A critic’s all-too-premature exit (and another’s pre-emptive judgement)….

But because he was so nice and kind, that made him a really special critic, too, since every word he wrote came from a warm place, not a bitter one. As the AP also put it in their own story reporting his death, “In a highly competitive profession, few were as generous and self-effacing as the man known to his colleagues, with affection, as ‘Kuch’ (Kootch). He would shy from credit for stories he had helped write (and break) and present framed copies of posters from shows that younger staffers had reviewed. Rarely did he have an unkind word for anyone; even rarer was an unkind word heard about him.”

That was particularly lovely to read just a couple of days after a particularly poisonous blog about me was written by one of my colleagues, just as I was about to make my producing debut on Friday, calling into question just what it is a producer actually does (and if he doesn’t know that now, after nearly forty years as a critic, I suppose he never will). It was ironically posted on a site where I had actually recommended him for the job after I vacated it, when he was without a regular reviewing gig.

But never mind the personal slights — he portrayed me “not so much a critic, I always feel, or even a producer (don’t you learn that trade for years and years any more, with your elders and betters?), as an enthusiast, paragraphist, plugger and likeable Stage Door Johnny, a delightful comic character from Sheridan” — but more worrying were the words he used to describe Shrunk, the play I am producing at the Cock Tavern, referring to it as a “new play for two people on a psychiatrist’s couch (not another one of those!) in a Kilburn hell-hole once graced by Ian Dury and his resident band,” though declining to actually name the play at all.

It was certainly odd to read such words posted late the night before he was due to come to review its opening night: he sounded like he was already determined to have a bad time, since he had already written the play off with a dismissive sweep of his pen, “Not another one of those!”, and the venue as “a Kilburn hell-hole”. As it happens, he didn’t, in the end, turn up at the first night after all - his editor apparently re-assigned it to another critic after reading this.

What a difference, though, to the kind of attitude exemplified by Kuch, who as the AP put it, “wanted every play to succeed, but didn’t pretend all would. ‘You may need a drink — and not necessarily water — after viewing A Cool Dip in the Barren Saharan Crick, he wrote in March, looking sadly upon “Kia Corthron’s messy message play that places water right at the center of its convoluted story.”

Some critics, of course, are famous for seeking refuge in those drinks, often propping themselves up before the show with something more fortifying than caffeine (my own drug of choice). Kuch, by contrast, was in a league of his own, saving the drinks till after: I first met him several years ago, and would regularly have post-theatre drinks and suppers with him on my regular trips Stateside. Just last New Year’s Day, I went out-of-town to stay with friends in upstate New York in Hillsdale, where they have a house, and he also happened to be in the same town staying with other friends. We spent much of the next two days and evenings together. And just a few weeks ago, we all met up for a late night supper at Angus McIndoe after attending a press preview of American Idiot on Broadway.

He was a one-man Critics’ Circle - critics from both New York and out-of-town gravitated around him, and I was happy to be one of his regular throng. (Just that night, I met Richard Ouzounian, theatre critic for the Toronto Star, thanks to him). But he was also rapidly turning into a one-man critic for the regional press in the US: as Variety reported last year, “As theater reviewers have been dropped, newspapers increasingly pick up the Associated Press reviews, making Michael Kuchwara arguably the most influential legit critic in America.”.

Kuch was just 63 when he died. Only the good, as they say, die young. And it reminded me of the death of Jack Tinker, nearly 14 years ago, at the age of just 58. As the late Sheridan Morley wrote of Jack in an obituary for The Independent, “Even actors and dramatists whom he regularly attacked would credit him with a passion for the theatre which was almost unique among his colleagues. Jack Tinker saw himself as in and of the theatre, a critic from inside the boundary who could be as savage as any of the outsiders but who always knew precisely what he was being savage about. His love and loyalty to plays and players will always be remembered. His overnight talent was to make the review as starry as the event he was reviewing, and in a world of increasingly academic and professorial critics he was, like Kenneth Tynan, one of the very last headline men, a journalist who always knew that his job was to sell his newspaper as well as his opinion.”

The same was true of Kuch: he was a journalist through and through, and as LA Times critic Charles McNulty has written, “Dependably discerning in his always fair-minded reviews, Mike was whom you’d turn to for straightforward reporting, balanced assessment and historical perspective.”

He was also able to deliver that to a widest possible platform - as the New York Times put it, “The A.P. disseminated his work around the world in hundreds of daily and weekly publication” - in a way that balanced sharp reporting with sincere enthusiasm: if the world was going to have to rely on one voice, it was good that it was his.

As Cara Joy David has written in a blog for the Huffington Post, “Kuch had none of the biting venom you encounter so much in this industry. Everyone could tell that in his writing, but, those who knew him had more to base their assessment on. He always smiled when I ran into him at the theater. He showed up at press agents’ parties (even though he was frequently the only critic who would) and chatted happily with the industry folk. We could all tell how much Kuch cared about the theater. He knew not all of it was wonderful, but he honestly wanted it be.”

One of those theatrical publicists, Judy Jacksina, nailed it when she is quoted remarking in the same blog, “He loved the theater more than any one else on earth. But that’s not why I admired him so. His role model status in my life came from the fact that he was a triumphantly successful human being. His vast intelligence was dwarfed by his boundless kindness.”

Being a triumphantly successful human being, of course, is just about the best review anyone could get. If only I could write the same thing about one or two of my colleagues. But Kuch truly is one of the critics I am already missing now that he is gone.