The Critics Say...: 57 Theater Reviewers in New York and Beyond Discuss Their Craft and Its Future (41 page)

Jeremy Gerard:
I was the first critic to review
Spider-Man
. I think I went back four times in total. All my reviews pretty much said the same thing because it was a piece of shit from beginning to end. But if the review was written before opening night, I made that clear in the review. I’ve always gone my own way, and many of my colleagues have vehemently disagreed with me. When I wrote my first review of
Spider-Man
, the
New York Times
attacked me by name, even though they eventually also broke the embargo.

David Sheward:
The critics had a right to go in and see the show before it officially opened because it had been in previews for such a long time. The producers delayed the opening night two or three times. Enough was enough, and we deserved to be able to write a review. The show still was a mess at that point, and the public deserved to know that the show was a mess.

Howard Shapiro:
When we bought our own tickets, it showed a kind of individualism. It showed that were willing to abide by social conventions with producers for only so long. At some point, we felt we were being toyed with and abused. So we said, “You’ve broken social convention, so now we have no social convention.” Previews don’t last 100-plus days. The social convention is that there’s an opening night. We get invited on opening night or right before it, we sit where you tell us to sit, and then we write our reviews. We give you a review, and you give us a seat. But that convention didn’t cover endless previews where so many people had already seen the show and were telling each other about it. I thought that showed individualism on the part of the critics. I was really proud of the critical community.

Adam Feldman:
I did not feel that the critics should have reviewed the Julie Taymor version before it was officially open. I wrote an appeal at the time suggesting that we give them more time to continue developing it before we stepped in with our opinions, but I completely understand why my colleagues felt differently. By that point, it had reached an absurd point in the preview period. They were charging a lot of money for people to see it, and it was very problematic creatively and functionally.

Marilyn Stasio:
Do I think the critics overstepped by writing about
Spider-Man
while it was still in previews? I don’t know. It was important for the trade press to write about it. I hope
Variety
covered it well. It was something for people in the business to know about—to see what could go wrong, and to realize how important it is to finance your show and set down limits. I don’t know why it was covered in the
Times
or the press in general in that way. I don’t know why people were so taken with it. There have been all kinds of abominable productions that should never have opened. There’s something people want to know about Marie Antoinette going to the guillotine. They like to watch that kind of thing.

David Finkle:
Spider-Man
is a part of the story of contemporary criticism. It was a very big show. Money seemed to be no object to the director, so we kept hearing about how much was being spent. If Julie Taymor had her way, if the producers had said, “Okay, put on the show you want, and we’ll only open it when you’re finished with it,” she’d probably still be working on it today. It challenged critics in a way that was kind of silly. It put us in a position of saying, “How long will you keep throwing good money at something that sounds so bad? We’re going to come. You’ve fiddled enough with this thing.” Jeremy Gerard went first. Then Linda Winer went. And then Julie Taymor was fired. At that point, I felt I should see her version because I would have to write about the show when it finally did open, and the reader would want to know how the final version compared to her version. I paid for a ticket, but the real hardship was sitting through it twice.

Michael Schulman:
The preview period serves a purpose. It takes a couple weeks for a live performance to get its sea legs. I know some TV critics who refuse to review the pilot episode of a new television show. At the same time, it’s like a deal that critics have with the producers to wait until the preview period has passed, and in exchange, they’ll get free tickets for the dates that the producers preordain, when the show has reached some kind of finishing point. The whole thing with
Spider-Man
was how it was in previews for months and people were paying full price for tickets. It was a very unique circumstance where the deal was betrayed or abused. The critics felt they had an ethical obligation to go and review what people were paying to see.

Jesse Oxfeld:
The producers of
Spider-Man
were asking people to spend a lot of money on tickets for months and months. If you’re a reviewer, you owe an obligation to your readers to tell them whether this is something they should or should not be spending money on and why. The whole existence of
Spider-Man
was built around a series of incredibly marketable names, from Spider-Man to Bono. It was specifically designed so that people would want to see it regardless of what Ben Brantley or Robert Feldberg or Jesse Oxfeld might say about it. We live in a market-driven society. Everything that happens around us is based on carefully-calculated marketing campaigns. What color shirts they have at the Gap this week, or what they’re putting on the menu at the Olive Garden, has all been focus-grouped and tested in terms of how to get people to spend their money.

Peter Marks:
The theater critics were symbolically saying, “There are only so many times you can manipulate the system before we have to take things into our own hands.”
Spider-Man
was extreme in every way: the length of the preview process, the problems with the show, the amount of money spent, the degree of publicity. They were all outsized. Was it the right decision to go in and review it when we did? In retrospect, I don’t know. At the time, it felt right. It went to the question of who really determines when a show is ready. There are people paying $150 dollars to see the show, so why shouldn’t we be there?

Jason Zinoman:
To me, the biggest thing
Spider-Man
revealed was that we have this system where there are press performances for critics. There’s this sense that a long preview period is set in stone, but I don’t think that’s true. There’s no reason why shows couldn’t rehearse before they start charging a hundred dollars for tickets. I thought the press did a really good thing. It was an instance where the producers were abusing the preview period. We needed to react by breaking the embargo and doing what journalists need to do. People were talking about the show. It was important, and it needed to be covered.

Jeremy Gerard:
Going back to my days at
Variety
, I have always felt that theater critics allow themselves to be too manipulated by producers. Tryout periods go on too long. It’s ridiculous for shows that have already been done at other places to have extended preview periods. I’ve had a longstanding feud with the way the Public Theater is run because they pick and choose what shows critics can be invited to, especially with their Under the Radar Festival. They bring in shows that have been reviewed all over the place, and then they say that the New York critics can’t review some of them. Last summer, I reviewed the musical
The Bridges of Madison County
at the Williamstown Theatre Festival—much to the horror of the Williamstown people, who had made agreements with the creative staff that no New York reviewers would be allowed to see it. I think that’s preposterous, particularly at a time when the notion of national critics and local critics has become completely blurred by the Internet. There’s no other area of journalism where we let the subjects of our pieces tell us what we can or cannot write about.

MATT WINDMAN
: Did the
Spider-Man
ordeal demonstrate the power or powerlessness of theater critics today?

Michael Schulman:
I think it showed the power of the theater critics. The show survived longer than people thought it would, but the reaction of the critics was very negative, and that undeniably had an impact.

Adam Feldman:
Spider-Man
is a hard case to extrapolate any general conclusions from. It was vastly more expensive than anything that came before it. It had an unusual combination of very high-powered creative forces and an inexperienced producer. The scale of everything made it all wilder than it might have been otherwise.

David Cote:
It got some of the worst reviews in history. But if you were to go to the Foxwoods Theatre and ask anybody in the theater about the reviews, they would have looked at you blankly. They don’t read reviews. They see a brand—Spider-Man—and they go, like sheep. So the complete impotence of the critics to have an effect on the show was kind of depressing.

Marilyn Stasio:
I don’t think the theater critics killed
Spider-Man
. It was the press in general. You’re confusing theater reviewing with backstage gossip. A lot of what passes for theater criticism these days is really gossip.

Eric Grode:
With
Spider-Man
, it’s important to separate the critical response from the media response. That all gets lumped together in a lot of people’s minds. There was a
New Yorker
cover on
Spider-Man
. David Letterman dealt with
Spider-Man
. Those things weren’t reviews. That was just the media having its 15 minutes.

Gordon Cox:
It showed the threat of the increasing irrelevance of theater critics, which is why so many critics went to review the show early—to take a stand against a production that had been perceived as pushing them around. I’m not entirely certain they were proved to be irrelevant because the show eventually did close. There was a match-up between the reviews and word-of-mouth that eventually led the production to peter out. It didn’t turn into the next
Wicked
.

Alexis Soloski:
Criticism isn’t helpful for some events. You can write a review of a Barnum and Bailey circus, but people aren’t going to decide whether or not to see it because you said it’s good or bad. They’re going to see it because there are lions and tigers and a motorcycle in a flaming wheel, and that’s fine.

Peter Marks:
What did it mean when tourists kept seeing it, even after the critics said it was terrible? Spider-Man is a superhero. You can’t beat him, you know? A high-flying superhero trumps reviews. In any event, critics shouldn’t decide when shows open and close. Why should that be our responsibility? Classical music critics don’t close orchestras. Why is there a business component to a theater critic’s job? Why is it left to theater critics to have a commercial responsibility? No one expects movie critics to sell tickets. Nobody expects a dance critic to keep a ballet company going. People talk about the power of this or that theater critic to sell a show or close a show, but no one talks about a music critic being able to cancel a concert.

Helen Shaw:
Spider-Man
pointed to a cultural shift on Broadway that has long since happened. In the 1950s, 1960s, and somewhat in the 1970s, Broadway had that beautiful appeal to post–G.I. Bill Middle America, which wanted something highbrow-to-middlebrow to make them feel like they were a part of the national culture. That culture is now gone—and it’s gone forever. What’s on Broadway now isn’t a national conversation.
Spider-Man
did become part of that pop culture conversation. It wasn’t about the powerlessness of theater critics. It was about the fact that there is still something marvelous and exciting about a flop, about Broadway, and about backstage chaos.

Ben Brantley:
If you look back,
Abie’s Irish Rose
was despised by every critic who reviewed it. It was the laughing stock of the critics, but it went on to become one of the longest-running plays in Broadway history. A lot of the musicals that have endured forever like
Cats
were not much loved by the critics. There are always things that slide under the radar.
Spider-Man
was big. It was something unto itself. It just kept running. And at the same time, we were writing so many stories publicizing the show. It became news. Going to see it was like going to a news event.

Steven Suskin:
Family musicals and extravaganza musicals are pitched to a different, broader audience that doesn’t usually go to the theater. With those shows, it doesn’t matter what the critics say. Those people don’t read the critics to decide what to see. If you look back at the reviews for
Les Miz
and
Phantom
, you’ll see that the reviews were not good. Is it a bad thing that a show with bad reviews is such a hit? As for
Spider-Man
, most of us simply said that it wasn’t any good, and the ultimate audience response was not favorable enough to prevent it from failing.

Peter Filichia:
In 1966, there was a musical about Superman:
It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman
. Stanley Kauffmann, the
Times
theater critic at the time, called it the best musical of the season. One of the best things about the musical was its lyrics. There’s a lyric where Lois Lane wonders if she should forget about Superman because he’s never going to marry her. She says she should look for “a homey type who’ll stay around/a guy with both feet on the ground.” Needless to say, that’s funny because Superman flies. There’s no lyric in
Spider-Man
that can touch that. Its lyrics are generic.
Spider-Man
was not called the best musical of the season by the
Times
. In fact, I think it was called one of the worst musicals of all time, and yet it ran for three years, while
Superman
, with the blessing of the
Times
, ran only 129 performances. The power of the theater critic is not what it once was.

Elisabeth Vincentelli:
Spider-Man
wasn’t about the critics at all. The critics were completely irrelevant. I recently read the book by Glen Berger (the show’s book-writer) about what happened behind the scenes at
Spider-Man
, and the critics play very little part in the book. There’s a mention of when the critics went in to review it, but it’s kind of irrelevant. The reviews were largely irrelevant.
Spider-Man
was its own thing. It was such an oddity in so many ways that it can’t be used as a lesson for anything.