Thursday, August 25, 2011
Theater Talkback: The Good That Comes From Bad Reviews
NYTimes.com: Last week, a neighbor from down the hall stopped me in front of our building to say that two years ago I panned his play. It was actually worse than that. I walked out of his play and then wrote a blog post about exiting early, saying that at the point I left it seemed like maybe the worst show I had ever seen at the New York International Fringe Festival. It was not a very neighborly thing to do.
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I understand that some scathing reviews can really be detrimental to a show and or its theatre. Now that is too bad, and sometimes it could have a snowball effect, but that is the real world. Almost any person with any amount of success has been reamed by someone at some point. This notion that critics might be becoming too harsh is ridiculous. When people start worrying about other things besides the facts about the show or person or whatever, then the integrity of the review is lost. If critics would start padding their reviews how would you know when you really did do a good job or better yet the worth of an actual good review? They talk about the passion of good critics, and they are right something like the arts has too much passion to be solely objective and thats great, thats why we all have different opinions about things. Also (hopefully) for every bad review out there, there is someone who enjoyed it. Or at the very least you gleaned something positive from the experience, even if its only things that you would never do again. Without harsh criticism how will we improve and make better art?
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