Leonard Jacobs, National Theatre Editor and theatre critic for Back Stage and New York Press, is also the mind behind the popular theatre blog, Clyd Fitch Report. Brave soul that he is, Leonard agreed to be our first "Critic on the Spot" by fielding questions from some of our Extra Criticum authors.
Every few days, we'll post a new Q&A between Leonard and one of us. Here's #3 in our series, this one from Robert David Sullivan.
Q:
Well, I was once a theater critic, albeit a second-string one.
One challenge I always had was conveying to readers that a play was still worth seeing even though it didn’t quite succeed on its own terms. Maybe a modern-day setting for a Shakespeare play was jarring, but the performances were good, and the question of why the concept didn’t quite work makes for great after-theater conversation. Or a new play has a simplistic political view, but there’s still the question of why that view seemed to resonate with the audience. Unfortunately, it seems that a lot of people scanning theater reviews are just looking for something that’s worth the money and will shy away from anything that’s depicted as a noble failure or even a flawed masterpiece.
So my question is: Do you ever feel tempted to pull your punches in hopes of getting people to see a flawed but worthy show?
And a follow-up: Should important and/or popular shows be reviewed twice once at the beginning of the run, when the main question is whether a show is worth seeing, and once near the end of the run, when the question is whether it showed lasting value?
A:
The third part of your question is extremely interesting, so I hope you’ll allow me to address that first. In a world without commercial pressures, and with government subsidy of the arts, full houses, and grants for everyone, I think it would be great to have productions reviewed at the start of their runs and again at the end. But none of the above conditions are going to come into existence soon, and, in any event, this goes directly to the question of what function theatre criticism serves in our culture. For us—for better or for worse, and usually both—the function of theatre criticism is to tell potential audience members about the production and to offer some kind of pronouncement or opinion with regard to the production’s value—it’s value as art, it’s value as a transactional proposition. At the end of a show’s run, there aren’t any more tickets to sell, ads to take out, or quotes to pull, so the idea of a review at the end of a run just isn’t pragmatic: Why would a nonprofit or commercial producer provide a comp? From an academic standpoint, however, it’s a fascinating idea and it would be a great exercise, say, for college students at both the undergraduate and the graduate levels. Can you imagine a group of acting students seeing a preview of a play as well as the final performance? They could not only learn all about how the performances changed, but how their experience as theatregoers had changed, too. I love the idea and I wish we could implement it.
Your point about pulling punches is also interesting. I guess it depends on what you mean. Yes, sometimes I go easy on something when I feel there’s potential or there’s some element—acting, say—that makes the event palatable, if imperfect. This is not the most popular approach, of course. Also, “pulling punches” implies that the critic is withholding some specific piece of information, some critical point, in an effort to skew a review one way or the other. We all have word counts we have to meet; the result is that we have make choices in terms of our focus on what we go after and what we praise. (This is one of the reasons why critics invariably write about all the technical aspects of theatre so terribly.) If I really think there’s a flaw in something that readers need to know about, I mention it. And that’s because if you don’t—and especially if the critical point in question is really glaring—I think you begin to lose credibility with your audience over time. I think audiences are coming to critics (to the degree that they do) with the expectation of honesty and fairness, so “pulling punches” is inevitably a double-edged sword. If you’ve got the room in your review, it’s always better to provide your readers with equivocation and let your tone and word choice shape the overall impact of the criticism.
Finally, yes, lots of people scan theatre reviews—all kinds of reviews, in fact so as to make their lives easy, for someone else to tell them what is and isn’t worth their cash. That’s why some papers and websites use star-rating systems and all kinds of aesthetic hieroglyphics. I don’t know a single critic who likes it. It reinforces laziness in the reader and puts critics in the one place they’re least suitable to be—in charge of the family budget. Think of it this way: a struggling NYU undergraduate who has to hock his kidney on eBay to take a class will have a very different relationship to a $120 ticket for South Pacific than some captain of industry who pink-slipped 12,000 people so he can persuade his conflict-of-interest-laden board of directors to award him a $12 million bonus. However, $120 for that student could also represent a time at his or her favorite show, and since the captain of industry just made $120 in the three-fifths of a second it took for me to type “three-fifths,” the cash amount is sort of meaningless. And the critic doesn’t know, going in, any of this stuff—so how can the critic be asked to assign a dollar value to art?
