Anonymous Testimonials

“It’s hard to put an exact number on it. That said, the one show that (MAJOR CRITIC) really hated – a world premiere – sold less overall than many shows sell in their first week. And it was directed by (FAMOUS THEATRE DIRECTOR) fresh off of (CRITICALLY CELEBRATED BROADWAY SUCCESS). It had lots of interest and then after the review, no one came.”
— Regional Artistic Director

“Anecdotally it makes the difference between if we extend or not.
Anecdotally it makes a $40-60K difference in ticket sales.
A bad review stops sales cold.
Very hard to overcome a bad review no matter how good the show is.”
—Regional Artistic Director

“A review can absolutely make or break a show’s bottom line in ticket sales. You can see that over & over again. And it makes me so angry because gorgeous, important plays can get buried if they get a bad review in the NYTimes, and then never get picked up for a wider life.

When I directed at The Public, it was explained to me that part of the month-long preview process was to just let plays live & draw word of mouth before the critics came and dragged the project.” —Director and Artistic Director

“Reviewer’s overall aren’t huge fans of my work. I have so many more bad reviews than good ones. The biggest issue is lack of overall education about Indigenous peoples on the part of the reviewer and their expectation that artists are supposed to fill that gap. I have a play that states clearly in the program that it is about a fictional tribe, yet the review dinged my play because the reviewer said he left feeling like he has not learned enough. I did a disservice to the tribe the play is about by not teaching enough about their culture.”
— Playwright  

“As a woman, it’s fascinating to me how much reviewers place credit on a male director. I have a play with extensive physical action written into the script. It is action that moves the story forward in specific ways. One prominent national reviewer credited the male director for saving my play by coming up with these action scenes.”
—Playwright

“In SF, ticket sales were definitely influenced by the “little man” icon in the SF Chronicle. Glowing reviews helped bolster sales, so-so reviews to negative reviews definitely suppressed sales, and would make it hard to reach our ticket sale goals on a given show.”
—Regional Artistic Director

“I’d say that it negatively impacts the life cycle of the work because it’s less marketable beyond the region in which it was reviewed.”
—Regional Managing Director 

“The unofficial metric at (MIDSIZE REGIONAL THEATRE) was that each level of the “standing, sitting, sleeping man” was 20k per position.”
—Regional Artistic Director 

“IN NEW YORK,  A Critics Pick in the Times is the difference between a 3 week run and a multi-year tour. So, hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s kind of a one pony town.”
—Director and Producer 

“ I mean god in London it seems like there are 100 major papers that print reviews. You’re going to get people who liked it, people who hated it, and people and people who don’t care. But thank God there’s so many options. In the US there’s only one paper. One opinion is never a good system.” 
—Playwright

“ I don’t know a single colleague or any other artists in theatre that have ever read a bad review and changed anything about what they do. Any thought that harsh public criticism is “helpful” or “productive” or some sort of lesson to the creatives is not reality. But that’s part of the justification, that they will change the plays or the acting. But a critic will never affect an artist, certainly not by insulting them.” 
—Playwright 

“There used to be betting at the Humana Festival among visiting producers and agents on which play would be the hit with the crowd and which one Isherwood would destroy in the NYT. Because we all knew that he would give one a rave and hate violently on all the others plays. It was the same every year. You got paid out twice if the one he destroyed was the crowd favorite. There was no recourse to explain how much an audience had enjoyed it. Didn’t matter. It was dead.”
—Regional Theater Literary Manager

“My reviews were always so sexist it was truly depressing. It’s why I ultimately moved away from theater. I found I could actually tell a more complete female story in television than I ever could on stage, paradoxically.”
—Playwright, TV writer, Producer

“Reviewers tend to think they need to put a warning label on my work whenever it contains something abstract, which tends to turn audiences off in advance if they think they don’t like abstract. It’s a value judgment of what kind of art people should like, not an evaluation of the effectiveness of the work, and it keeps the community’s standards set around traditional theatre.”
— Director, Professor

“If you’ve never had it happen to you personally, the cruel and arbitrary takedown that a highly negative review causes is one of the most mentally damaging things that can happen to you in the theatre. It stymies risk-taking and debilitates the self-esteem so desperately needed to pursue a career as a playwright. New work that pushes boundaries will not survive at the helm of one snarky person’s opinion that claims to be the final say. This role is as outdated as that of a switchboard operator or VCR repairman and needs immediate progressive change.” 
— Playwright/Screenwriter, NYC

 “Fear.

Everyone in the business of theatre is answerable to someone else in the business of theatre – except theatre critics. The critic is not necessarily part of the actual theatre community, and they are only answerable to their editor – who may also not be part of the theatre community. This means that much of the success or failure of any actor, writer, director, production, or theatre depends upon the opinion of someone they cannot argue with, cannot take their case to, someone who does not have to justify their publicized opinions, someone who presents those subjective opinion as objective reality, someone who is so powerful that even pointing out that power is frightening to all the artists in the region covered by that critic. Because despite what any critic thinks of themselves they have the power to retaliate against their own critics – and some will use that power. Why is this document anonymous?

Fear.

Not respect. Not friendship. Not a reluctance to put colleagues on the spot.

Fear and fear alone is why so few artists are willing to speak directly to any critic, to challenge their opinions, and to remind them that theirs is simply an opinion, not the “truth.” 

Good critics know they are part of the theatre, that their job depends on a vibrant community, and that is not any part of their job to act as a sort of guardian of taste,  morals, or politics. It is not their job to decide which show, performance, artist, or theatre is worthy of an audience. That is up to the audience, to the community as a whole. 

But when a critic takes it upon themselves to decide who, theatrically,  lives and who dies, to ignore the enthusiastic audience around them in favor of their own lack of connection to a piece, when they become so invested in elevating or denigrating rather than helping the artists continue to shape a piece and present the ideas as best as possible to the community they are trying to reach, when the critic abuses the public trust with vicious subjectivity, and most importantly when, knowing they are answerable to no one in the community, they take it upon themselves to act as judge and executioner of the artistic expression and livelihoods of so many artists, they are no longer serving anyone but themselves. 

They simply inspire fear. And the silence that fear creates they mistake for respect.”
—Regional Theatre Playwright/Actor/Director

“I mean for god’s sake if a man walked up to me in the lobby of a theater after a performance of a play of mine and said the things out loud that some critics have written about my work they would be kicked out of the theater and put on a no-fly list. And yet somehow it’s OK for them to write those things in a paper read by millions of people? It’s madness. It’s unchecked bullying dressed up as literary intellectualism. They can literally say whatever they want, no matter how ignorant, unfeeling, or lazy and get away with ruining a production so many people have worked on and supported. And there is literally no way to call them on it. And every single person I work with in the theatre knows this and thinks there’s nothing to be done except to sit there and take it. Let me tell you how much this damages the artform. It makes people scared, it makes people full of rage, it sucks the joy and creativity out of a joyous and creative field. There’s got to be a better way.”

— Playwright, screenwriter, teacher

“It’s like going to a restaurant and ordering your favorite food and being told, ‘sorry this one guy didn’t like it so we had to take it off the menu.” And you’re like ‘but I liked it, can’t I have it anyway? ‘Nope. He hated it, so it’s gone forever.’ ”
— Playwright