CMU School of Drama


Friday, March 27, 2015

The Trends of Ten Years of New York Times Broadway Reviews. An infographic.

The Producer's Perspective: What’s cool about creating stuff, is that sometimes you make something for one specific purpose . . . and then you find it has a whole other purpose later on.

It happens in the pharmaceutical industry all the time. Did you know Viagra was originally made to treat hypertension? Imagine the surprise when they conducted those clinical trials!

This phenomenon just happened to me. And I think you’re going to get as excited as those Viagra patients when you see the results.

6 comments:

Alex E. S. Reed said...

Overall this infographic was fairly interesting to look at, but not worth much else. The fundamental flaw I seem to have with their data is they have no standard by which they’re basing this data off of. These two men are fairly similar in their views, one may be slightly more harsh than the other, however, since they were both in the same position and one wrote fewer reviews than the other combining their reports creates skewed data. Secondarily, there seems to be two categories into which the different graphs can be sorted: those whose difference is too small to be statistically significant yet for some reason still used as relevant data, and there are possibly significant but skewed by the numbers. Clarification: they took 70% of Brantly’s review and 30% of Isherwood’s this changes the percentages fairly significantly, a simple sample of each author would have been more accurate. I’m glad he recognized the possibilities in the data he had, I wish he had hired a statistician.

Unknown said...

This is article is interesting in some aspects but not very useful in others. First, from the producing aspect, this article gives you a big hint in where to find the intersection of a commercial and critical success! You can find the commercial success based on numbers alone, but if you are also interesting in critical success you can compare to this chart. However as Alex comments this infographic is somewhat biased and unreliable. But this is not the only flaw with it. As the popularity of infographics rises and rises, it becomes easy to differentiate the good from the bad, ones that had a design and marketing team behind them and ones that did not. This was not easy to read from top to bottom, the colors were somewhat difficult to look at. Additionally, the infographic was very repetitive in terms of color, images, and more making it seem like all of the information that was being presented was related, or worse the same.

Sasha Mieles said...

Honestly, the writing in this article is very odd and has no reason to be so sexual. There’s nothing sexual about critics and reviews about The New York Times. Also, why does anyone care about what these two people think about theater in New York? I’ve never even heard of these two critics, so why is this valuable to anyone? There are other critics in the world, and more than just The New York Times reviews Broadway shows. This data is not “hot” and it means absolutely nothing to the theater world. What matters in this world are ticket sales, not what critics think about plays versus musicals. It has been proved countless times that ticket sales go up because people tell their friends to go see shows rather than critic’s reviews telling people what they think of the show. Also, people have very differing opinions of shows and so what I may love, a critic may hate. Why should I listen to what a critic says, then?

Kimberly McSweeney said...

How could this data be at all valuable when the majority of review come from Brantley? This source needs a severe remodeling and needs to focus more on the works of Brantley, because frankly, Isherwood has almost no weight within the statistics with the levels at 70 to 30. Also, does the New York Times only have two theatrical reviewers? And if they somehow only have two, why does one write twice as many reviews as the other? I don’t think these statistics hold any weight in the theatrical works of Broadway, and I’m pretty sure every knows that critics prefer plays over musicals and that everyone is still confused at seeing disney on stage. Also, the percentage of shows they liked is under 50%, while the combined negative and wishy-washy reviews outweigh the positive review by solidly 5% on either end. I’m not sure what was trying to be achieved with this research, but they definitely needed more focus in their end goal.

Kat Landry said...

I have to say, I'm not very impressed with this infographic. For starters, I can't say the data pool for this study is even close to large enough. The reviews of two critics are not nearly as valuable as the reviews of perhaps several critics from several different papers. What do we gain from this infographic? The opinions of two men in New York. This means nothing to me and draws no conclusions for theatre at all. I'm honestly confused about why Davenport would use this as a study point at all; even if this were done well, what do the opinions of critics tell us? Their opinions? I wish that this were looking at something a little more valuable, like ticket sales or what groups of people are more frequently attending shows. Give me something more!!

Thomas Ford said...

This was a really cool infographic. I try to always click on the infographic articles on the green page because they tend to be pretty cool and I really appreciate the cross between graphic design and data (I really like random data streams). The last infographic I looked for comments was a bust, but I really enjoyed this one. It looked good, and the information it contained was really interesting. I’ve only read a couple of times theatre reviews, and a lot of the time even if they have an opinion it’s really subtle if it’s negative. I find that kind of annoying, but I also appreciate how they try to put a positive spin on everything. I didn’t realize that it was only two guys who did all the reviews, and I find that kind of interesting. I wonder if they hang out together, and I wonder how they determine who reviews what. Also, I wonder why The Times doesn’t get a more diverse group of critics, like someone who’s, I don’t know, a woman. Although, I did find it interesting that the critics liked female directors more than male directors (although that’s probably due in part to the fact that way more shows are directed by men, which is a problem that needs to change and hopefully will).