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Opinion
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Are theatre critics too soft?
Spectator reviewer Lloyd Evans says his colleagues do theatre a disservice by raving about mediocre shows. Do you agree?
I think it might have been Alan Bennett who once charmingly referred to theatre critics as "giddy chorus girls just waiting to be fucked". Spectator critic Lloyd Evans seems to agree. In his latest column, where he runs the rule over Pastoral at London's Soho theatre and Fallen in Love at the Tower of London, Evans looks to some of the positive national reviews of the same shows and asks of their authors: "Are these people on drugs?"
He goes on to say: "Critics who go into raptures over near-flops risk turning their columns into the sort of perfumed screeds recited at the funerals of Asian dictators."
It's often bloggers who get accused of star inflation, while national critics are perceived as being jaded and hard to please. But it's true there are certainly plenty of four and five star reviews in the mainstream press, and personally I'm guilty as charged. In the past week, I've given five stars to two shows, Not I at the Royal Court and the epic Life and Times at the Norfolk and Norwich festival (although you'd have to go back almost a year before I last got quite so enthusiastic).
Evans may be right in thinking we do a disservice to theatre and audiences when we hyperventilate over the mediocre. There are undeniably masses of three-star reviews, but very few two- and one-star reviews.
Yet are critics more inclined to rave than they once were? Perhaps recession has encouraged kindness, although it's no kindness if people spend their money and are then disappointed. Equally, perhaps the tendency of audiences to rise to their feet and cheer the merely competent is having some kind of effect on reviews. Are reviewers too keen to praise, as Evans suggests – and do you feel critics should be more critical? Tell us what you think.
Click to go to the article at The Guardian Newspaper on-line
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Published in the April 29 edition of the New Yorker:
(available for purchase via the New Yorker cartoon store) |
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Author, drama review and WSJ columnist Terry Teachout sees that because of financial pressures, regional theatre programming is collapsing toward the safe center:
Theatre's Expiring Subscription Mode
by Terry Teachout, April 26, 2013
[. . . .] [N]ot only are solo and small-cast plays increasingly taking the place of large-scale shows, but I've noticed in the past couple of years that many regional theaters are also opting for significantly less adventurous fare. More familiar comedies and recent Broadway hits, fewer challenging new shows and revivals of great plays of the past: That seems to be the direction in which American theater is moving.
 But is it all about the recession? Not long ago I spoke to the artistic director of a well-regarded theater company somewhere in America that's feeling the pinch. No names: I'll call her Ms. X for the sake of convenience, though "she" may or may not be a woman. In addition to running the company, Ms. X is a stage director of high seriousness, one whose work I've praised in the past. Yet her company is inching away from the kind of programming that led me to start reviewing its shows in the first place. I didn't ask why—we were talking about something else—but Ms. X volunteered an explanation, and though I wasn't taking notes, this is more or less what she said to me:
I""m in the ticket-selling business. If I don't sell tickets, we shut down. We used to do it by selling subscriptions. That gave us money up front, and it also made it easier for me to do serious work, because people were buying a five-show package, and they trusted me to give them a well-chosen, wide-ranging package each year. We'd do a comedy, a new play or two, a classical revival, maybe a couple of modern classics. August Wilson, Tennessee Williams, that kind of thing. Sometimes they didn't like all five. Maybe they never did. But they still went home feeling like they'd gotten a balanced diet, they'd done their duty to theater. And that used to matter to people. It really did. They thought that seeing good shows made you a better person.
"Then the subscription model fell apart, for a lot of reasons. Some subscribers got too busy, or too old, to commit in advance to five shows on specific dates. Some of them couldn't afford to buy all five in one pop anymore. And young people never have gotten in the habit of subscribing to anything. On demand, that's their motto. Anyway, it all added up to the same thing: We had to start selling individual shows instead of a package. When that happened, everything changed. Instead of trusting us to give them something good, people started playing it safe, and we had to play safe with them. We didn't have any choice. The last time I tried putting on a classical revival, our single-ticket sales dropped by nearly half. And we've had to start using name actors as often as we can. Doesn't matter what the show is: It's the star that sells, not the play.
"Look, I'm as serious as I ever was. And I don't waste money, either. I didn't pile up debt by building a big, fancy theater complex, which is what's gotten a whole lot of other regional companies in hot water. And I think we're still putting on good shows here—but more and more of them are middlebrow shows. Safe shows. And more than anything else, it's the collapse of the subscription model that's done it to us. It's as simple as that."
Is it? Or was the old-fashioned subscription model always a snare and a delusion, an easy-money honeypot that seduced growth-happy companies into losing sight of their artistic missions? While I'm sure that the answer varies from company to company, there seems little doubt that the model itself is going bust. According to the Theatre Communications Group, nationwide revenue from subscribers plunged 18% between 2007 and 2011.
What now? Modernize the subscription model? Or scrap it altogether and try something completely different? If I knew, I'd start a theater company. But I do know that if regional theater wants to save its soul, it'll have to find new ways to sell tickets. Otherwise, it's going to be "The Odd Couple" and "Clybourne Park" over and over again, forever.
—Mr. Teachout, the Journal's drama critic, writes "Sightings" every other Friday. He is the author of "Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong." Write to him at
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
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Click to link to the article at the WSJ on-line
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Published at
Austin: A Way of Saying Yes
Robert Faires
April 19, 2013
 You can’t be in Austin very long without hearing someone wax lyrical about the Armadillo World Headquarters. If you’re not familiar with that legendary venue, just know that the grandiose name was another bit of River City irreverence, gussying up an abandoned National Guard armory and bestowing global significance on the luckless varmint too blind to see a pickup bearing down on him as he crossed some farm to market road. Even so, the ‘Dillo was a cultural—make that countercultural—hub in Austin throughout the seventies, a venue that played host to as eclectic an array of acts as the city had seen up to that time: rock, blues, country, comedy, jazz, punk, folk, reggae—hell, even the ballet. I mention this not to indulge in nostalgic narcissism about how much cooler Austin used to be back when—as time-honored a tradition as that is in our town—but to offer a seminal example of an expansiveness of identity that’s long influenced Austin’s creative scene. One of the great legacies of the Armadillo was how it served as a crossroads for the country and rock scenes. At a time when long hair and pot could get you a serious whuppin’ in a lot of places in Texas, the ‘Dillo was a spot where you could be a cowboy and a hippie. And where the two fused—as with the scene’s most renowned and proudest “outlaw” artist, Willie Nelson—something fresh came into the world and flourished.
| There’s an openness to change, to new people, new ideas, and new ways of doing things. And because so many traditional barriers between people, groups, or methodologies either don’t exist or are ignored, there’s an openness of movement that makes it all the easier for someone to range all over the place, to seek out the horizon, and for others to strike out for it alongside him or follow his trail. |
Theater wasn’t really part of the ‘Dillo’s multifarious menu, but the willingness to break free of traditional roles and embrace multiple identities has been just as alive on Austin’s stage scene since that time. In the early eighties, a couple of out-of-work actors in need of some cash figured to take some characters they’d regaled friends with at parties and throw them on stage. The play struck a chord, and not just locally; within a half-dozen years, it was the most produced play in the United States, and nowadays you’d be hard-pressed to find a corner of the country that hasn’t seen some version of Greater Tuna. Of course, those actors, Joe Sears and Jaston Williams, wouldn’t have had that success or been able to parlay it into a theatrical franchise (with three sequels), tour the shows coast to coast for thirty years (with runs off and on Broadway and a pair of command performances at the White House), or create any of their non-Tuna projects (Williams’ autobiographical solo shows I’m Not Lying, Cowboy Noises, and Camping With Gasoline; Sears’ The Kansas Open and Trail of Tears) had they believed they had to sit and wait for someone to cast them in order to get work in the theater. That they were willing to cast themselves as playwrights made all the difference.
The notion of the hyphenate theater artist hadn’t had a lot of traction in Austin up to that point; generally speaking, playwrights wrote, actors acted, and directors told everybody what to do. But the triumph of Tuna alerted local thespians that they could wear more than one hat in the theater, and the idea really began to gain ground after the unexpected popularity of a locally generated play of monologues. The company members of Big State Productions had seen an exhibit of Richard Avedon’s portraits of westerners and disliked them so intensely that they decided to create a play in response, one with their own portraits of westerners drawn in soliloquies. To ensure that everyone had an equal hand in the show’s creation, Big State’s artistic director Jim Fritzler set it up so each company member wrote a monologue, which was handed off to another company member to perform, and a third company member to direct. It didn’t matter how much or how little experience anyone had in any area, for this project, everyone would be a playwright-actor-director. The show might have been little more than a curious theatrical exercise had it not become a roaring hit. In the West was revived a dozen times over several years owing to popular demand; toured to Dallas and Fort Worth; was one of only two theatrical productions to be invited to the Kennedy Center’s festival of Texas culture in 1990; and adapted into an indie film. The response was so positive that several Big Staters were inspired to write and perform multiple-character monologue shows of their own, and when locals embraced those, too, other theater artists in Austin began to join in the fun. In the West premiered in 1985, and by the time Bush 41 retired to Houston, Austin stages had seen some two dozen homegrown solo shows. And no one here gave two hoots about whether an actor had the right to write a play or a director to perform. Austin’s other theater artists—and more crucially, its audiences—were totally accepting of the artist who was creative in more than one way. Go ahead and experiment, they were saying. We’ll support you.
Click 'Read more' to continue or click HERE to go to the article at www.howlround.com
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Published at
Making Friends to Make Shows with to Show Friends
by The Rude Mechs
April 16.com, , 2013
We're lucky to live in Austin. We're lucky to live in a community that's creative and hard working and confident and intelligent. All this new work and all these open minds. We're lucky to live in a community where artists support one another—where we lift each other up instead of trying to tear each other down.
| Because our city brings so much to the table, it's on us to bring our audience pleasurable and challenging work, and we'd be lazy assholes if we didn't let them in on the process. They are smart and they know what they want, and we are not lazy assholes, so we let them in early, and often. |
We're lucky to have so many amazing creative people that can make work with us, that are interested in making new work of their own, that understand failure is a symptom of working well and working hard and working right, not a predictor of future success.
We're lucky to live in a city where the audience is well-read and has a good sense of humor and brags on itself and yet somehow doesn’t take itself too seriously. We're lucky to have an audience that wants to participate in the creation of the play—that knows it isn’t finished until they show up and bring their own associations and dreams to the piece. And yet an audience that holds us accountable—with honesty but never dismissiveness.
We're lucky to live in a city that is full of bands and reads a lot of books and likes the outdoors and knows that a creative community isn’t just the money-generating “movers and shakers” but also the teenage punk rockers and the quirky artist who build spaces from trash and the hippies with their butterfly bicycles and the students making films and plays and music and their own new thing, whatever the new form will be.
Because our city brings so much to the table, it's on us to bring our audience pleasurable and challenging work, and we'd be lazy assholes if we didn't let them in on the process. They are smart and they know what they want, and we are not lazy assholes, so we let them in early, and often. Making new works from scratch the way we do—collaboratively and on our feet—really requires that we test material in front of everyone to learn what works and doesn’t work. So we mount workshop productions when we can afford it, we invite feedback, we hold talkbacks, we survey for input, and then we make the next draft.
Click 'Read more' to continue or click HERE to go to the article at www.howlround.com
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