A (Former) Critic Responds
By Frank Rich

Marsha Norman raises more questions about critics than I could possibly answer, but I do want to play devil’s advocate on a few points, speaking from my experience as a past Times drama critic. I realize that some of these arguments will never end: the Shuberts first barred a Times critic (Alexander Woollcott) from their productions in the years after World War I because he had too much power, liked too few shows, etc., etc., and this back in the day when The Times was still a much smaller enterprise and there were many more papers competing with it. The plus ça change. …
But let’s stick to modern times.
If the critics have as much power as Marsha says, why do they have no power to get audiences to buy tickets to “The Seafarer” or to stop audiences from flocking to, say, “Young Frankenstein”? It can’t be that one’s a drama and the other’s a musical. Just look at “August,” a straight play with fewer well-known actors than “Seafarer” or “The Homecoming” or “Is He Dead?” (all box-office also-rans soon to close) and a much-more demanding 3 hour, 20 minute running time, especially in this day of 4-minute shows on YouTube.

The idea that critics might report the audience response is meaningless. Even the most ludicrous fiascoes I saw as a drama critic — the plays and musicals no one remembers that closed in a weekend — received standing ovations at press performances because the producers stacked the house with friends and backers. I’ll never forget taking my then 12-year-old son to a now-forgotten whodunnit, and his amazement that all the people around us were roaring at lame jokes and cheering at the curtain call. I explained what was going on, and my son said with a mixture of innocence and shock, “But Dad, they’re grownups!”
The only real exception I remember was the original Broadway production of “Sunday in the Park with George.” Because of revisions during previews, the press opening was postponed several times, into a period when a lot of the houses had been pre-sold to theater parties. The management had no choice but to shoehorn critics into those performances; there were no extra seats to fill with the usual friends and family. The night I saw it, the audience was not only disgruntled but there were lots of walkouts. I was deeply moved by the show. I wanted to urge readers to see it. A critic’s job is not to be a pollster but to write his or her honest opinion, explain it, and let the reader judge whether the argument adds up or not. What would have been the point of adding that there were people all around me, in many cases there by social obligation not choice, who were bored? Here was a great piece of art (in my view) that I wanted to fight for. (As it happened, most of the other original reviews of “Sunday” were negative and, even with my favorable review for the Times, it never became a smash hit. Indeed by the standards of the business it was a flop, because it didn’t pay back its investors in its original run and did not even spawn a touring company. I’m glad to see that a better fate may be in store for the excellent new revival, which has been greeted by critics and audiences far more favorably than the first production, which was no less excellent.)
The notion of publications running listings of currently running plays that repeat in capsule versions the original reviews. This is a practice that serves the readers. Whenever The Times has cut back on the listings in any way, producers and playwrights as well as readers complain vociferously. My guess is that the playwrights who received favorable reviews are very happy that those opinions continue to be available in digest form week after, whether in The Times, The New Yorker, New York, wherever. In any case, we live in a new media age. As more and more people rely on the Internet, especially for information about movies and plays (where information can be gathered and tickets purchased on the same Web sites), potential ticket buyers have instant access to any and all reviews they want of every play, film, book, etc., in perpetuity. Once a review is on the Internet, it’s there forever 24/7, for whoever wants it, no matter what listings run in print media, and to a much wider audience than those who are reading it on a printed page. This clock cannot be turned back now. By the way, many of the most vicious reviews are written on theater blogs, and they can’t be stopped either. But this much is certain: the more outlets, the more opinions, the less influence any individual critic or publication (The Times included).
Marsha, audiences drifted off to television long ago. This is not a recent phenomenon. The number of productions on Broadway collapsed in the late 1920s when talking pictures came in. Then it fell by another 50 percent between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, as TV consolidated its power, and has remained at roughly the same place ever since. Just ask Horton Foote, whose “Trip to Bountiful” was a hit on television in the 1950s and as a feature film in the 1980s but not as a play mounted on Broadway in the 1950s. He made his living writing for TV and the movies throughout this period, even as he kept writing plays. If this was the plight of playwrights back when Brooks Atkinson and Walter Kerr reigned as critics, what’s really changed? The good old days for playwrights really date back to the golden age ending in the late 1940s, just before TV came in, and we can’t pretend that what has happened since has anything to do with the vagaries of drama critics. It has to do with television, like movies before it, stealing a huge chunk of the theater audience — for keeps. (Now the Internet is stealing that audience from TV and movies as well as from the theater.)
One other point about television. Marsha complains about the power of critics who review on television. Would that this were so! Television (local or network) has stopped reviewing theater altogether. (NY 1, a cable channel, is the rare exception.) In the 1980s, all the local TV news outlets in New York, network affiliates included, reviewed every Broadway play and even some major Off Broadway plays. Now none of them do. By Marsha’s argument, this should be taken as good news: A whole set of critics that no longer has any power because they are literally extinct. But I would argue — and I suspect some of Marsha’s peers would too — that it would be better for the theater as a whole if plays were reviewed regularly on television, even if some of the reviews were poor or some of the critics incompetent. Publicity is still publicity, as long as they get the titles and actors’ names right, and creates excitement for an artform that has to fight for every inch of media space in the digital age.
Critics are no longer advocates? It would take a whole post to list all the previously little-known voices — Shinn, Ruhl, Stew, et al. — championed by Brantley and Isherwood of The Times, not to mention countless other critics in New York and around the country.
And I also don’t buy into Marsha’s sense that the theater is now at some particularly low ebb. When I came out of a performance of “August” on West 45th Street and looked around a few weeks ago, I saw that just on that street alone there were plays, not musicals, by Stoppard, McPherson, Sorkin and Twain/Ives — in addition to Letts. I don’t want to make more of it than it is, but I don’t think I’d seen so many new (or in the case of “Is He Dead?” quasi-new) straight plays — not revivals — running at one time on Broadway since I was a teenager. I don’t think there was a single season with that many plays running simultaneously on Broadway during my entire tenure as drama critic. Maybe this will soon fade and prove an anomaly, but this is one season when we probably shouldn’t bemoan the New York theater’s erosion. Maybe the unexpected commercial success of “August” will bring about more courageous producing in its wake.
Critics are “exempt from criticism of any kind”: Please remember you’re talking to the former Butcher of Broadway!