Let’sGet Critical

By SAM THIELMAN

Special to the Critical Condition

Nov. 1, 2008

For those of you keeping score, it’s probably significant that I’m publishing an article about the decline of theater criticism on the internet, on my friend’s blog, for free.

Ignoring Post writer Michael Reidel’s extravagant gravetop tango with his unnamed producer source, his column from last week was remarkably apt. Theater criticism is in trouble. At Variety, where I’m one of two Off Broadway critics now that Mark is gone, I compile the Broadway charts and the “Crix Picks,” a little box that boils down the opinions of New York’s most-read theater writers to pro, con, and mixed. When I first took over that duty, I hated it and I loved it – on the one hand, I was cutting down a labored, considered opinion to a tiny sound bite. On the other, I was poring over some of the best writing in the newspapers and magazines I was reading. It was certainly the best writing in the Sun, may it rest in peace, and usually the best in New York Magazine.

Both of those publications have elected to stop employing a regular critic, the one because it finds itself so short on readership that it can’t even publish, and the other because its star, Jeremy McCarter, left for Newsweek without a replacement. In his wake, they’ve decided to run tiny reviews by people whose expertise is in other areas: Salon.com film reviewer Stephanie Zacherek and Gutenberg! The Musical actor/librettist Scott Brown, to name two. These reviews aren’t disasters – Brown in particular shows an expertise that comes from writing on all sorts of topics, including theater, for Entertainment Weekly – but New York has lost a consistent voice, and that’s what makes a critic distinctive: John Simon was, for better or for worse, the voice of New York for many years, and you knew whose opinion you were getting when you opened the magazine to the theater section. David Rooney is the voice of my paper, and we’re proud to have him.

I could go on ad nauseum about the great tradition of print reviewers from George Bernard Shaw to Walter Kerr to Kenneth Tynan. So I will. Criticism is, believe it or not, an actual profession. It has its teachers – Dan Sullivan at the O’Neill; Michael Feingold, when you can corner him; Linda Winer, who teaches at Columbia and makes do with ever-less space at Newsday – and it has its drawbacks, like the barely-masked revulsion of the theater community at your name, presence, and occasionally, your relatives (my fiancee has to put up with more than her share of abuse from people who don’t like my reviews). (Note from Mark: I have had many fantastic interactions with New York theater people. Some people are wary of critics, but not everyone.)

A print critic is part of a larger institution, too – one that reaches people who don’t necessarily read the paper for the theater section. An investment banker who wants to watch a good show will read Terry Teachout before he reads Playbill.com, so the quality – high as it frequently is – of a lot of the online theater writing is immaterial. New audience members, the kind the theater needs so desperately, are looking for a publication that they trust, and for now, they’re looking to print, or at least to general-interest websites.

Believe it or not, even in its currently reduced state criticism offers distinct pleasures for the critic (and no, a fat paycheck is no longer one of them). If you’re a warped, frustrated shell of a human being like myself, you find no greater joy than cackling over a beautiful little orphaned  theater piece at a tiny off-Broadway house that no one can find, despite the best efforts of the show’s beleaguered, underpaid publicist. And, as soon as the performance is over, you shamble off to your cave to hunch over your computer for hours in an effort to tell someone about it.

After a spate of productions I’ve strained to be no ruder than necessary about in print, this joyous reaction happened to me twice in a row, most recently last night. I owe a first opinion to my masters at Variety (the article should be in Tuesday’s paper, on the web by Monday night), but let me tell you something: if you find my writing style baroque and irritating, if you have no respect for the institution of criticism, if you hope that I die in a horrible septic tank accident tomorrow because I said your codpiece made you look like a marsupial in your last show, fine. My best to your lovely wife and children. But for Jesus’ sake, as hateful as I am, isn’t it surprising that I like something? Can you picture my haggard form twisted, unwilling, by the unstoppable force of really fucking good theater? Wouldn’t you like to see a show that can force happiness on me? If you find a chance to read my review on Tuesday to see what I’m talking about, I would humbly ask that you go see this Christing show before I knock down your door, drag you to the theater, buy you a ticket, and tie you to the chair.

And while you’re at it, go see Hunchback at the New Victory, which runs through the 9^th of November, and give its company, Redmoon, some money. They look like Theatre de Jeune Lune, a wonderful company that shut down recently for lack of funds and excess of public indifference, and Redmoon’s work is astonishing and cute and funny and sad and moving. Go, now, even if you find italics boring and unsubtle.

And then send an apology to Four Chairs Theater for not seeing What to Do When You Hate All Your Friends, which was funnier than any movie I saw this summer and didn’t even get a review in the New York Times.

Reidel’s unnamed publicist may be exaggerating the case when he says that most Broadway shows are critic-proof (some certainly are – Grease is still playing), but  he’s really on to something when he observes that off-Broadway productions don’t get any press that isn’t a review, unless they’re by someone like Sam Shepard or Stephen Sondheim. (Note from Mark: This is why I try to write about Off Broadway companies in The New York Times as much as possible.)

In a seminar I attended a few years ago, one of the students asked the teacher, who worked at a large paper in a theater-friendly city, for some pointers on writing description. The teacher thought for a moment, and then said, “Be sure to describe whatever you want people to see as thoroughly as possible so that they understand what you’re talking about, because nobody is going to see it at the theater anyway.”

People whine that theater critics are too mean; that they’re privileged; that they’re mercurial and unfair. That’s all fine; it comes with the territory and we welcome it. We only start to worry when readers begin complaining that we’re boring. It’s an uphill battle to get anyone to the theater anyway; even if the show is fantastic, even if it’s new and impressive and life-changing and hopeful and totally unconventional, it might still be called Passing Strange, in which case no one will bother with it because it doesn’t seem like it’s “for them.”

Maybe, though, there’s the slimmest of chances that they think this Thielman kid is really funny, or at least so irritating that they have to read him so they can yell at the wall for a couple of hours. (That’s why I read the National Review; I doubt I’m the only one with the compulsion.) P

Perhaps I’ve made someone laugh so hard or scream so furiously that they just had to get out to the theater to see what I was talking about so that they could get the joke or tell me off, one or the other. I don’t much care which. If someone goes to the theater because I wrote a review, I win. And more importantly, Lin-Manuel Miranda or Stew or Joe Iconis wins, and I was secretly on their team the whole time, because they do good work.

The theater will not die, but it might leave New York. If we don’t want it to, we will send our best writers to hunt talent in places where tourists are scared to go, and we will trust them to drag us kicking and screaming to see the very best theater that the city has to offer. In so doing, they will ensure that craftsmanship and inspiration are recognized above huge production budgets and marquee names from other media, and the theater will begin to thrive again.