of a brand new web site,
BroadwayWorld.com
. He offered me the chance to write about pretty much whatever I wanted. I started writing humorous essays, but then we started getting invited to review Off Off Broadway plays. I had never thought much about reviewing, but I started taking assignments. Eventually, the website was accepted by the Broadway League’s press list, and I was named chief critic.

Zachary Stewart:
I really did just fall into it. When I began working as the listings editor at
TheaterMania.com
in 2008 I would request to review shows I was interested in but weren’t being covered by any of the regular reviewers (stuff like haunted houses, novelty gay musicals, and Off Off Off Broadway). By 2012, I started reviewing four or five shows a month. And in 2013, I became the chief critic at
TheaterMania
.

I had previously directed several shows in the city, and I never really had any intention of becoming a critic, but I’ve discovered that I like being a part of the conversation without having to make the personal sacrifices (lots of travel, income uncertainty, etc.) that it takes to be a working director in America. So this career path was really a happy accident.

Don Aucoin:
It’s been a long and winding road. Towards the beginning of my career, I worked for a newspaper in Meriden, Connecticut called the
Record-Journal
as a news reporter. But as is the case with many small newspapers, they let me do other things so long as I didn’t ask for extra money, and I was interested in reviewing plays. Meriden is about 20 miles north of New Haven and 20 miles south of Hartford. I began reviewing productions at Yale Repertory Theatre, Long Wharf Theatre, and Hartford Stage.

In the mid–1980s, I began freelancing for the
Boston Globe
, which is where I really wanted to work. I had grown up in the Boston area. I was even a newspaper delivery boy for the
Globe
. I did an interview with August Wilson when
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
premiered at Yale Repertory. I think it was the first piece about August Wilson published in the
Globe
. In 1986, I joined the
Globe
as a copy editor on the night news desk. After a year or so, I began writing theater reviews for the
Globe
on my nights off. Kevin Kelly was still the drama critic back then. But if there was a smaller production or something that he couldn’t get to, I would review it.

When I left the copy desk and became a reporter, I didn’t write any theater reviews for two decades. I worked as a general assignment news reporter, a reporter in the City Hall and State House bureaus, a TV critic and reporter, and a feature writer. Fast-forward to 2009. Louise Kennedy, the theater critic at the time, was on maternity leave, and the features editor (who heard that I had written theater reviews once upon a time) asked me to fill in. About eight months after Louise came back, she decided to leave the paper, and they asked if I wanted the job.

Elisabeth Vincentelli:
I was the arts editor at
Time Out New York
. The job of theater critic opened up at the
New York Post
after Clive Barnes died. A former colleague of mine, who had gone on to be the features editor at the
Post
, called and asked if I was interested. They wanted to mix things up and take someone from outside the pool of usual suspects with a different background. They wanted someone who could take a show that, on the surface, didn’t look accessible and make it feel exciting to a lay reader. They wanted someone who could go to everything, from the big Broadway musicals to the super-experimental European stuff, and make it all interesting and fun to read about.

Frank Rizzo:
I went to the University of Arizona, where I majored in journalism and minored in theater. I didn’t intend to go to graduate school right away, but I couldn’t get a job in journalism at the time. When I finished grad school, I got a job at a small newspaper in Massachusetts as a general writer. That gave me the best training in the world. It was outside of Boston, so I could give myself assignments in Boston all the time. I covered the world premieres of
Pacific Overtures
,
A Little Night Music
, Angela Lansbury in
Gypsy
, and all those other great shows that were coming into Boston in the 1970s. I would also cover the fire department, the police department, school board meetings, and everything else.

I cobbled together a pretty good portfolio and got a job at the
Journal-Courier
, which was the morning paper at the time in New Haven. I was a general arts writer, covering everything from disco and rock concerts to theater. I was there during the last years of Robert Brustein at Yale Repertory Theatre. I just missed Meryl Streep’s time there. Then I got hired by the
Hartford Courant
—not as a theater critic, but as an arts journalist. By the 1990s, I was pretty much the theater writer. And starting in the late 1990s, I was reviewing more and more.

Frank Scheck:
I think people end up becoming critics in the same way: they love going to the theater, the movies, or whatever. In my case, it was both movies and theater. I’ve always been an addict. I started writing early on for my high school newspaper. Then I went to Columbia University and wrote for the
Columbia Daily Spectator
, and it proceeded from there. It was a way to spend every day going to the movies and the theater, make a living at it, and not have to do anything else. Nothing else ever really interested me.

Like everybody else, I went through the process of starting at smaller places and moving on up by getting breaks. After I graduated college, my first job was for an independent theater magazine called
STAGES
, which was run by a doctor in New Jersey who decided to become a magazine publisher. I started out as a reviewer, then I became the editor, and I ultimately wound up co-publishing it with him for several years until economic realities finally took hold. While that was going on, I did freelance writing for a variety of publications. I got my first real break when I became the theater critic for the
Christian Science Monitor
. A couple of years later, I wound up also writing for the
Hollywood Reporter
as a film critic. Eventually, I segued over to theater and music as well, which led to a gig at the
New York Post
.

Helen Shaw:
I have an MFA in drama from the A.R.T. Institute at Harvard, which leaves you qualified for literary positions and dramaturgical work, and I was doing that kind of stuff in New York. A friend of mine from undergrad, Jeremy McCarter, was the theater critic at the then-existing
New York Sun
. During the Fringe Festival, they got pretty desperate. He was trying to cover as much of it as possible, but it was too much for one man, so he was reaching out to everyone he knew who stayed with the theater and was possibly interested in criticism. I wrote a couple of Fringe reviews for the
Sun
and then became the second-string critic under Jeremy. I was very happy there. It was a very conservative paper, but it had some of the best arts coverage in the city. They were interested in weird, experimental work, which is my focus. I then went on to freelance at
Time Out
. Unfortunately, the
Sun
shut down, but I’ve been with
Time Out
ever since.

Howard Shapiro:
I had been at the
Philadelphia Inquirer
in many positions before I became its theater critic. In the 1990s, I was the arts editor. Then I became the travel editor. At some point, both of the paper’s full-time theater critics took buyouts, so the arts editor asked me to do some theater reviewing. It never occurred to me to be a theater critic. My first review was in April 2002. When I sat down to write it, I realized how little I knew about being a critic, even after having been an arts editor, but I liked it. I did one or two pieces a month, which very rapidly turned into at least two pieces a week. And at some point thereafter, I become a full-time theater critic.

Jesse Oxfeld:
I grew up as a stereotypical Jewish kid from the New York suburbs. I’d always been a theater fan and a theatergoer. By the time I ended up at
New York
magazine, I had already written for several different outlets while continuing to go to the theater. When I left
New York
magazine, a friend of mine became the editor of the
New York Observer
. At the time, they were remaking the paper in response to imperatives coming primarily from its owner, Jared Kushner, and the realities of the newspaper business. John Heilpern, who was their theater critic, only wrote infrequently.

This was soon after the
New York Sun
closed, and there was a theory at the time that advertisers were looking for a smart publication that was less expensive than the
New York Times
. There was this idea that theaters, museums, and cultural things like that wanted to reach an affluent, educated New York audience, so the
Observer
was looking to beef up its cultural pages and have regular theater criticism in order to sell theater advertising. It didn’t matter if the reviews were good or bad. They just needed someone who could do it and would be reasonably cheap. So my friend called me up and asked if I’d be interested. My first reaction was to say, “I can’t be a theater critic. I don’t know how to do that.” And he said, “You’re being ridiculous. You’re a smart guy. You’re a good writer.” And then I thought, Why should I say no to this? Maybe I’d be good at it.