Allan Jefferys

On being a Critic

By Allan Jefferys




Thank you for inviting me to your class, today. My only regret is that I cannot be here in person. I’d like to meet you, I’d like to see you face to face and it’s been too long since I have been in beautiful Utah.

I have been asked to speak with you about being a theatre critic. Let’s start with what a critic is and how powerful an influence he or she commands.
Mark Twain called being a critic the most degraded of all trades. John Mason Brown said it was like trying to tattoo soap bubbles. Those who have felt the sting of adverse criticism would choose even tougher words. Some claim never to listen to the critic; others contend critics don’t bother them. Maybe not. But it doesn’t take a thin skin to cringe when something you have worked hard to perfect meets with less than approval. I have been on the receiving end of poor reviews and readily admit it hurts. One I remember occurred during a run of The Merchant of Venice with the late John Carradine as Shylock. I was playing the part of Lorenzo. When the reviews came out, one critic commented favorably on all the actors until he got to me. All he said about me was: Allan Jefferys spoke very distinctly. It could have been worse, but being damned with faint praise still makes me wince.

Can a critic destroy a career? No. Those with determination and talent will always bounce back and, sometimes, are so angered by stinging words that they go to even greater heights than they might otherwise scale.

Can a critic destroy a Broadway show? Yes. Especially if that critic writes for the New York Times and his opinion is shared by a few other critics. There have been occasions when the Times was alone in a bad review and the total opinion of other critics outweighed the giant. But that is rare.

Can a critic create a hit? No. Critics can create a line at the box office for a few days but, ultimately, the only thing that creates a smash success is word of mouth. Not advertising, not press agent hoopla, not appearing on Letterman or Leno, but word of mouth. You see a show and tell your friends and they tell theirs.

What qualifies anyone to call himself a critic? Good question. Maybe I was thinking of that when the major producers of Broadway decided to check out the qualifications of those of us who broadcast our reviews. In the beginning, there were seven important New York newspapers but they began to drop off until only three that counted were still around. Suddenly the TV based theatre critic was developing some stature.

The theatre invited us all to be on a Broadway stage in front of a full house of theatre professionals. The producers sat up stage. When it was my turn, I walked down stage and said, “I’m flattered that after seven years of doing this, you have decided to ask me if I know what I’m doing. Well, here are my qualifications: I was not a very good actor, wrote one play which wasn’t worth producing, I’m nearsighted and slightly hard of hearing. If you don’t think those are the qualities of a critic, just ask the producers seated behind me.” That broke up the house and ended any more questions.

I was a critic for almost nine years—writing close to a thousand reviews of Broadway shows, Off-Broadway shows plus an occasional movie. It was fun, frustrating and challenging. In those days you always attended opening nights. The critics sat on the aisle so they could make a mad dash to the exit when the final curtain fell…hailing the nearest taxicab and racing back to the newsroom of the newspaper or broadcast station to face a deadline of less than an hour to come up with an opinion phrased in some semblance of coherent prose.

How do you become a critic? Most of us fall into it. The editor turns to a reporter and says, “There’s a show opening tomorrow night. Go cover it.” Sometimes that opens the door for a giant like Brooks Atkinson or Walter Kerr. Sometimes the result is a disservice to playwrights, actors and directors. The editor then finds somebody else, but it’s too late for the play that suffered from an inept reviewer.

In my case, I was asked by a brand new network radio program called “Flair” to review Broadway musicals. They picked me because I was doing a two-hour per night program centering on music of Broadway and Hollywood. I tried to get on the opening night list for musicals only. No dice, said the Shuberts (who controlled the opening night list.) Either you cover everything or nothing. So I began to attend all opening nights. Nobody paid a lot of attention until a newspaper strike brought critics for broadcasting front and center. All of a sudden I was for real.

After I had done it for several years for radio, television beckoned But the offer came with a couple of strings attached: I would wear a tuxedo to every opening and deliver the review into a waiting motion picture camera just as the audience filed out of the theatre. I protested vehemently. Tuxedos are okay, I explained for big musicals, but I’ll look like an idiot at some drab off-Broadway house where rats running up and down the aisle are not uncommon. As for delivering a review minutes after the curtain came down, no one can do that.

“Do you want the job or not?” the powers-that-be asked.

I wanted it and took it. I learned to wait until the final moments of the play. Then, in the glow of stage lighting, I would begin to scribble into a page of a stenographer’s notebook. A full page in long hand, took about a minute to read. People used to ask how I could do it and still pay attention to the show. I explained that it was like kids doing homework in front of the TV set. One eye and ear on the show and one eye and ear on the homework. It never got easier but it could be done.

There were some hazards: As soon as the theatre crowd discovered what I was up to, they would gather around the camera and glower. It was hard to call a show a turkey when you could see the person who wrote it staring at you with hope in his eyes. One woman producer told me she came close to slugging me with her purse. But when the rest of the reviews came in she admitted that I was only the first to pan the show.

This was before video tape. The crew filmed the review and passed the magazine of film to a motorcycle courier who sped it to the studio lab. It took only nine minutes to develop a negative. On air, the technicians reversed polarity and the negative became a positive. When TV went to color, that technique ended. Color took an hour to develop and I was allowed back in the studio to do the review live. The extra forty minutes of thinking time seemed like a luxury.

This was the Sixties—a good decade for New York theatre. We were offered seventy or eighty NEW shows a year. Not so in this millennium. They tell me critics don’t even go to opening nights —preferring to attend previews. If true, they miss the exhilaration of watching sophisticated grownups stand up and cheer and they miss that joyous moment when you realize you’re sitting in on the beginning a true classic. We made it a point not to listen to any rumors about the upcoming show and it was an unwritten rule that theatre critics never discussed the show they were covering that night. So when Carol Channing stepped down those stairs in Hello Dolly, it was a brand new surprise to all of us and most of us forgot about trying to look wise and unemotional. We stood up and cheered with the rest of the audience. We did the same thing when Angela Lansbury opened a new window in Mame. Why Hollywood did not use those two stars in the movie version is beyond me. Audiences missed out on seeing the performance theatre audiences cheered. Don’t say box office. The film versions flopped.

Hello Dolly, Mame, Man of La Mancha, Fiddler on the Roof, She Loves Me. The list goes on and on of the musicals in those years. Was this the Golden Age of Broadway? In retrospect, I’d have to say no, not quite. That honor has to go to the Forties and Fifties…the era of Oklahoma! South Pacific, Carousel, My Fair Lady and West Side Story. The Twenties and Thirties had great music with the Gershwins, Harold Arlen, Cole Porter and Jerome Kern but the shows of that period lacked the tight integration of dance, music and book that developed in the Forties.
What about today? A quick glance at the list of shows running will disclose as many as eight or nine revivals. The Music Man, Chicago, Kiss Me Kate, Annie Get Your Gun. All shows from years gone by. It always strikes me as a little silly when they give a TONY award to a show that almost came pre-packaged. Even so, I believe in revivals. People who weren’t born when South Pacific was first presented deserve a chance to rejoice as we did in the Forties.

There was a time when revivals did not turn up on Broadway. Stock, regional theatre and festivals were the milieus for old shows. A case in point: Each summer for several years New York’s Lincoln Center ran an eight week festival featuring a twenty year old musical . When it was Carousel’s turn, I attended opening night with some trepidation. Carousel was one of my long time favorites. I had seen it shortly after it opened. What now? Would it be like visiting a childhood home only to discover the house had shrunk from what you remembered? Not to worry. Carousel (with its original star, John Raitt) proved every bit as captivating to me in 1965 as in 1945. And it also captivated my son and daughter who saw it for the first time. All the critics gave the show rave notices. I wrote Richard Rodgers a note begging him to take it downtown to an established Broadway house and extend the run. He wrote back that revivals never made it. What has changed to make them acceptable now? Possibly because the Rodgers and Hammersteins, Irving Berlins and Cole Porters have not been replaced.

The first Broadway musical I ever saw was a road company production of Rio Rita. I was five years old and I was hooked. Theatre became an all-consuming addiction—a habit that lasted well over a half century. I did not see a New York production until after World War II but, as a pilot during that war, I could eagerly pursue my love in London, Paris, Sydney and on Air Force bases around the globe. To a naïve youngster these were heady experiences. I have seen many Hamlets (and even been in one production) but nothing has ever equaled the wondrous performance of John Gielgud in wartime London’s West End.

When the war ended, returning GI’s were welcomed with open helping hands. If Broadway was the goal, the USO and the American Theatre Wing went out of their way to teach and open doors. New York was a busy bustling city— a hurry-up city filled with hurry-up youth racing after life’s brass ring.

I was one of them. When the war ended, I packed my silver wings away and headed for New York to pursue the dream. The first show I saw was Oklahoma! — followed quickly by Carousel. I never met Stephen Sondheim but might have had I accepted the offer to join the singing chorus of Allegro. I opted instead to go into summer stock as an actor.

New York in the Forties was the Mecca for all aspiring artists, writers, actors, singers and dancers. It was a giant magnet that pulled and tugged the young men and women who wanted to conquer and dared to risk being slapped down. This is where it happened; the giants youth challenged were the best of the best. Four decades later a song would tell the world that if you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere. This was true. It was a city created by Merlin—filled with romance, excitement, challenge, and hope. New York had it all, including a heart that belied its mask of cynicism.

The sidewalks of the city were meant for more than walking— they were meant for skipping. A stroll down side streets west of Central Park offered a smorgasbord of talented sounds drifting from open windows: Violins and sopranos, baritones and flutes, pianos and horns all exercising, all practicing scales, all pointed toward Carnegie Hall—all pointed toward Broadway.

When broadcasting doors opened wider than Shubert Alley’s portals, I left the city…Gordon Jenkins Manhattan Tower ringing in my ears with its promise that I would return.

Stints in Atlantic City and Washington, D.C. still offered theatre and trips to Broadway were not all that infrequent. I could still get my theatre “fixes.” In time, I did return to my towers of Manhattan. And finally, as a critic in the Sixties, got deeply involved with my love.

The critics of that period were a diverse group. Some were aging writers who still remembered covering shows in the Twenties. One critic’s wife never tired of teasing her husband for panning the original 1927 production of SHOW BOAT. Some were neophytes. Some wrote for the seven major newspapers…some did time-constrained reviews for TV.

We seldom disagreed about clear-cut flops or hits but the vast number of “in-between” productions brought forth different points of view. I recall a good friend and fine critic, Richard Watts, who wrote for the New York Herald Tribune and later the New York Post. Dick told me one night that it was amazing how he and I used the same “peg” to review a play—how we spotted the same talented ingénue in the background and came to almost identical conclusions. Then he added, “That’s for a straight play. When it comes to a musical, you and I write like we were in different theatres or even different cities.”

I had to admit that I was an easy mark for most musicals. I simply liked them. A few critics, (like some news anchor people of today) considered themselves experts in every field. I parted company with them. I described the plot and theme but did not comment on theme . . . preferring to dwell on how well the show was written , directed and acted. In one season, you were offered plays centering on Catholicism, Judaism, Martin Luther, the holocaust, gay themes, broken families, adultery and murder. Who can pretend to be knowledgeable about each of those subjects?

There was a red flag or two even then. Each year brought fewer openings to Broadway. Were these clues to an increasing decline to oblivion? There were always rumblings but the “invalid” got up an walked so often that most of us thought the Cassandras were simply crying wolf The theatre would always be there. Broadway would always be king. But “always” is not always always.

Robert Anderson is a superb playwright who has given us I Never Sang for My Father, Tea and Sympathy for the theatre plus screenplays for the Sand Pebbles and the Nun’s Story. He once wrote: you can make a killing in the theatre but not a living. True. But you can make a life in the theatre, even if it means driving a taxi or going into TV. I have never met anyone who insisted on staying with this elusive mistress who regretted it.

The late author and playwright, Howard Teichmann and I once sat in an empty theatre, watching actors audition for a new play of his. The brick firewall and work light appeared to be out of a scene from Stage Door. Teichmann stared at it for a moment and then turned to me to say, “It gets you doesn’t it?” I agreed. He chuckled and added, “ The theatre can be a cruel and tough adversary. It’s almost impossible to break through its guard dogs. Which is good. Otherwise everyone would be in it, because is so much fun.”

It gets tougher each year. The St. James theatre in New York hold the same 1600 seats it held in 1943 when Oklahoma! opened. That show cost $75,000 to produce and the best seats sold for under five dollars. Today that show would probably cost forty times that much which means the seats should sell for $200. Tickets are higher but not that high. The bottom line, of course, is that fewer people are willing to take a chance on new talent.

Where are the new plays and comedies and musicals? In an era of computer generated graphics, is it necessary to have the stage play host to helicopters and falling chandeliers and cats going to heaven on mechanical elevators? Consider the joy of I Do, I Do. Two people, one four-poster bed and a bunch of props (hidden carefully under the bed.) All it took for a fabulous evening in the theatre. Of course it did not hurt that the two people were Mary Martin and Robert Preston.

Where are the producers? I don’t mean that cast of thousands who run onto the stage to share a Tony. I mean the one-man entrepreneur with the courage to do it all. I mean the David Merricks and Alexander Cohens and Hal Princes and all of the others who loved theatre enough to take an all out risk. Why must it cost so much to mount a play? Actors and stagehands and musicians are not getting rich.

Much of what is done today is feast or famine. Blockbuster or nothing seems to be the cry. There is no room, no time for nurturing, guiding, encouraging or growing. Bring on the roller rink, the doomed steamship, the juggernaut say the money people. Forget small comedies and, above all, let us not produce drama. Drama is for the Greeks, for yesteryear. I know one of America’s great playwrights who has written me that he cannot get a play read, let alone produced.

Is it really an impossible dream to wish for a renaissance of young, feisty creative writers, composers and lyricists? Revivals are necessary to introduce new generations to great works. But the revivals belong in regional theatre, City Center or Lincoln Center festivals or community theatre. Revivals should be produced at affordable prices for retired theatre buffs and young students. Revivals should offer an opportunity for performers to play parts they could never get the chance to play on Broadway. Revivals have their place but not as the core of Broadway.

I mentioned Harold Prince a moment ago. It is encouraging to read that he and his children are trying to save the new American musical. They are committing time, money and (most of all) great expertise to nurture Theatre’s new composers. This does not surprise me. I remember Harold Prince to be, not only a creative genius as a director, but as a caring human being.

I remain convinced that the talent is out there. Lyricists exist who don’t subsist on rap; Composers are available who can blend harmony and melody into a memorable score. Playwrights, actors, directors, singers, dancers, choreographers are waiting, not in the wings, but just outside the stage door. I pray that somebody lets them in. Thank you for inviting me.

Copyright© 2000 Allan Jefferys All Rights Reserved

lecture to a theatre class in Weber State Univ. Utah