Totting up the Critics
SIMON, JOHN
On Stage TOTTING UP THE CRITICS BY JOHN SIMON One of those perennial posers, "How much power do theater critics have?" rears its battered head again in two articles in the July/August issue of...
...That doesn't even make sense...
...Or might not power be the respect of the intellectual community and of posterity...
...7) Watts was the best indicator of long runs: 40 per cent of his raves outlasted 500 performances...
...And what is the significance of the theatrical columnists, from Earl Wilson to Rex Reed (though the latter fancies himself a critic...
...The limitations of "Critic Power" are obvious, and, to give it due credit, the article itself states many of them...
...Or how the television reviewers may have encroached on the power of newspaper critics...
...6) Gottfried was by far the toughest critic, with better than 50 per cent pans...
...In other words, drama reviewers may be representative of Everyman's opinion, and may actually have been picked for that very reason by their editors...
...Still, you might say, as long as so much of the theater is independently produced rather than government (or otherwise) subsidized, money reviews do matter...
...And David Rabe: "Kerr is a theatrical fascist, a totalitarian idiot...
...4) Nearly half the reviews studied?79 of them, covering 206 shows out of a possible 450 were extreme: raves or pans...
...If a goat were writing for the Times, it would be the goat that would be the power in the theater!' " Well, many goats have held that job, and many more will, doubtless, hold it...
...Let me cite only the "parting shots" of three of our ablest young playwrights, and therefore the most important among the 12 respondents...
...Of the remaining notices, slightly over half were more negative than positive...
...To find out one would need to go to the audience and ask people at the theater whom they read and to what extent they consider themselves influenced by the critic or critics of their choice...
...Or whether the man on the Post alone has ever been able to swing the public...
...Barnes and Watts were the best indicators of flops...
...I think, in New York at any rate, the power is always in the dailies...
...Critic Power" performs a useful service because it introduces facts into the bailiwick of guesswork...
...Why should they...
...it is a chatty, sometimes perceptive, but mainly conventional introduction to the personalities and styles of the principal New York newspaper critics - Clive Barnes and Walter Kerr of the Times, Richard Watts and Martin Gottfried of the Post, and Douglas Watt of the Newswith the New Yorker's Brendan Gill and myself making brief guest appearances from the magazine world...
...Why should it matter so much whether a critic, or the critics, has, or have, power...
...28 per cent of those he gave raves passed 500 performances...
...It would be valuable to know, too, what happens when the Times critic is of one opinion and all the other critics of another...
...Cry for Us Alt, alleged to have run 308 days, closed after eight performances...
...And "Critic Power" refers to Harold Clurman as the "author" of Where's Daddy?, a William Inge play he merely directed...
...Can we trust as a playwright a man who doesn't seem to understand what he is saying...
...Can you imagine what would happen to Broadway if, say, a Kenneth Tynan were given the Times job...
...And isn't the combined voice of Time and Newsweek, when they happen to agree, a factor to be reckoned with...
...Moreover, there would be no way of knowing whether they were consciously or unconsciously distorting the truth...
...Can we be sure that a person who read both Barnes, say, and Ted Kalem in Time or Jack Kroll in Newsweek, was not really more influenced by one of the latter...
...8) Contrary to popular belief, Barnes did not favor British plays...
...Beyond what the More analysis has done, it would be useful, in fact necessary, to compare the "power" various critics on one publication have had over the years...
...If we consult the useful charts included in the More survey, we find that Barnes recommended or strongly recommended 40 per cent of the plays he reviewed, which, as any civilized playgoer knows, is absurd...
...rears its battered head again in two articles in the July/August issue of More magazine...
...5) Barnes was the most generous of the critics evaluated, with 29 per cent raves...
...in the midst of his pathetic hero worship of Kerr, Nachman asserts that Kerr was unfavorable to Serban's Cherry Orchard, whereas his review was a high mixed one...
...Surely, the function of the critic ought to be to educate the public, not to think for it...
...How do we know that if Joe Blow were to accost random citizens in Times Square, touting some favorite play of his, he might not talk every third one into seeing it...
...3) Mixed reviews, high or low, do not show a marked correlation with the length of a run...
...Finally, Ronald Ribman: "Criticism is like an Indian gauntlet...
...The answers, by the way, might vary according to whether the questioning took place as people were entering or leaving the theater...
...He should beg, borrow or stealeven buyA couple of newspapers and several magazines, and having examined critical opinion synoptically, infer a judgment, reading the lines and between them, along with the criticism and against its grain...
...by Gerald Nachman, a columnist for the New York Daily News...
...Yet what I find truly interesting is not the answers but the central question itself...
...What is more absurd and shocking, though, is that with the most prestigious daily publication as his platform, Barnes still only manages to sell fewer than one out of three plays he raves about...
...One has to run through it to survive...
...Granted, theater prices have become very high, and people don't want to gamble...
...Of course, it could always have fired Tynan as it did Stark Young and Stanley Kauffmann...
...Even so, no reader should take a critical opinion at face value...
...Alas, or thank goodness, we shall never get to the bottom of it all...
...Unlikely...
...The first piece is "Who's Afraid of the Broadway Critics...
...Is it not the sign of an abjectly capitalistic, antiintellectual society to view the importance of criticism in terms of dollars and cents...
...The Times did not know what it would have gotten itself into...
...It implies that criticism is a gauntlet that only the mediocre survive...
...All of which makes me wonder whether Broadway deserves better critics than the ones it has...
...was more on the mark [when] he wrote several years ago...
...The strong...
...And what about those occasional classics or "difficult" new works that all the critics band together to praise and the public nevertheless ignores...
...At the very least, the power would no longer be that of a single critic, or even of the critics collectively...
...his judgment also had the least relationship to runs...
...Or what the effect of advertising, including the promotion of a catchy phrase by some minor reviewer, has been on counteracting critical verdicts...
...it would be of the reader who knows how to evaluate and synthesize various notices...
...Said David Mamet: "Intellectually, I'd like to think of [the critics] as running-dog conspirators against the institution of art...
...This is followed by "Critic Power: Who Has It...
...When you've got a good Barnes [review], you feel like you've got a fighting chance...
...2) The correlation is more striking for the negative than for the positive...
...This being the case, it is too bad that a city like New York has only one publication with any real critical clout...
...What, in any case, is critical power...
...Is that power, too, then...
...Mediocre as they are, they may be the right people to weed out the mediocrities from the worse than mediocrities...
...It was more or less offered to him once, but he stipulated conditions (no Sunday pieces, for one) that could not be met...
...A final problem...
...John Simon...
...Is it, for example, to make a lousy show run anyway...
...Then who doesn't survive...
...More's metacritics need to be a little less sloppy than the critics, but they point to an area worthy of further investigation...
...In London, for instance, there are far more drama critics of importance, but none with the power of a Barnesor his successor, Richard Eder, because it is not the byline that matters but the paper...
...Critics create an environment of mediocrity...
...But, again, why turn criticism into a power game in the first place...
...They and the other theater critics have more power than they are willing to acknowledge...
...If everyone survived, there wouldn't be room to move in...
...Ninety-one per cent of the plays Barnes panned closed under 50...
...In a revealing further section of More, "The Victims' Revenge: Broadway Reviews the Critics," 12 Broadway notables or not-so-notables were asked to opine about the critics...
...Sancta simplicitas...
...Douglas Watt was the only one who showed a noticeable preference for foreign works...
...a statistical analysis of the correlation between selected drama reviews published in the dailies during the last decade and the fates of the Broadway shows reviewed...
...The weak...
...Of the plays panned by all the critics examined, almost three-quarters closed after fewer than 50 performances...
...But they're just jack-offs like the rest of us...
...All agreed that the main critical power was Barnes', or, as five of them put it (more correctly), the Times...
...Yet consider how asinine most of Broadway's remarks were...
...9) On the whole, there is greater agreement than disagreement among the critics about a particular Broadway season...
...Critic Power," after quoting statements from both Barnes and Kerr that dismiss the very idea of such a power, ends its survey as follows: "Both Kerr and Barnes, our study shows, are wrong...
...Nachman claims that Barnes went soft in 1971, but "Critic Power" shows that he always was...
...Its chief findings are: (1) Strong negative and positive critical opinions have a marked relationship to the length of runs...
...And if it is the mediocre who survive, doesn't that make Ribman, a survivor, mediocre...
...But he did not become easier in the past two years, the reason often cited for his recent removal from the Times' drama critic's post...
...Neither statement is grammatical, and Rabe's barely sounds literate...
...When you've got a bad one, you feel like you're dead...
...That would take a little time, but it could be a profitable investment...
...The most flagrant weakness is that critics may merely reflect or epitomize general taste rather than affect or fashion it...
Vol. 60 • August 1977 • No. 17
