off-stage right

In this week’s Village Voice there is a really interesting article Theater Criticism Reconfigured: The Internet (unlike the Tonys) lets everyone have their say—to a point. What would Wilde think? by Michael Feingold which delves into everything from critics being shut out of the Tony’s to criticism in the Web 2.0 era.

On the Tony’s, Feingold basically says, you don’t want us fine at least I have more time to see what I want to see rather than imported or overproduced fare:

By the end of this paragraph, the producers of Burn the Floor will be sore at the Broadway League and the American Theatre Wing. When the news broke that these two organizations, which jointly manage Broadway’s annual Tony Awards, had decided to remove the first-night theater press from the ranks of Tony voters, my first action was to e-mail my editor that I wouldn’t be reviewing Burn the Floor, Broadway’s new ballroom-dance compilation, an Australian import that has been trekking around the world for some years. As a Tony voter, I might have felt obliged to go: The nominations are so eccentric that you never know what may or may not end up on the ballot, and the ballot always specifies that you may not vote in a given category unless you’ve seen all the nominees. My new non-voter status has liberated me from events like Burn the Floor. Unluckily for its producers, my editor has no space outside my column for it either, so their show will get no Village Voice review. Let the League and the Wing deal with it.

 

Some of my colleagues on the press list are dismayed by the Tony administrators’ decision; some are downright irate. For me, it’s a blessed release. The League, the Broadway producers’ association, works hard to make the public equate "Broadway" with "the theater," but the two were never identical, and in recent decades, the gap between them has steadily widened. Theater, sometimes very fine theater, does still occur in the large-scale venues that function on Broadway contracts and charge Broadway’s staggering ticket prices, but not so often that theater critics need to spend the bulk of their time there. These days, most of what we call "Broadway," good or not, comes, like Burn the Floor, from elsewhere: London, Off-Broadway, resident theaters across the U.S. The era when "Broadway" meant a specific way of creating theater, with its own attitudes and its own approach, is long gone; its surviving practitioners are mostly older than myself. And I am not young, except at heart.

 

The roster of Tony voters includes Broadway producers, presenters of touring attractions, artists with Broadway credentials, and officials of the theatrical unions. By removing the first-night press, the one sizeable voting bloc not directly involved in producing Broadway shows, the Tony management reaffirmed what the award is: a trade association prize, given by members to the work they hold most valuable—which, in practice, often means most commercially valuable.

I have to say Feingold’s attitude is probably more incendiary than any letters or articles I have seen more far.  The who cares, I have better things to do with my time and the space in my column is a delightful “who cares and F-you” rolled into one.  It will be interesting to see if he skips other fare.

But it is Feingold’s thoughts on “our new era of digitalized communication that are most intriguing.”   First he set some historical context and where we are now:

Newspapers and magazines, once the great repositories of arts criticism, are embattled phenomena themselves today, phasing out, as they downsize, not only their staff critics but most of their arts coverage. Springing up to replace it is the babble of voices flooding the Internet, some qualified to speak and others not, some striving for honesty while others pontificate from questionable assumptions and even more questionable motives.

 

Like most human phenomena, this one has precedents. A century ago, when New York had two dozen or more daily newspapers, representing every income level and every shade of political opinion, they all carried theater reviews, which—no surprise—mostly reflected those papers’ overall outlook. Mid-18th-century London, where the practice of publishing regular theater criticism began, offers an even more Internet-like picture, with fly-by-night news-sheets and scurrilous pamphlets popping up everywhere, mingling blind-item theatrical gossip with detailed analysis, often willfully and malevolently inaccurate, of plays and performances. Picture Datalounge and Educational Theatre Journal as the same website.

 

The Internet’s speed makes today different. Reviews by news sites’ designated critics get posted the minute a show opens. Even these are being supplanted, for enthusiasts, by the instant reactions texted or tweeted, to chat boards and networking sites by those privileged to catch the workshop, the invited dress, or the first 15 minutes of the first preview. The multiplicity of opinions online can be refreshing, like a spring rain, but their instant, unremitting inundation of all discourse seems more like the Johnstown Flood: The sane person instinctively retreats to higher ground.

 

Finding such ground is no longer easy. Newspapers, fighting to stay afloat in the Internet torrents, can hardly promote it. The weeklies that still cover theater now strive to post reviews simultaneous with the dailies’; the space their later deadlines used to offer for reflection and reconsideration has mostly vanished. Though many bloggers and chatters have shown that they can supply an intelligent perspective, they’re vastly outnumbered in a medium where even those who purport to love theater seem mainly concerned with which TV stars will appear onstage, or which stage stars on TV….

I guess by writing this blog, I am part of part of the dilemma of the era – although I don’t write reviews.  The funny thing is, I completely see Feingold’s point and I do think it is a bit of a problem.  I am still old school enough to think that previews are sacred time to work on the show – rehearsals with an audience is what one of my favorite actresses used to call them.  I get angry when I see a blogger break that tradition and print a outright review before opening.  After all this is when a show can be tightened and it is often the only way for a show to reach that point where the work simply transcends all interferences from the outside work so that it can take the audience on a fantastic journey each night. 

But, on the other hand I am seasoned enough to know that the majority of shows that have major flaws or issues will likely not solve them in previews, and I have seen plenty of clunkers in previews that got the poor critical reception I thought they would. 

And, let’s not forget that many of the “critics” and “journalists” have adopted standards that match that of the lowest common denominator in blogging.  Frankly are there that many real theater critics out there?

Aren’t we all “backseat drivers” or “Monday morning quarterbacks” when we are tweeting and blogging.  It was only yesterday that I excerpted Michael Riedel’s column declaring Spiderman dead (premature or not?) while discussing whether the show was a colossal waste of money or not.  Although I am very careful about what I tweet when seeing shows during previews is it really fair to censor an entire audience.  I don’t think so.  Also, it would be completely off-putting to say “Hey everyone, we’re in previews so no status updates or tweets about the show until after opening.”   After all we as producers are delighted when actors in a show tweet and set up Twitter accounts for the show itself.  We want an audience so we can use these tools but once the audience arrives they can’t?  Doesn’t really make sense does it.  Of course we also only care if someone says something not so nice about the show.  Praise is more than welcome we re-tweet it!  So the only other option would be to censor the audiences?  NO.  Unacceptable.  So we must adapt or embrace the era.

But back to Mr. Feingold and his grand finale—the conundrum of how we move forward or do we?

Our time is an exceptionally rough one for criticism. With the dizzying changes in the way we communicate altering the whole fabric of our social life, we are going through a double revolution, and revolutions are never optimal moments for integrity and clarity of thought. The critic—whether viewed by the theater as an enemy, a necessary gadfly, a creative partner, or a poor relation to be tolerated—was never more than a small part of the picture. The theater that leans on critics as a crutch, deriving its own estimate of its worth from its reviews, is probably in as unhealthy a state as the theater with no critical guidance or intellectual perspective at all. Somewhere between those two conditions, the new world that the Internet has caused will probably find a healthier middle way for the astute critical sensibility to function as part of the theater. We can’t guess yet what that will be, because we can’t predict what the theater will become. Today’s world has abolished business as usual.

 

One clue for criticism’s future may lie in the aspect of its essence most overlooked in the current upheavals. The instant thumbs-up or thumbs-down so beloved by the Internet is only the smallest part of a critic’s job. The rest involves writing—exploring, simultaneously, the work under review and the critic’s response to it. Oscar Wilde’s definition of criticism applies: "the record of a soul." The habit of reading critics of the past has ebbed in recent decades. But many cultural habits have ebbed and been revived over the centuries. Phenomena like Kindle and GoogleBooks may yet bring this one back, too. The pleasures that lie in wait for readers who love theater may be ending only to begin all over again.

So readers…what do you think?  Is theatre criticism a dying art or just in at the low part of the cycle waiting to come around the bend?