Who Are The Best Contemporary Theatre Critics?

Over the last few weeks, I've been slowly making my way through HOT SEAT, an anthology of Frank Rich's reviews for the NYT. I wasn't paying attention to theatre during the reign of "the butcher of Broadway", so I missed most of this stuff. What strikes me while reading his work, especially in comparison to the Times' current roster of theatre critics, is his ability to place each production in context of both the theatrical canon and larger arts landscape, as well as in comparison to past productions or attempts to address similar subjects or adapt similar material.

The only performing arts critics I can think of at the moment who can match Rich's breadth of knowledge and depth of insight are Alastair Macauley, a dance critic for the New York Times and Anne Midgette who covers classical music for the Washington Post. Macauley has the ability to convey the "subtext of movement" -- what is being expressed by a body behind the sequence of movements that constitute choreography -- in the same way a good literary critic can convey what's happening between the lines. Midgette's handle on the contemporary classical landscape matches Rich in breadth. On her blog at the Post ("The Classical Beat"), she approaches classical music from several insightful angles, including economic/financial (music as industry) and political, in addition to artistic.

So my question is: who do you think is writing the best contemporary criticism in the theatre world today? (I'm honestly looking for leads here, as I haven't really read much of today's critics outside the major American newspapers.) Whose writing have you found accurately conveys what a certain piece of theatre is like? Who is the most entertaining or delightful to read, or the most thought-provoking? On the other side of the coin, whose writing DON'T you like, and why?

Updated On: 2/14/12 at 03:38 PM

"ability to place each production in context in both the theatrical canon and larger arts landscape, as well as in comparison to past productions or attempts to address similar subjects or adapt similar material."

Michael Feingold, who also often wittily places his subjects of review in the context of our social and political climate. His writing is also as clear, accessible and unpretentious as it is erudite and perceptive (which can't always be said for his colleagues at The Voice).

Michael Feingold, Village Voice.

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@AfterEight: interesting. I actually read some of George Jean Nathan's criticism in college and recently found his review of DEATH OF A SALESMAN online (see link below). It's a brilliant piece of writing. I get the sense that reading reviews like that would transform the experience of watching a play and make you notice things about the theatre that you wouldn't even know to pay attention to. He addresses things like dramaturgical scale and balance, emotional schematics, and also more general questions about the playwright's motivations and tactics. He seems like theatre criticism's equivalent to Edward Denby in the dance world. Though, I have to admit, I find Denby much more readable: he's less turgid, less busy.

But it strikes me that a review like this would never be published today, and that it's not really the fault of writers but of drastically changed market forces. I'm not sure who the audience for Nathan's reviews were in his time, but they must have been a very different breed of reader than those who read the New York Times Arts section today: better versed in poetry, literary theory and philosophy, less harried by the daily grind. Nowadays, taking theatre (of all things) too seriously -- regarding it as little more than contrivance, luxury, frivolous (if sometimes quite moving) diversion -- is seen, at best, as quaint, and, at worst, as outright pretentious. I'm not saying I agree with this sentiment, but most people today would regard this level of criticism as effete and remote (if not irrelevant). There are still places for criticism in specialized journals and even in the mainstream, but not at the level of Nathan's rather lofty register.

In other words, what we expect and want of our theatre critics seems to have changed substantially. It's interesting that the present tenor of criticism has actually swung back to the time before the "academification" and "theorization" of art that developed towards the beginning of the 20th century. (Blame the French.) I have a volume of reviews of opera and symphony music by the 18th-19th century German Romantic E.T.A. Hoffmann. His review of a performance of Mozart's DON GIOVANNI is much more accessible, much less laden with intellectualization than Nathan's review written a century and a half later.




Review of Death of a Salesman

Updated On: 2/14/12 at 07:52 PM

" I'm not sure who the audience for Nathan's reviews were in his time,"

The theatregoing public of the day.

" but they must have been a very different breed of reader than those who read the New York Times Arts section today: better versed in poetry, literary theory and philosophy, less harried by the daily grind."


Poetry, no doubt. Literary theory and philosophy? Perhaps not at all. Less harried by the daily grind? I doubt it. Life was tough then, too. And really, did you need to know literary theory or philosophy to understand or appreciate Star and Garter, Follow the Girls, or even, Death of a Salesman? But certainly the general public was far more literate, because one was expected to be. Nowadays, literature is Stephen King, and cultured means knowing Lady Gaga's latest hit. I have to laugh when I hear a lyric like Cole Porter's in Out of This World: "When I was prettier, when I was prettier, in bed I did not read Whittier." How many of today's college grads would get the reference, or the joke?

Nathan was a brilliant writer and citic, with a breadth of knowledge that was astounding. But I don't find him to be some remote, effete academic. He can guffaw with the best of them, and if you read his annual theatre compilations of the 40's, you see that he can enjoy comic burlesque routines as well as high art.
And he does not lavish the same sort of analysis on plays like With a Silk Thread and Mr. Adam as he does on Death of a Salesman. Nor did one need to be versed in poetry or literary theory to understand and enjoy his reviews, either.

And let's not forget his contemporary critics, and those in the pre- Frank Rich era. They are miles below Nathan, but miles above what we have today. Even if they weren't the greatest stylists, they approached the theatre with something wholly absent today: dignity. You would not find any of them writing a "witticism" like "Grease is the turd." But hey, that's what passes for wit today in this crass, tawdry age. Autres temps, autres moeurs. Alas!

me!

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I am very partial to Frank Rich's work, though I know he doesn't write (much?) theater criticism anymore. I also think Jeremy McCarter is really talented, but I thought I heard he had segued into another area of journalism, too?

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