On Stage
SCHNEIDER, ALAN
ON STAGE By Alan Schneider The Sound Of No Hands Clapping With New Yorkers continuing to grope helplessly through a daily newspaper blackout to find out what's on (or off) in their town,...
...In the current situation, when theater coverage has become an impossible luxury, the critics have ceased to be whipping boys and have instead become friends, allies and fellow wanderers in the common wilderness of silence...
...A bad notice, after all, is preferable to no notice...
...radio comment was equally unfavorable...
...As for the commentaries in the weekly and monthly magazines, their influence in the financial success of a production is roughly equal to that of a distinguished supporting cast—except in the case of something like a layout in Life...
...As for TV one picture—including the very clear one of a drama critic reading his review over the airwaves, as many of them are now doing—is worth far less than a thousand words...
...Nor have radio and television provided more than fleeting and capricious substitutes for a daily press...
...The best laid plans of theater men, however, still seem to be best disseminated by that old friend and companion, the daily newspaper...
...If there is some question whether or not a falling tree makes a sound when no one is around to hear it, there can be no doubt that a theater production which generates no discussion simply does not exist...
...Significantly, Lorenzo, which is Alfred Drake's next venture, is already planning to stay out of New York until the strike is settled...
...This was a serious but rather oldfashioned drama of social significance with certain comédie insights into the corrosive effects of business values on the personal life of a liberal-minded participant in Seventh Avenue's garment district...
...Had there been newspapers, In the Counting House might have tried to make a fight of it for a few weeks before succumbing...
...Without them it failed to survive the weekend...
...its songs were easily exploitable in a sound medium, it was buttressed by a strong advance sale, and it had the special built-in advantage of Alfred Drake as its star...
...Some seasons ago, it may be recalled, Kismet opened amid an earlier (and not so lengthy) newspaper strike and enjoyed a long run largely because the daily reviews, which were uniformly bad, failed to appear in print...
...The first play to be presented during the current blackout of theater news and reviews, Leslie Werner's In the Counting House, opened and closed almost simultaneously...
...The television commentators, seizing upon what was then their first opportunity to show their power, were generally favorable...
...But Kismet was a special case...
...Radio is too ephemeral, too tenuous...
...ON STAGE By Alan Schneider The Sound Of No Hands Clapping With New Yorkers continuing to grope helplessly through a daily newspaper blackout to find out what's on (or off) in their town, the complications and implications for the city's theater are considerable...
...Whether other openings which cannot postpone and must brave the elements without benefit of newsprint survive remains to be seen...
...Meanwhile, every manager and publicity man is trying to spread the good word about his show by every means available...
...By the time the strike was over and the reviews were printed, the show was established already...
...For stronger than the delights of being praised and greater than the fear of being panned is the terror of being ignored, unnoticed, unrecorded in indelible newsprint...
...it is split up into too many separate audiences listening with only half their thoughts and less than half their time...
...It involved a musical, the most popular form of commercial theater...
...These critical pieces, which can discourse on the esthetic value of a play more analytically and more philosophically (if not necessarily more sensibly) than the daily reviews, are of little assistance in drawing large audiences to the theater...
...Compared to the reviewers for the metropolitan dailies, the names and comments of the magazine critics seem to be of questionable value in the hierarchy of the display ad...
...With one exception, the reviews read that same evening over TV by the critics were all bad...
...Even the doughty David Merrick, a producer who relegates critics to a level somewhat below that of retarded Neanderthals, after contemplating the Sunday afternoon spectacle of a critic vocally entangled in his own copy, has shudderingly decided to postpone the opening of Oliver, his forthcoming musical, until normal hostilities in print are resumed...
Vol. 46 • January 1963 • No. 1
