Theater

The perils of reviewing — and being reviewed

There’s a fun little tempest in the literary teapot going around right now, with a self-published author flaming reviewers in a blog’s comments section. Not only is this a bad strategy, but the author’s English is so bad that you wonder how she could write a whole book if she can’t even string up coherent comments. Anyway, the whole thing reminded me of an old encounter with someone who objected to my take on his show’s cast album. Now, this is a show that was critically well received in New York (hint: it’s still playing), and my review was definitely in the negative minority — and the criticism was quite mild at that. Yet this wasn’t good enough for the author, who violently engaged me by email. His main argument: If everybody else loved the show, that meant I must be wrong. Well okay then!

The thing with reviewing is that it’s not a science so a good part is, by definition, subjective. More important is that I enjoy discussing a review I wrote with its subject. It can be constructive for both parties: I get a better handle on what they were aiming for (even if I still don’t think the end result worked) and maybe, just maybe the artist can get something useful out of the conversation. Is there any doubt that the reviews of “Spider-Man” that came out early February directly led to the show being radically retooled? Only time will tell if the changes actually help improve the show — see you in June!