The woman on the phone simply wanted to know why I couldn't be nicer.
Via
AmericanTheaterWeb,
an essay from Dominic Papatola, theater critic of the
St. Paul Pioneer Press. Seems Mr. Papatola got a lot of reader response on his review of the new
Little House on the Prairie musical currently playing at the Guthrie.
She regularly brings busloads of theatergoers to places such as the Guthrie, the Ordway and the Chanhassen Dinner
Theatres. And she was distraught because she thinks reviews such as mine don't do enough to support the hard-working, high-quality band of theaters and artists we have here in the Twin Cities.
I've experienced reviews from both sides. The first time I was mentioned in a theater review was in college. The local paper ran a review of a University Theatre production of Martin McDonagh's
The Cripple of Inishmaan, in which I played the lead. If the reviewer had been using the
Time Out six-star rating system, it might have been a four-star review. But he took an entire paragraph to detail the inadequacy of my performance. I read that review in the dressing room before a Friday night show. I know how it feels.
But I also know, at least now, that it isn't personal. On this side of the divide, where I give my solicited opinion on a couple hundred plays a year, I know that even when I write a bad review it's because I love theater and I want it to succeed. If I point out the flaws in a playwright's work, or a director's or actor's or designer's, it's usually in the hopes that they'll do better next time. (Occasionally, if they've demonstrated a sustained pattern of bad practices, it's in the hopes that they'll just quit screwing people over and making theater look bad.)
[The review] also had its supporters: "We're not tough,
sophisticated play-goers, and really wanted to like the play," wrote Grandma Plummie of Minnetonka, "but the best we could give it might be a C+. Papatola's review is less Minnesota nice than our comments on the drive home, but pretty much sums up our thoughts."
"Minnesota nice" shouldn't be limited to Minnesota. There seems to be such a thing as "Chicago nice," too. Chicago's second-city complex and Midwest passive-aggression regularly manifest themselves in the theater community, which is understandable given that the vast majority of our theater is produced on a nonprofit basis and too many of our artists work for too little (or no) money. They worked so hard on this, you hear. You should be nice about it.
It's not even limited to theater practitioners; sometimes it's the theater judgers who we should be nice about. I often disagree virulently with
the Jeff committee—and check in with
the TOC blog at 12:01am tonight, when we'll announce this year's Equity award nominees, for more on that—only to hear, oh, they volunteer so much of their time to see theater! We should be nice. Well, it's great that they go to so much theater. But that doesn't mean they aren't often wrong.
My job as a critic isn't necessarily to tell you what to see and what to avoid. It's to give you the tools to make that decision on your own, to give you my perspective on what happened in the theater that night and to attempt to entertain and enlighten and sell a few papers along the way. Do I attempt to provoke? Sure ... I hope more conversation than anger. But I'll take any honest response I can get.
Papatola has it right. Critics' opinions are exactly that, and we've all heard what opinions are like, haven't we? But honesty is what we're all after, not niceties. And most of us critics are in fact in this because we like what we do, and we like what we cover. In the last two weeks, I've been to the theater six times—and that's in late August, when very little is happening. Only two of those were shows I was reviewing. The other four were just because I care about theater. If I were reviewing them, I wouldn't have been nice about all of them. Because, to quote
one of my favorite Stephen Sondheim shows, nice is different than good.
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