Who is the longest-serving theater critic? Queried in March by Ada Tseng of the LA Times, we replied that ATCA doesn’t keep statistics, but we cited Michael Billington, who’s been reviewing for The Guardian in England for 48 years and reviewed for smaller papers for 10 years before that...
Every year the Broadway League conducts a survey of Broadway audiences to determine, among other things, what motivates individual audience members to attend a particular show. They don’t ask the question the same way each year and respondents can choose more than one reason. Statisticians...
Kirill Serebrennikov The Russian Theatre Critics Association, ATCA’s co-member in the International Association of Theatre Critics, has denounced the arrest of controversial Russian stage/film/opera director Kirill Serebrennikov. Described as “always fresh, unconventional, and truly innovative,” he has been selected to receive the New Theatrical Reality prize this December by...
Hedy Weiss (Photo by Rich Hein/Sun-Times) Long-time Chicago Sun-Times theater critic Hedy Weiss (ATCA’s 2015 Perspectives in Criticism speaker) has stirred up a hurricane (not for the first time) with a June 13 review of Antoinette Nwandu’s “Pass Over,” a re-write of “Waiting for Godot” featuring two young African-Americans, now at Steppenwolf...
SOME FOLLOWUP STORIES Update, March 1: High profile playwrights (Marsha Norman, David Henry Hwang, Lynn Nottage, Doug Wright, etc., etc.) are among 800 signers of a petition to the N.Y. Times to fill the second string theater critic slot with a woman or transgender person of color,...
The Columbia Journalism Review has published a thought provoking piece by Boston’s Jeb Gottlieb, former music and theater writer for the Boston Herald. In a section he titled “the end of the age of the critic” Gottlieb provides statistics on the decline of full time...
ATCA’s Russell Warne (managing editor, Utah Theatre Bloggers Assn.) files a very interesting report on the YCS he recently attended in Poland, commenting especially on the similarities and differences between the concerns and issues addressed there and in the U.S. (To read, cick link here or below.) Such seminars are sponsored...
“Everyone in this world has someone else whom he can look down on,” wrote George Orwell in 1946, “and I must say, from experience of both trades, that the book reviewer is better off than the film critic, who cannot even do his work at home.” Now, of...
Sometimes we post essays about criticism in the right-hand column. But this piece by Charles McNulty for the LA Times earrents the front page. Charles McNulty Nowadays, he says, “criticism isn’t always readily distinguishable from the salesmanship and hype that have corrupted not just our politics but the arts,...
Sarasota’s Asolo Rep was slapped down by Brian Friel for making significant changes in “Philadelphia, Here I Come,” as reported by Jay Handelman (Sarasota Herald-Tribune). In “Who Thinks It’s OK to ‘Improve’ Playwrights’ Work?,” Howard Sherman points out the issues are legal as well as moral and aesthetic. In the debate over...