First the pigeons, now this.
The ax fell quietly, by e-mail, at a little before 6pm today. “After careful consideration,” begins the letter from Tony Award Productions, “the Tony Awards Management Committee has determined that Tony-voting privileges will no longer be extended to members of the First Night Press List, commencing with the 2009–2010 season.” In other words: Critics are hereby purged from the Tony voting rolls. No official reasons for this decision are given, but the letter goes on to note that critics already get to have their say during the year, and that “certain publications and individual critics have historically pursued a policy of abstaining from voting on entertainment awards in general, to avoid any possible conflicts of interest in fulfilling their primary responsibilities as journalists.”
This strikes us as a disappointing decision. Critics have long been part of the Tony voting pool, alongside industry insiders from the American Theatre Wing, Actors’ Equity Association, the Dramatists Guild, the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, United Scenic Artists and other groups. The rationale for the new exclusion—a vague allusion to conflicts of interest, the precise nature of which are hard to imagine—is thin stuff indeed. If anything, critics are among the voters least compromised by conflicts of interest, and most likely to vote objectively and fairly for the work they judge to be best. (The others are liable to have greater personal, professional and financial stakes in the outcome.) The excision of this voting block represents a step backward in the seriousness of the awards.
It also represents another regrettable step toward the marginalization of critics within the New York theatrical community. It is true that critics do not vote for the Oscar or Emmy Awards; but theater is an inherently more local and personal industry, in which critics have historically played an important role. (Not for nothing are Broadway theaters named after Walter Kerr and Brooks Atkinson.) But critics, and indeed criticism, are inconvenient to the modern theater marketer: Old-fashioned in our insistence on quality, unreliable in our support for expensive projects and less necessary in light of the diffusion of information in the Internet Age. We can expect to see more such gestures of exclusion in the future, each chipping away, as intended, at the status of critics within the theater world.
Beware, New York theatre patrons! Here in South Florida, the critics have all but vanished from the dailies. Barely half the professional productions get any coverage, and that is sporadic. I tell you, you don’t know how much you actually rely on critics to market your show until you don’t have them.
Patrons NEED a metric of some sort; especially since tickets are no small investment.
Sure, word of mouth is still the best advertising, but a critic is one mouth that reaches a lot of ears. And when that voice is silenced, you feel it at the box office in a big way.
Support your critics, even if they are complete SOBs.
The Tonys are worried about conflicts of interest, are they? Then, clearly, they’ll be very soon eliminating from the voter rolls the dozens of out-of-town producers whose votes are based strictly on which shows will make them the most money. Wait, why do I think that’s not going to happen?
No surprise to me. The theatre community never fails to find new ways to shoot itself in the foot.
It’s a real shame. As Feldman points out, critics are among the least likely block of voters to have a conflict of interest. Just one more arena in which it isn’t about the work, but who you know and what they can do for you. I suppose we can now look forward to the Tony’s being more like the Oscars and the Emmys, with an abundance of dross receiving accolades each year.