Critics are in the business of dishing it out. And so, wisdom assures us, we must also be in the business of taking it. As our own David Cote has just been pointing out, critics and bloggers keep a keen eye on one another, noting when preferences shift into bias, and then raising a squawk about it. But what about the vast, undifferentiated “public” and its responses to theatrical criticism? In the past week, a particularly edifying example of a critic critiqued has been unfolding at The Boston Globe, where Louise Kennedy’s cheesed-off review of Pirates!, the Huntington’s musical rethinking of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance has been occasioning some serious frothing. (Sample comment: “Again, another show audiences enjoy, and again, Louise Kennedy feels the need to let out some of her inner anger on a hardworking theatre company…”) Is this a good thing? Is all this emphasis on “dialogue” just a venting mechanism for the disgruntled? A necessary corrective to an uneven power dynamic twixt critic and criticized?
I’ll go with both. Look, I believe the comments section is a wonderful thing. What worries me rather was this blog post, from Michael Maso (managing director at the Hunt), who asks those who loved the show to say so on the boston.com comments (hooray! grassrootsy!) and then says, “Louise’s first line displays her anger at the fact that the audience was responding with cheers and laughter throughout the evening, and her condescension to the audience and artists alike is breathtaking.” Eek. Her review starts with:
To the people who were hooting and hollering at every ribald joke and bawdy gesture, the Huntington Theatre Company’s production of “Pirates! (Or, Gilbert and Sullivan Plunder’d)” was clearly a grand night at the operetta.
But for anyone who wants more than sitcom-level rewrites, broad yet toothless parody, and lots of tired pirate gags, it is the very muddle of a modern messed-up musical.
I know exactly how she feels. There are few people lonelier (the last guy off the Moon and onto the Lunar Lander?) than the unamused audience member having his chair kicked by a flailing, hiccuping laugher behind him. I myself sat through Christopher Durang’s Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them, grinding my molars into featureless stubs. And I started out not hating it—it just wasn’t my cup of tea. But as the man next to me actually slapped his thighs, mild dislike transformed into irritation, and then into angry disbelief, and then bang! I had a full-blown case of the “Everybody is crazy and perhaps there isn’t any hope for us after all”s.
Since I’m hardly going to dash up to Boston to see Pirates! (sorry, but that’s something I think wouldn’t be my cup of…grog…either), I’ll never know if I agree with the Kennedy review or not. But the response to her slam raises questions that never seem to go away: Is a critic supposed to apologize for his subjectivity? Is he an ombudsman for the audience? Or do we gain when he cuts against the grain?
An example of a classier kind of critical exchange is happening in the comments section at Critic-o-Meter between Elisabeth Vincentelli and Aaron Riccio. Click over there to see how Riccio’s comment about Vincentelli’s review has evolved into a broader discussion of a piece, a director’s work and critical terminology. Dialogue! It’s not just for the actors anymore.
And Helen, I know exactly how *you* feel. Except that when I went to see “Why Torture Is Wrong,” the person kicking the back of my chair was Ben Brantley. One of these days, we’ll see a show together and not feel lonely if it turns out to be bad. Dialogue indeed! That’s why it was so great to use the Interweb to e-xchange words with Vincentelli.
Re: your post here, though–my own thoughts sort of ran into a rant on my site, but to sum up, no. The critic has an obligation to hold the artists to a higher standard, especially if the audience is letting them off easy.
I suspect the actor would enjoy an earnest standing ovation more than the Broadway “Oh, wait, everybody’s getting up, so I guess I should too,” version. I mean, they can’t really be in this for the money . . .
Reviewing the audience is like going to buffet and saying, “well, everyone loved the pork roast, but I thought it was terrible, those people obviously have no taste at all.” Taste and theatre are subjective. How about critics telling us what they think about the show and giving us examples from the production to support their opinions, rather than attempting to show us how superior they are to the audience/rabble/groundlings/uneducated morons (Isn’t that the path intended by their hubris in talking the audience down?)? I’ve read Ms. Kennedy’s reviews many times, and while I’ve seen very little that she has reviewed, it does seem as though she hates everything, to which one has to ask, why are you reporting on something that fails to please you….ever? Lastly, reviewers aren’t critics - although these words are used interchangeably by reviewers looking to raise the status of their personal opinions. Robert Brustein is an example of a critic, anything less than a complete analysis is a review - and a review is usually the opinion of someone who liked theatre a lot in college while studying journalism. So consider yourself a part of the rabble and just give us your opinion without commenting on our reactions (which you really can’t interpret anyway unless you’re some kind of mind reader).
I usually read theater reviews only for pure amusement not consumer choice, because I very rarely encounter reviews written for the common theatergoer and not for critics’ own ambitions and agendas..
Still, the arrogance of some reviewers is almost shocking, to the point of being just unprofessional and, to me, enough to be fired from their job.
Here is the relevant example:
(from The New Yorker’s John Lahr’s review of musical “Wicked”)
“..But no amount of support from old pros like Carole Shelley, Joel Grey, and Norbert Leo Butz can get this musical soufflé to rise—although the audience sometimes does. It is only fair to report that on the night I saw “Wicked” the spectators gave this fourteen-million-dollar piece of folderol a standing ovation, a phenomenon that the musical inadvertently explains in a number called “Dancing Through Life”: “Life is painless / For the brainless.”