The annual Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards, which I hosted for the first time on Tuesday, are a rare coming together of critics and practitioners in joint celebration - an event at which those of us whose job it is to go to the theatre night after night publicly acknowledge some of the great achievements of the previous year.
For once, too, it’s the critics onstage and the artists in the audience, so the relationship is completely altered. And yes, I admit it: I did have a bit of stage fright as a result. (I choose to spend my nights in the stalls, not onstage, for a good reason; I’m not a thwarted actor. But it is also good experience, I keep telling myself, to come out of the shadows that we typically occupy, and face those whose work it is we judge).
I was too absorbed in keeping the event moving both swiftly and smoothly to try to keep track of everything that was said - but you can read some of the onstage comments here, including the best advice I’ve ever heard to accepting awards from Margaret Tyzack, to observe the 3G’s - “Be grateful, be gracious and get off!” (Kate Winslet, take note!) And it was a similar suggestion I made to the critics presenting the awards, whom I had implored to keep their speeches short, too. The result? We were able to wrap up the entire awards in around an hour.
As usual, Arthur Smith introduced proceedings with his brilliantly irreverent take on some of the year’s headline theatre stories - but told me afterwards that he’d forgotten to tell one of his stories. “Gone with the Wind closed in June - but it was so long that the last performance only finished last night”. Arthur also alluded to the precariousness of critics nowadays - and said he’d already offered Michael Coveney a job as his cleaner.
It was a theme picked up by Kenneth Branagh, in an acceptance speech that was delivered on his behalf by Kevin McNally, in which he said that though critics are sometimes thought of warily by theatre practitioners, he’d actually just signed a petition to restore a critic’s job that had recently been lost. Though some in the audience wondered on whose behalf such an injunction was being made, it wasn’t for a critic at home, but in LA where he is currently working.
New York has also lately seen the elimination of the role of theatre critics on a number of leading publications - as Michael Riedel reported at the beginning of December in the New York Post, “Being a member of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle these days is like being in a revival of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.” He was reporting the latest layoff there of Journal News critic Jacques le Sourd, who had served as critic for 35 years, and observed wryly, “My next assignment was on the Depression hits Broadway. I don’t have to do that story now. I’m living it.”
He was just the latest in a series of critics to see their jobs go: others in the exodus, by force or natural causes, included (according to a story in Variety), “Michael Sommers, who took a buyout at the New Jersey Star-Ledger; Eric Grode, who lost his gig at the New York Sun when that paper folded; Jeremy McCarter, who ankled New York magazine to become a cultural critic at Newsweek; and Clive Barnes, a major figure in performing-arts journalism who died after 30 years as theater and dance critic at the New York Post.” As Variety went on to comment, “When the dust cleared, the New York Drama Critics Circle, the group of journos that hands out stage kudos every spring, had suddenly been reduced to 18 from 22. (While losing that quintet, they added one Village Voice scribe.)” Linda Winer, critic of Newsday, quipped, “Pretty soon we’re going to be an alumni organization”.
This situation has been recently been mirrored in LA, where three leading critics have lost their jobs: the L.A Weekly eliminated its theatre editor staff position (held by Steven Leigh Morris), and the Daily News and Daily Breeze both laid of their theatre and arts critic respectively. But the theatre community there has far from welcomed this disturbing development, and the artistic directors of three of LA’s leading theatres, Gilbert Cates of the Geffen Playhouse, Sheldon Epps of the Pasadena Playhouse and Michael Ritchie of Center Theatre Group, have written an eloquent joint letter decrying it.
As they say, “it may seem somewhat ironic that leaders of arts institutions would come out in favor of further criticism. It would be like fire hydrants getting together to come out in favor of more dogs. But, as artistic leaders who run three of the larger theater organizations in Los Angeles, we’ve recently become worried. Over the last few months there has been a conspicuous disappearance of arts writers and editors in our local papers. Two more significant layoffs were confirmed this week. It’s time for us to speak up. Criticism is always difficult to hear, especially if it comes from friends, relatives, acquaintances, neighbors, strangers, bystanders or casual observers. But it is even harder to bear when one realizes that criticism is being shared publicly with thousands of readers and may form the basis of their own opinion toward your work. Yet we depend on the voices of critics and arts reporters to help create a conversation with our community. If we let these voices slowly and quietly disappear, the consequences are simple and inevitable: fewer people will know about the productions, fewer people will purchase tickets, and eventually, fewer theaters will exist.”
We are, in other words, all in this together; and critics play a crucial part in fuelling that dialogue and support. And its loss is being felt all over the place: a blog from Time Out Chicago writer Kris Vire points to similar problems in the Windy City: “Time Out Chicago is slimming down a bit in the new year; the Reader announced this week that it’s cutting its print listings way back; the Sun-Times has been moving many reviews to online-only; and the Tribune famously cut down its news hole last year. For features, reviews, even listings, you just can’t expect print coverage as some kind of birthright at this point in time.”
So, to adapt the old adage, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”, if a theatre production opens and there is no one to list or review it anymore, has it actually happened? Of course it has; but reviews act as a permanent record of an ephemeral art, and they also encourage people to attend and support it before it passes. We lose that at our peril. And artists are realising it, even if editors aren’t.
Further to that, in New York City where every major television station used to have a theatre reviewer, there are now exactly zero. Once upon a time print critics feared that their jobs would be replaced by television critics . That fear proved to be unfounded. I think what is happening is that reviews are mattering less and less because the reviews themselves aren't long enough to really explore what is right or wrong with a play in any depth and of course the reason for that is that editors keep cutting down the amount of space that critics are given, thereby preventing any indepth discussion of the work which in turn makes the public reading it think that it's not a particularly interesting review which makes it less influential and therefore not important which causes the editor to give even less space to theatre reviews. Its a vicious circle that will continue to spiral downward.
Here's another thought: it's not just because the relationship of criticism to the art form it relates to is undervalued, it's also - probably more - an editorial sense that reviewers aren't really journalists; they're not part of a newspaper's identity as such, and so can be jettisoned. But that attitude is dead wrong.
To be honest, reviews mean very little to me in regards to what I see and don't see. I will read a review if it is well written, but its only one opinion. In this data on demand age, I can go on line and read the opinions of sometimes as many as 2-3 doz. people within hours of opening night.
Critics are just that, critical. Better to read the reviews of people who went to the show for love of seeing a stage show rather than someone who is going to recieve a paycheck based on his or her reviews.
To be fair, I don't care for movie reviews either so maybe I am just not a person who lives my life based on others views.
Cheers