After I wrote a blog post about how I wasn’t going to review a whole show at Book-It because the first act drove me so nuts I decided to leave, I’ve gotten a lot of letters from people, including a widely respected theater director, who said:
I love you for this… I had a manager in L.A. years ago who said it was the artists’ responsibility to make him want to return after intermission, and if they didn’t he had the perfect right to leave. I haven’t seen the show you were reviewing, but I’ve left others in various places over the years. Why the heck not?
A well-respected actor texted me to say:
Thank you for walking out of a show and then not being afraid to write about it.
But a bunch of people I’ve never heard of on Twitter have been confronting me the last few days with their views of theater reviewing. None of them know the rules of theater reviewing, judging from all the “how does theater reviewing work?” tweets I’m getting this morning (an account or two associated with a hair salon, another account from Florida…), but that doesn’t stop them from letting me know that I have broken the rules (and what are the rules again, they ask in the same breath?).
Look: There are no rules. If there is a rule, the most important one is: tell the truth. If you hate a show, just say you hate it, because if you conceal that fact you’re implying it’s good and worthy of people’s attention, and if someone goes to a show that you’ve said is worthy of attention and hates it, they’ll think, “If that’s good theater, I’m never going to the theater again.”
There is no contract a theater-reviewer signs when a theater puts them on the media list for a particular performance.
Also on the truth tip: If you leave a show and decide to blog about it (or put your thoughts in print, which I didn’t do with this particular show), you need to make explicit mention of the fact you left. You can’t leave a show and then write about it as if you saw the whole thing, whether your review is positive or negative. Otherwise you are lying. It’s a lie of omission, but it’s still a lie.
Another rule (this one goes out to all the people whose friends are associated with that show): As a critic, your audience is not the actors or the directors or the producers of the show. Your audience is the public, people who just worked all day and are now reading Slog or The Stranger trying to decide if they want to spend their money on a play tonight. For weeks, that show was starred in our theater calendar because it’s based on Raymond Carver stories and Raymond Carver is an important writer from this part of the world and Book-It sometimes does great literary adaptations. After I saw it, I removed the star and wrote a blog post about my impressions.
By the way, aggrieved friends of people in that show, I didn’t even mention the actors by name because I didn’t feel like they were the problem (as I wrote: the adaptation itself was the problem). All I said was that if you like the same thing I like about Raymond Carver’s stories (which I reread before going to see the play) then I wouldn’t recommend this particular Raymond Carver adaptation based on what I saw in the first act. And then I said, “Maybe the two stories in the second act were phenomenal. I’ll never know.”
In other news, this is not news. The great Brendan Kiley wrote this characteristically smart thing on the subject of leaving at intermission five years ago. The illustrious David Schmader wrote this one 10 years ago. I have it on good authority that Stranger performance critics have been reserving the right for a lot longer than that. Here, for example. And here. And here. And here. And here. And here. Et cetera.
If you think I have lost all credibility for not staying until the bitter end before saying anything, feel free not to read my thoughts about theater anymore. If you are friends with someone in the show and you’re now filling my twitter mentions with questions about how theater reviewing works, I’m muting you.
