"After what should have been considered a cause for serious celebration — a season which concluded with the opening of four new musicals, two new reviews, and three major revivals — we find ourselves mourning..."
That was how the article I planned to write might have begun. I spent weeks collecting reviews from every source I could find of the shows which opened in the late season, watching in horror as show after show was lambasted and pilloried in the more than two hundred pages of reviews I had collected. It wasn't so much that I demanded raves for every show; no, that would have been excessive (besides, I'm not that open-hearted). But it certainly conflicted with my dream of an atmosphere of nuturing criticism, one in which reviewers recognized that audience attendance is directly related to the health of theatre in general.
So, I planned my response to the critics — an article to be entitled, "Pan & Slam: What fools these morons be." I planned to discuss:
- The pomposity of reviewers: fouling themselves in the attempt to come up with the wittiest title or twist on the subject play's title; babbling just to hear themselves speak;
- The stupidity of reviewers: Watching what seemed to be an attempt to literally kill the theatre, it occurred to me that critics are one of the few groups of employed people who try to eliminate the reason for their employment;
- The arrogance of reviewers: writing about areas in which they have no knowledge; or making statements about "what the play should have..." "...been," "...done," "...attempted," "aimed for," etc., (see, for example, Howard Kissel's comments in the New York Daily News about how Steel Pier's creators failed to achieve something only he believes they were trying to achieve;
and more along those lines.
I planned to support all these statements with massive tables excerpting the articles to show how the critics:
- contradicted each other and themselves;
- made erroneous statements about the shows, the pre-production, or the casts;
- cribbed from each other, or somehow suffered from an overall lack of creativity (How many of the reviews of The Life mentioned the "Disney-fication of 42nd Street? How many of the reviews of Titanic mentioned the pre-opening difficulties, or its failure to manifest a flop on the proportions of Carrie?);
- were simply malicious, irritating or ignorant (You want to see a visual definition of the word "glee?" Watch Michael Riedel on WNET's Theatre Talk during one of the shows periodic critical bash fests
