The Critics Say...: 57 Theater Reviewers in New York and Beyond Discuss Their Craft and Its Future (9 page)

Michael Musto:
I went to Columbia College and majored in English because there was no undergraduate journalism major. I knew I wanted to pursue writing of some kind, particularly cultural writing. I would hang out at the office of the
Columbia Daily Spectator
every day, just hoping somebody would throw me an assignment, and it wasn’t happening. Then I met a woman named Jami Bernard, who years later became the film critic for the
Daily News
. She asked me to write for the
Barnard Bulletin
. Barnard is Columbia’s sister school. I started writing theater reviews for the
Barnard Bulletin
, be it reviews of campus productions or Broadway shows. Then the
Spectator
took notice, and I became its theater critic. This was back in the 1970s. I was reviewing shows like
A Chorus Line
and
Chicago
. I also did interviews with people like Chita Rivera, Kelly Bishop, and Carole Shelley.

After college, I wrote for
After Dark
and
SoHo Weekly News
, which was an alternative to the
Village Voice
. I wrote things for daily newspapers in New York—not exclusively about theater, but including theater. In 1984, I got my column at the
Village Voice
: “La Dolce Musto.” I had done a few freelance pieces for the
Voice
, and then there was an opening for the column. I submitted a sample column, and they liked it. They wanted something that covered the wide range of culture in New York: theater, nightlife, fashion, and beyond. They gave me the freedom to cover any entertainment or non-entertainment topics that I was interested in. I featured theater very heavily in the column for the 29 years I was there. My current column at
Out
is called “Musto! The Musical!” That pretty much says how dedicated I am to covering theater.

Richard Zoglin:
I’ve been writing and editing at
Time
for over 30 years. Back then, our theater critic was William A. Henry III. After he died of a heart attack,
Time
had no theater critic. I had done a few theater reviews here and there, filling in when Bill wasn’t around. The job fell to me because I could do it part-time. Back when Bill was writing,
Time
covered theater pretty regularly. Later, the magazine felt less obligated to review everything, so being a theater critic wasn’t a full-time job, and it was kind of perfect for me.

Rob Weinert-Kendt:
As a film major in L.A, I ended up enjoying the critical studies classes more than the production classes. I saw tons of films and learned how to write about them. I started working for a little newspaper in L.A. called
Downtown News
. At the time, L.A. was having a theater flowering. Gordon Davidson was putting on
Angels in America
and
The Kentucky Cycle
. Then I got a job as editor of
Backstage West
, which I had for about 10 years. L.A. is a spread out bunch of communities with theaters all over the place. It was a really fun and gratifying scene to cover.

I eventually left
Backstage West
and freelanced for the
Los Angeles Times
. I really wanted to be the paper’s theater critic, but they wanted someone from New York. They went without a critic for four years—even though I was right there. Clearly, to continue being a theater journalist, I needed to be in New York, so I moved there in 2005. I’ve been freelancing and doing theater coverage ever since. I was the last critic that
Broadway.com
employed. You may know the story:
Broadway.com
is a ticket site, and the people selling tickets to the shows didn’t really love having a critic standing alongside their ticket sales, which I can understand.

I’m now the editor of
American Theatre
magazine. I also write articles for the
Times
and
Time Out New York
. I write reviews regularly for
America
magazine, which is a Catholic weekly. I feel like there are a lot of folks in my sort of category, who consider themselves critics, even though they mainly write features and preview pieces. We cut our teeth writing reviews, but it’s hard to find a place that wants to publish only our reviews. To make a living, we have to do a lot of features and other stuff.

Robert Faires:
I stumbled into this. In the early 1980s, Austin was still very much a small town. There was an upstart free biweekly called the
Austin Chronicle
, and I happened to have a friend of a friend who was writing theater reviews for it. Periodically, we would talk about theater. At one point, he asked if I had considered doing theater reviews. At the time, I was doing community theater in the evening. I had done enough complaining about critics, so I thought, Well, the universe is telling me to either put up or shut up. So I gave it a try, and I found that I really liked it. At the time, there were a few other people who were also writing about theater at the paper. But within six months, I was the only one left. Before long, it was more of a calling in my life than anything else. After about 10 years, I was invited to be on staff as an arts editor, but theater has always been where my heart is. It’s still what I cover most regularly.

Roma Torre:
Both of my parents were involved with the theater in New York. My dad was a producer, and my mom was a columnist and a critic. For a long time, I thought I would be an actress, but that didn’t work out so well. I became impatient with the whole process, but I still loved the theater. Several years out of college, I decided that I wanted to be a news reporter. My first on-air job was at News 12 Long Island. While I was there, they started a magazine called
Total TV
. Knowing of my background in theater, they asked if I could write theater and film reviews for it. One of my first reviews was of
Les Miz
.

I was at News 12 Long Island for five years, and then I got a call from NY1. It was this start-up 24-hour cable operation based in New York City. I was very happy to join it. After six months, Steve Paulus, who was the news director and a big fan of the theater, said, “I know you did theater reviews over at News 12. Would you like to continue doing that for us?” So I’ve been continuously reviewing theater since 1987.

Scott Brown:
I’ve been writing criticism in one form or another since college. That led me to
Entertainment Weekly
. I was an editorial assistant, working my way up the ranks. I spent seven or eight years there and ended up writing a lot of criticism because there was bandwidth for it at the time. They had their major critics, plus a lot of other people picking up the slack. They had a stage section, which came out whenever there was a crop of new shows. There wasn’t one dedicated theater critic, so I ended up doing a lot of theater reviews, filling a niche where there was one. From there, I got my foot in the door at
New York
magazine. One of my former editors had taken a job there, and they were looking for a new theater critic. Like a lot of these things, there was a great deal of luck and people you know involved.

Jesse Green:
When I was at Yale in the late 1970s, I reviewed two plays for a campus publication under a pseudonym. I had some pretentious idea that Robert Brustein, who at that time ran the Yale Rep and Yale School of Drama, would get back at me if I used my real name. Between then and just recently, I haven’t written any other theater reviews. I wrote a lot about theater, but always in the form of profiles, feature articles, or news stories, mostly for the
New York Times
.

After the 2008 financial crisis, the
Times
was particularly hard hit and couldn’t afford to pay me what it had previously, so I started looking for other work. And lo and behold,
New York
magazine offered me a position as a feature writer, which would sometimes include features on theater, like my notorious profile of Arthur Laurents. I also wrote a lot of nontheatrical stories about sad people doing sad things. At the same time, I was getting to be known (at least by shut-ins and insomniacs) from appearing on that silly TV show
Theater Talk
. (I shouldn’t say it’s silly. It’s actually quite good, but I feel silly on it.)

In March 2013, Scott Brown, my predecessor, decided that he wanted to take a sabbatical because his wife was about to give birth, so the magazine asked me to take over for him for three months.
New York
magazine covers every Broadway show as well as a certain algorithm of non-Broadway shows, and this was happening in March, April, and May, when the Broadway season is insane. It was sort of a trial by fire, and also a tryout because there was a possibility that Scott would eventually leave the job permanently.

Scott came back for three or four months and then decided that he wanted to give his other writing a good try, which meant giving up theater reviewing. Because he was going to work with people who were being regularly represented in the kinds of shows he had to review, it was also becoming a conflict of interest. So Scott resigned the position. He was not forced out or anything like that. I didn’t poison him. Then they asked me to take over, which I did starting in October 2013.

Steven Suskin:
I came about it in a roundabout way. I spent about 25 years working in the Broadway theater as a company manager, general manager, producer, actor, and stage manager. In my spare time, I wrote books about the theater. After several books, I moved into reviewing. I did a series of books called the
Broadway Yearbook
, each of which covered a full season’s worth of reviews. Those books were more about analysis and after-the-fact reviewing. After that, it seemed natural to become an overnight critic. I had also been doing CD reviews for many years for
Playbill.com
. Eventually,
Variety
called, and I went to work for it.

Adam Feldman:
When I was a kid, I was really interested in the history of musicals. I would go to the library and look up what people said about them when they opened. I did some theater in college, and later I was associated with a publication called the
Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review
. There were things that I wrote for it that could, in a sense, be called reviews. When I moved to New York, I had a day job. And when I was bored or had extra time, I would go online to a Usenet discussion group called
rec.arts.theatre.musicals
. There were a lot of interesting people there, including a young Jeff Marx, and we would have spirited conversations about shows we loved or didn’t love. And through that, I ended up being recruited into theater criticism.

Someone from
Show Business
, a news publication which was sort of like
Backstage
, contacted me and said, “Hey, we like what you’ve been writing online. Would you be interested in writing reviews for us?” I said, “Sure. That sounds like fun.” Then I ended up meeting Paul Wontorek, the editor of
Broadway.com
, at a party. We started talking, and it came up that I was writing reviews, and he suggested I send him some. He liked them, and I started writing for
Broadway.com
. This was back in the day when
Broadway.com
had reviews; they don’t anymore. (You’ll see that as an emerging theme, unfortunately.) At that point, I decided to take the bull by the horns. I quit my day job and started freelancing as much as I could. In 2003, a space opened up at
Time Out
. They hired me, and I’ve been there ever since.

Michael Schulman:
I grew up in Manhattan and always went to the theater. I acted in plays in high school, and I directed at Yale. When I graduated and moved back to New York, I had this sense that I would go to film school or pursue theater directing. Then I started looking around. And within five minutes, I thought, I have no idea how to do that professionally.

Then I got a job at the
New Yorker
. One day at the office, I went up to the woman who edited the theater listings and said, “There’s this play that I think you should cover.” She said, “Do you want to go out and write 100 words about it?” I did that, and then she sent me to see two other plays that same week. And it took off from there. I had a body of knowledge about theater, and they just happened to need someone at that moment to go out and see plays. Most of my criticism in the
New Yorker
is unsigned. Unlike my reporting, my theater criticism is a little more under the radar, which is kind of nice because I make fewer enemies that way.

Michael Sommers:
I’ve been doing this for a long time. I reviewed movies for my high school paper. Then I became the theater critic for my college newspaper. I was also the football writer, which is pretty much the same sort of thing. (I always wonder how my career would have turned out if I stayed a sports writer. I’d probably be making a lot more money.) When I came to New York, I worked for Actors’ Equity. I didn’t like it very much. I thought there must be other ways I could wreck the American theater, so I became a drama critic (laughs).

I got a job at
Backstage
in 1981 and became an editor there. I was the first reviewer that
Backstage
ever paid. I wouldn’t do it for free, so they had to pay me for my reviews in addition to my salary as an editor. I got five bucks a review. (I don’t know if they ever raised those rates.) I then started reviewing as well for the
New York Native
, which is the newspaper they keep talking about in
The Normal Heart
. I started at the
Star-Ledger
in 1991. They hired me to review New Jersey theater. In 1993, William A. Raidy, the paper’s New York theater critic, died, and I nabbed his old job.

Peter Marks:
I acted in college. When I was coming out of college, I applied to the Neighborhood Playhouse and to a newspaper, and I got the newspaper job. In 1996, I was the theater reporter at the
New York Times
. An editor came up to me and said, “We’re looking for a second-string critic. Who can you recommend?” I gave him some names, and he said, “Well, what about you?” And I said, “I’m certainly willing to try.” I did a couple of practice reviews. They liked them, and voilà!