Perspectives in Criticism from Adam Feldman, staking a claim

Perspectives in Criticism from Adam Feldman, staking a claim

New York, November 25 — The ATCA Perspectives in Criticism series had its latest offering November 8, 2024, the first day of the 2024 ATCA New York City conference “No One Asked Us To Do This”.

The 2024 speaker Adam Feldman is the Theater and Dance Editor and chief theater critic at Time Out New York, where he has been a staff writer since 2003. He has written for Canada’s Globe and Mail and National Post, was contributing Broadway editor for the Theatre World book series, and has served as president of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle since 2005.

The full listing of Perspectives speakers includes critics, playwrights, performers, and others reflecting on the critical arts. Previous “Perspectives” speakers have included critics such as Helen Shaw, Maya Phillips, Lily Janiak, Diep Tran, Jason Zinoman, Michael Finegold, Henry Hewes, Frank Rich, Dan Sullivan, Robert Brustein, Eric Bentley, Clive Barnes, and many others.

The 2024 offering was in the form of a conversation between Feldman and ATCA member Raven Snook, after session introductions by former ATCA Executive Committee chair and current conference planning committee member Martha Wade Steketee.

Steketee: Adam requested to have this be a conversation as opposed to delivering a speech. So I asked Raven Snook, our delightful ATCA member, Drama Desk member and Drama Desk nominating committee member, and writer for Adam at Time Out New York to conduct the conversation. This is the most recent contribution to our Perspectives in Criticism series that has running since 1992 with Clive Barnes as the first speaker. Every year we invite individuals, sometimes a group of individuals, to speak about what is going on in criticism from their perspective, sometimes railing against current conditions. I don’t know what Adam will do. One thing I have learned in all my years is to assemble a team and to then just sit down. So that’s what I’m going to do. Raven and Adam — have a good time.

Snook: I’m really honored to be interviewing you. I edit at TDF Stages so I’ve been on both sides. I have to say that you always make me better, smarter, and wittier than I actually am. We’ll see if he’ll do the same thing today. Adam is the national theater and dance editor and staff writer for Time Out New York. He’s also written for Canada’s Globe and Mail and National Post and other outlets. He has been known to sing a tune; word has it that we sang duets at Stonewall once upon a time; I’m not going to make you sing “Boson Buddies.” You’re also a very influential social media personality, and that’s why you didn’t sleep last night. Maybe we’ll talk a little bit about that. I’m going to start at the beginning to find out what made you fall in love with theater, and how you went from performing to want to be an arts journalism critic.

Feldman: My gosh. That’s a long story, but I will give a very short account of it. I loved theater as a child. I saw musicals at summer camps, some abridged versions of productions. My local community Jewish youth group did musicals once a year, so I saw Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat there and The Grand Tour and other things with big Jewish themes. I loved that stuff. I was drawn to it like a gay moth to a flame. And like many others, I just sort of took to it. I heard some sort of hidden call embedded in the musical. I listened to all those albums. I was the kind of kid who was very interested in what was the best things were supposed to be. I wanted, having determined that I loved musicals, to know what musicals I should know. I would go to my local library sometimes if I liked a musical or was interested in a musical and listen to things like Evita let’s say. I would go to the library in Montreal, and I would go to their microfiche, and I would look up the old New York Times reviews, or check out Newsweek to seewhat Jack Kroll said about these musicals, and I would get different perspectives. Sometimes they would align with my own youthful responses, and sometimes they wouldn’t.

I was always interested in broadening my understanding of the thing that I liked. I didn’t have that many people that I could talk to about it in my friend group, of course. I was also interested generally in Western culture, the history of popular music. I was one of those kids who got collections of Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington songs (one of the many kids who was really into Dinah Washington).

I ended up going to Harvard, and when I was there, I started off thinking that I was going to be in political science and then over the course of my time there I started getting involved in doing theater as an actor in plays, and I found that I enjoyed that a lot more. And I also found that I really didn’t like the people who were in the political science department. I ended up switching to English and because of my interests I wound up doing a program of study that unintentionally focused a great deal on dramatic literature. I took a lot of classes in that, so in addition to performing in shows, I was also studying theater from an academic perspective. Little did I know that I would be one of the few people to use my undergraduate English degree in my professional life. As it has turned out, I have, also somewhat by accident. Did you ask how I got into criticism, or journalism?

Snook: Arts journalism in general.

Feldman: I moved to New York in the 90s, and this is the beginning of the modern internet era. So it was before the chat rooms exactly, but there was a thing called Usenet, which was a text-based national discussion group, basically, with different threads of discussion, like Reddit has now. There were different groups for theater. The taxonomy involved “rec” which is for recordings, recreation or something, and arts, and theater, and then there were separate groups covering theater plays and theater musicals. You could branch out and you could go in these different discussion groups. I was very active in several groups. I had a job in New York, I was working for a personal finance writer, I was writing about personal finance, and that wasn’t very personally interesting to me.  So in my free time, I would go on these groups and have these discussions with fellow fans of plays and musicals.

At a certain point in the late 90s, there was a theater publication called Show Business Weekly that had been out of print for some time, and they were bringing it back. It was sort of a Backstage-type weekly publication. And someone from their editorial department reached out to me and said, listen, we’ve seen some of the things you’ve been writing on these discussion groups, and we can’t really pay you, but we wondered if you might be interested in reviewing things for us. I said sure, yeah, that sounds like fun. So I started doing that, did that for about a year on the side of doing my regular job, and then I met the editor of Broadway.com at a party and I mentioned that I was doing these reviews. He said, you should send them to me. I did, and he liked them, and so I started writing for him. Broadway.com at that point had reviews. They have since, for reasons that we can get into later in terms of the general dynamics of theater journalism, phased those out. At the time, this was in the early 2000s now, they were publishing reviews. I would be covering mostly straight plays, and Ken Mandelbaum would be reviewing the musicals.

I quit my job, bravely and foolishly, and just as I was really going to throw in the towel on being a freelance critic because I couldn’t afford to pay my rent, a job opened up at Time Out, someone reached out to me from there, I applied, I was hired, and I’ve been there since 2003. Which is an unusually long tenure, especially in New York City. I think at this point, I am the longest serving critic at a mainstream publication in New York. Not the one who has been writing the longest, necessarily, but the one who has been writing at the same place the longest. It has been fascinating to observe the changes at Time Out and in the general media culture in the 25 years that I’ve been writing about it.

Snook: I was going to ask about that later, but maybe we can now. How you approach theater criticism, both in terms of when you’re going to see a show, do you do any research, do you read any artist interviews, or do you like to go in cold?

Feldman: It depends on the show, is really the answer. There is a difference between writing about a revival and writing about a new show. There is a middle space where there’s a new show that is adapted from commonly available sources that will be important in understanding that show. So I have different strategies for these different things. For new shows, I tend to go in blind. I think if you read the artist interview first, that will sometimes guide too much your reception of the show. You’ll be seeing what they intended to do rather than what they ended up doing. I like to read those afterwards so I can get a better sense of what the intentions were. But I do like to have a blank slate going in. That’s true also for shows that are adapted, there are a lot of them now, especially on Broadway, that are adapted or inspired by existing intellectual property. In many cases, that intellectual property is a major selling point of the show and will be a major factor in the reception of the show and in the audience’s enjoyment of that show. You don’t want to be unfamiliar with that material. But again, you don’t want to be overfamiliar with it going in. So if I’ve seen it before, or if I haven’t, either way really, I will see the show first and then I will go back and refresh myself on what the movie is or the book is adapted from, or the biographical history that it is drawing from, and the rest of it. Otherwise, you’re sitting there in your head making these comparisons, you’re not in the show. Speaking for myself, I’m constantly being drawn out of the immediacy of the moment by thinking, oh what choice did they make just now, compared to how it is in the movie or was in the book.

The balance is slightly different when you’re dealing with a revival of a classic text as those choices are in many cases what you’re reviewing. The point of it is to see what they have then done with this text that is different from what has been done with it before. How is this Hamlet, or this Gypsy, different from others before. So you do what to be part of the context of that larger discussion when you are writing about a revival that way. And in that case it might be useful to know what the directors’ histories are, certainly conversations around the history of this text. One of the reasons that it continues to be fun to return to Shakespearean texts over and over is, one, the poetry is inexhaustibly deep, etcetera. But also there is a cultural authorization, because we know these shows are going to be done over and over again, for actors and directors to make strong stances on the material. That’s what you want to be looking at. And that’s what you want to analyze in the review. You’re not just saying, Macbeth is a good play. At a certain point that’s not so useful. It really depends on the show.

Snook: And in terms of the role of the critic, and this of course is guided somewhat by the publication that one writes for, do you see yourself strictly as being there for the audience and to guide them towards what to see and what not to see and what to look for when they see it, or do you also hope that artists are reading what you write and maybe taking some of your feedback to heart for future productions or tours?

Feldman: This is a complicated question and one that comes up a lot. I think in New York it’s a little bit different from how it might be in some other places. We get a lot of shows after they have already been taken on developmental tours. Especially on Broadway, you’ll get shows that have already been done in Chicago or La Jolla or wherever, and by the time they get to us, we’re seeing basically what will be the final version of the show.

Snook: Not with The Addams Family.

Feldman: Sometimes when they do shows in the West End or elsewhere, or when they license them, they’ll sometimes make changes. Or they continue to make changes to perfectly good shows. Stephen Sondheim was continually rewriting some of his shows, usually not for the better. Most of the changes that are made are either horizontal moves or slight decreases. The 1987 London Follies is worse than the original. It just is. But they’re trying different things also. And then Follies returned to the original score after they experimented because they realized that the London version was not good.

It’s complicated of course because people in the community will sometimes say, why can’t they be more constructive in their criticism. And the answer is that I’m not there to be constructive. Nothing I say by the time I see it is going to change production, it’s frozen. So it doesn’t matter for the artists. I’m coming too late in the process to be a dramaturg or to be an advisor or to be a script doctor. I’m not the producer, I’m not the friend, I’m not the dramaturg. I am evaluating it as a stand in for the audience, or more specifically for a certain kind of audience. There’s a difference between whether you want to be mean, how harsh you want to be about it, that’s a separate question in a way from whether you can be constructive. Bear in mind that artists are going to be affected by what’s written about them, both personally and professionally. They have stakes in these things and usually they’re really doing their best. Sometimes you leave a show and you’re very angry at having spent time at a show that was unpleasant to sit through. You have an initial impulse to just take that out on the artists who have done it. Sometimes you have to pull back from that and sometimes it’s appropriate. That’s why I like to see shows are far in advance as I can, because you have more time not just to marinate on what the show is trying to do and what your feelings are about it, but also to have a bit of breath time so that you can step away from your initial emotional response to what you’ve seen and have a more analytical distance from the production.

A lot of actors say they don’t read reviews, I think most of them do. I envy the ones that don’t. I am not someone who has ever been able not to read what’s written about me. I will read the comments, sometimes it’s infuriating. At a certain point it’s healthy because you realize that you can’t please all the people all the time. And just because someone disagrees with you or hates you doesn’t mean they’re right. That’s just true. That includes what I say about people. I do not believe that what I say about people is the final word on any subject.

I do aspire to a sense of objectivity. I also understand the limits of objectivity. There’s no capital “O” objectivity; we’re always going to be speaking for ourselves as subjects. There’s no avoiding that. Even the attempt at objectivity is a form of subjective choice. So there’s a balance that you find. Similarly, there’s a balance in how seriously you take yourself as an arbiter of quality. You want to take yourself seriously enough to be able both to take the work seriously enough and to take your opinion writing seriously enough. But you also don’t want to get too self-important and self-serious.

All of you, if you write about theater, are familiar with this balance. There’s an 18^th-century Hassidic parable of a rabbi who carries in each of his pockets a scrap of paper. One says “you are dust and ashes” and the other says “the world was created for you.” You take these two different things that are both true and you use them as necessary and appropriate at given times. Sometimes you have to believe in yourself, you have to step into your authority, step into trusting your own taste. And sometimes you have to also understand that your taste is not the only taste that your views are not the only views, that they are going to reflect your particular history, and the night that you saw, which is going to be different from what everyone else sees. So we’re not even writing about the same thing. That’s one of the challenges in what we do. When you write about a book or an album or a movie, you’re writing about the exact same thing that the person reading it is going to be seeing. When you write about theater, you’re not. They’re going to be seeing something that is literally different. The performances will evolve. The audience will be different. The actors will have good nights and bad nights.

Snook: And sometimes protesters interrupt the shows.

Feldman: Sometimes there will be a radical difference in the show, like that, and sometimes there will be small differences. Also, you’re seeing it from a different seat than other people that are seeing it. Everything about your experience is going to be specific to your experience that night and no one else’s experience of that show. That’s something that’s important to bear in mind when you’re writing about this stuff, and at the same time you want to be as prepared for the show as you can be – know as much as you can, go in with as open a heart and as open a mind as you can, be as fair-minded as you can – and at the end of the day, you stake a claim. You decide what your overall feeling is, and you weigh out in your mind what is most important. You’re going to have a lot of responses, and most of the time they’re not going to be overwhelmingly positive or overwhelmingly negative. Most of the job is weighing out what is most important. Sometimes I look back at some of my reviews and I feel like I got some of them wrong.

Snook: Are there reviews you remember specifically?

Feldman: It’s not that I disagree with things that I said in any review. Almost all the time I will look back and agree what I’ve said in a review is a fair take on the show. What I sometimes differ with myself about is the way the weighing ended up – where I will have ended the review with a snappy line that suggests a more negative, or positive, take on it than I really felt, or that upon reflection the show deserved. That kind of thing – where I didn’t dwell enough on a performance that should have gotten more attention, or I dwelled too much on some quibble that wasn’t ultimately that important. Sometimes I look back on reviews that I wrote positively about that I have no memory of.  And then there will be shows that I was very mixed about and I look back on and remember things I liked about it that stand out for me and the other things that I didn’t like so much turned out not to matter a few years later.

You can’t know that at the time. You just have to go out and do your best. You have a few days to process it, and you do what you can. We are, like all journalists, a first pass at history, a first pass at reception. What we say is not going to be eternal.

We look back, even at the critics we really love. I love Pauline Kael, I look back at her reviews and sometimes I find them wildly off base. She also has a very particular taste, which is helpful if you’re comparing yourself to a critic. It’s helpful that you know what they like and don’t like, you can establish your taste in relation to theirs. These are smart people with deep knowledge and love of the theater, and some of their reviews hold up better than others, from a modern perspective. That doesn’t necessarily mean that their reviews were wrong at the time, because our perspective is different than their perspective. So that something that might not have succeeded as a comedy then might succeed now, and vice versa especially. People say they didn’t get it at the time. Maybe we just see something different in it now than they did. Maybe it didn’t work then for whatever reason, because things are designed and written to connect with audiences in their moment. Maybe Chicago at its moment wasn’t as good as A Chorus Line, and 20 years later it was. We had a different perspective in America in the late 90s than we did in the late 70s. And so, different aspects of the show come out and are emphasized and resonate with people, and that’s why it’s great to revisit these classics. These different shows will come out differently, we’ll see different things in them, we’ll find different things funny, we’ll find different things sad. When we do Merchant of Venice now, it is a very different play than when it was done in Shakespeare’s time, when it was a wacky commedia dell’arte show in which the miserly disapproving father happens also to be a Jew. That’s what Merchant is. And because Shakespeare is Shakespeare, and because the character of Shylock is so much deeper than he needs to be for that purpose, it is possible to continue, 400 years later, to find different resonances that go beyond that original intent. And then the challenge is, what do you do with the fifth act of Merchant, when it goes back to being a wacky comedy, when you’ve had the “happy ending” of the Jew being taken off and being forcibly converted. That was a happy ending in the fourth act, everyone was happy there. And then you have this business with the ring and there’s all this funny little stuff, that now what we perceive as a quite tragic ending of the fourth act, the challenge for modern directors is: how do you rescue that? Do you rescue that and try to keep it a comedy, and if so, how? I’ve seen productions that credibly make the whole fifth act poisoned by the fourth. These are directorial strategies that involve how to take existing texts and make them connect with modern audiences.

Snook: In addition to being a reviewer, you’re also an editor. I’m curious about how you choose the shows that you cover personally, then you assign out. How do you choose what you cover, what you assign, what you don’t cover, and how much of that is dictated by how arts coverage has evolved?

Feldman: We used to review a great deal more. We used to have a lot more space to review things, in a way. We used to have a lot more room to review a wide swath of different offerings – Broadway, off Broadway, off-off Broadway. We used to have more people on staff reviewing theater and more budget for freelancers and we would try to review pretty much everything in the city. We still try to review as much as we can, but we can’t review everything, and that especially hurts small shows.

I’m very lucky at Time Out because we still have a thriving theater department, while almost all the other arts coverage even at Time Out, the “specialist” arts coverage, has pretty much fallen away — music, film, dance, and that sort of thing. It’s a multinational company so we do have film critics in London who are reviewing films, and that just goes out to everyone now, instead of having different film critics in different cities. We don’t cover live music anymore because they don’t run long enough, the concerts. There’s not enough traction for these pieces, and that’s true certainly for off-off Broadway shows. When you’re deciding about where to allocate resources, a big Broadway show which will be running for months or indefinitely, gets priority over a 20-performance Showcase run in a 99-seat theater. It just does. And partly that’s because a big Broadway show is much more interesting to a larger readership.

We used to not know, exactly, how many people were interested in what. And now we do know, exactly, how many people are reading what. And that makes a big difference. Now, you can run things as loss leaders, and we do, to maintain a general reputation and breadth of coverage, and all that is very important I think, and I fight for it all the time. But also, those things don’t get a lot of readership. There aren’t many people clicking on it. And because of the way the algorithms work, it isn’t being fed to people in the same way. Because if a lot of people don’t click on it right away, then it’s just not going to go to their feed.

It’s not the same as when it was in print, when you would flip to the theater section and you would see all the shows that were in the theater section, and you would accidentally come across an off Broadway or an off-off Broadway show while you were looking for your Broadway show. That is not happening any more. Very few people are going to the landing pages where all the shows may be listed, or briefly listed, at the top of the page. They are being fed the new material through the algorithms. And the algorithms, if a critical mass of people aren’t immediately interested in something, liking and commenting and sharing something, then the algorithms will decide that this is something not very many people are interested in, and no one will see it. This is a technological obstacle that we all face.

Part of why I’m so active on social media is that I want to create a platform so that when I share things that aren’t immediately and obviously algorithm friendly, the algorithm already knows that people engage with my material enough to give people a chance to see it. And that sounds cynical and opportunist. There are a lot of other reasons that I engage with social media. But that is a big part of why I make a constant effort to interact, to respond, to share things, to share personal things and non-theater related things, in a fun and mostly positive way, because that is what gets engagement up. Getting engagement up is what gets people to also see your professional work.

As a side benefit, going back to what we were saying before about authority and humility, I think there is a benefit in a time when people are uncomfortable with the idea of authority or of objectivity, it helps to reinforce in people’s minds, the understanding that you are a human person, you are one person, that you are speaking as yourself in addition to whatever authorial, authoritative voice you may assume in the course of writing your critical evaluation. If people also understand that you know that you are a person, if people also have a context of your personality in which to insert this review, then it takes a bit of the sting and edge and distance away from your critical writing, in a good way. It helps establish your subjectivity.

I do think one reason I don’t get quite as much blowback when I write a bad review as some others do, is because people know me in a parasocial way. I’m not just some anonymous character saying a mean thing in print. I’m your parasocial friend Adam who has an opinion for you, the way that he would if you asked him about a show. So it’s a closer relationship with the reader in many ways now than it used to be. It’s not just printing something, putting it out to the universe, and then occasionally getting a Letter to the Editor. You get immediate response from people who really feel like they in a way know you and know your tastes and your history. All these things are ultimately helpful. They’re extra work on the side of your professional work, but they’re worth the time.

Snook: You are influential in social media circles. You’re the one who started the change.org petition for Gavin Creel. I’m sure it was a confluence of things, but that was a huge push to make sure that all theaters dimmed in his honor. And last night you were up all night. Do you want them why?

Feldman: I did post something about this, about Nicole Scherzinger. She did something that looks bad. She made a comment …

Snook: She follows Russell Brand.

Feldman: He’s a British comedian, and lately he’s taken a strong right-wing turn, and this year a strong born-again Christian turn. He’s been a very vocal Trump supporter in this news cycle. And on the day of the elections he’d posted a photo on his Instagram of him waving a new hat that said “make Jesus first again”, a red hat with white lettering, that suggested or could easily be read as suggesting that the next step of the MAGA program might be a Christian nationalist position, especially in the context of Russell Brand’s brand. Nicole, perhaps innocently, wrote “Where do I get this hat” — heart sign, prayer emoji. That was up for a day, and no one noticed it, and then people noticed it and it started making the rounds and people were unhappy about it. I posted something about it, saying this would probably not help her chances of winning a Tony Award. That is not me endorsing a boycott of Nicole Scherzinger over her political/religious/political/accused-sex-offender-supporting status. Which is also Russell Brand. It was just an observation that this was not a great optic move for her.

It did go pretty wide and when a Tweet goes wide and it gets picked up by The Daily Mail and other places then there are going to be cycles. First an outpouring of people agreeing with you, then people agreeing with you and taking it to steps you’re not comfortable with, then a backlash of people disagreeing with you, and then a crazy backlash of people getting it from their news sources that are spinning it in a different way, that are accusing you of all sorts of things, and then an extra crazy wing of that saying “Jewish cockroach” and then it comes back again.

It’s kinda fun, in a way. You’re popular for a second, then unpopular, it’s a roller coaster. It’s quite stressful at a certain point late at night when something is going wide in the UK, to be getting suddenly a lot of messages from strangers accusing you of holding positions that you don’t actually hold. This is the upside and the downside. You have to have the stomach for it. I’ve been building this social media engagement up for 15 years. I started, as I said before, I’m probably the first critic in my position now to have come out of the Internet, basically. I started in discussion groups, as a musical theater and general theater enthusiast. That is how I was hired as a critic, is off of my engagement in public forums. So it’s not new to me, I have been doing it for 25 years.

My approach to it has certainly changed. I was throwing flames like mad in the late 90s. I was absolutely bomb throwing in my opinions. I have mellowed a great deal since then. Partly that’s institutional. When you have an institutional authority behind you, and that’s how a lot of people will be reading it like “The New York Times says” or “Time Out says”, they don’t even read the bylines a lot of times. You have the responsibility of that institutional authority, so you don’t want to be just subjective, and especially you don’t want to be violently subjective. So you make a good-faith effort to step away from your own subjectivity and to try to unpack your own reactions. Do I love this because it was a great performance, or do I like this performance because it reminds me of my sister and I love my sister? One is unique to me, and one is not. When you’re evaluating someone else’s worth, you want to make sure that its not that one thing that is unique to you. You want to make sure it’s fair and will also help other people who aren’t you to find stuff that they will enjoy.

Snook: You have said you’re from Canada and recently got your U.S. citizenship, and I believe you just voted in your first U.S. Presidential election.

Feldman: I did. My first election period. I voted in the Quebec referendum in the mid-90s, the second referendum about whether Quebec would separate from the rest of Canada. I voted in that election, and that was the last election I’d ever voted in, because I moved to the U.S. when I was 18.

Snook: You were a terrible political science major.

Feldman: I was a debater. I was a nationally ranked debater, and model parliamentarian, that sort of thing. That’s what I thought I was going to do, I thought I was going to be a politician, a Canadian politician. I like convincing people. I like taking positions. The thing about debating and what it teaches you, paradoxically, is that it teaches you to make a strong case, also paradoxically it teaches you to make a strong case on either side.  And so you become intensely aware sometimes of the complications that adhere to any subject. That kind of grey area thinking can be paralyzing, or it can be helpful in trying to sort out where on the spectrum of opinion you are most comfortable fitting, with the understanding that counter arguments can be made, and not just bey dumb people.

Snook: Recently, someone who I think is very smart wrote a take on Sunset Boulevard that was interesting. He didn’t like it. I said: I agree with everything you say, capturing it completely, except I loved it for all the reasons you hated it. And that is always so interesting, when you have similar experiences and yet different reactions.

Feldman: It’s that weighing thing. I will read a review, let’s say by Jesse Green, a critic I like very much. When we disagree, I will read his reviews, and I will say yeah, I agree, but that doesn’t matter.

Snook: How do you do that as an editor? I wonder if you read something I’ve written and you think, Raven you’ve really missed this. You’ve never said to me, you didn’t get it.

Feldman: I can’t say you didn’t get it. Often I haven’t seen the show at that point, sometimes I’ll see it later. But also I just have to trust reviewers to have their opinions. I give them that trust when I hire them. And then I can help them polish up things and make it punchier for the kind of review that we like to run, and our readers like to read. If there is something that is confusing to me, an argument, I will ask sometimes for an explanation of what the writer meant. If something stands out to me as not making sense, not justifying the argument that they are making from it. Then I will ask for an explanation. Usually there is an explanation that they just forgot to include, because they know their own logic. I’m coming to it as a new reader to a lot of these pieces, so that let’s me see sometimes what steps are missing in the logic of the review.

Snook: Now I’m dying to know whether you saw something after I reviewed it and thought, what the hell? One of my proudest moments is when I told you to go see Oratorio for Living Things which I gave five stars to, five stars is very rare, and then you shared my review and told people to go see it.

Feldman: It was a terrific review and a terrific show. When people write a really enthusiastic review, that is the kind of review I am most excited about. Even if it’s a reviewer I don’t necessarily always agree with. Helen Shaw, who is my favorite theater critic in town, and who I worked with for 15 years at Time Out, and edited to the minor degree that she ever needed editing – Helen and I are good friends, I admire her opinion tremendously. I also know her; I know her taste very well at this point. So I know when she hates something, that sometimes it will be something that I will really like. We have different tastes in certain areas. She has a great tolerance for very slow experimental theater that I do not. She bristles at big commercial musicals in a way that I don’t necessarily. I have greater affection for them. If they aren’t good, I don’t like them. But I have a softer spot for being willing to let them work on their own terms than she does, so I will read her stuff with that in mind. That said, if she loves some weird experimental flow thing, then I’ll go see it, and I’ll try to see it through her lovely eyes, and I’ll try to expand my taste in the direction of towards being more small “c” catholic, being able to enjoy a wider range of material.

Great enthusiasm is wonderful to me. It’s also more dangerous than negativity. I get more blowback when I write a positive review than when I write a negative review, from people in the community. People think that if you write a negative review, you’re smarter than them and your taste level is higher. And people think that if you write a positive review of something they didn’t like, then they think that you’re stupid and your taste is not as good as theirs. That’s a general cultural bias that I think a lot of us have. We hear the negative and we believe the negative more readily, we associate that with more discerning taste, a harder to please palate, and I don’t think that’s true. But it is a danger, and it’s one reason that when I’m editing, one thing I’ll consistently do is I will take out certain kinds of adjectives that sound reckless, that sound over eager. I’ll take out things like “amazing” or “great” or “spectacular” – those things will strike a lot of people as uncredible, or too easily impressed. When you’re writing a positive review, often in a weird way the more withholding you are in your praise, the more authoritative your own voice sounds. So if you say, “this is a very fine performance,” that sounds more believable than if you say “this is an amazing performance.” Unless you literally mean that you were amazed, that you were struck with awe, then don’t say awesome.

Snook: You are a performer and a personality. I don’t know if you would agree with that assessment. Do you ever find that in conflict? You’re performing, you’re an online personality, and you’re doing criticism. Is there ever a moment you think you’re crossing a line?

Feldman: No. I know where my lines are. I do interact with people in the creative community more than a lot of critics do, for various reasons. I have a lot of friends who are creatives. I also dabble in performing myself, but not professionally. I will do readings when people ask me, or I will get up at piano bars and sing. I think that those things make me a better critic. They give me insight into the process of performing and the different variables that go into that and give me a better sense of the spirit of performing and creating that goes into it. You remember that most people are in fact trying to do something good, that they believe in, or want to believe in, and that you don’t always have as much time as you’d like to fix things. All these things are useful to remember when you’re evaluating other people’s work.

I would not review the work of someone that I was friends with, because it would be both a conflict of interest professionally and a stupid thing to do personally. It can only engender bad feelings among your friends, and it can only engender mistrust among your readers. There is no positive aspect of it. There are many people that I will meet socially at some party or that I will interact with parasocially on line, who I may have generally positive feelings for, who I will still review. That’s different from someone I’m friends with, go to dinner with, watch TV with, etc.

I feel like I have a pretty good sense of those lines, and I don’t think anyone has ever accused me otherwise. I may be wrong, but I don’t think I am.

Snook: I have a situation where someone, not that I go to dinner with, but I knew too well to whom I gave a lukewarm review, and we don’t speak now.

Feldman: That’s happened to me, but that’s not with people that I know well. But it has definitely happened. I have had many awkward icy social engagements with people whom I haven’t reviewed particularly well. Artists respond very differently to that sort of thing. Some are very good at being, like, oh, you’re doing your job, I’m doing mine. And some of them, quite understandably, are hurt or angry or annoyed. This is why at a social level, if I’m at a party and I see someone, I’m not going to go up and impose myself socially on someone that I have reviewed negatively recently. I just won’t do that. If they want to come up to me, great. I think that’s lovely. And selfishly I wish that everyone felt that way, because it would make my life more socially comfortable. But I don’t expect that from people. I fully understand why people would be mad at me, or resent me, or just generally have bad feelings associated with me if I have written about them negatively.

Snook: I have one more question. I know that you love your puns. You’ve inserted some really great puns. If I put in a pun and it doesn’t quite work, he’s like, nope gone, we’re not salvaging that. So if you had to choose the best puns you’ve ever written, you may choose up to three, go.

Feldman: I can’t choose among my children. The one I liked this year was the one that The New York Times stole after quoting it in their own paper.

A lot of them require a certain amount of set up. It’s meant to be read on the page; it’s meant to sneak up on you. Without that element it’s not going to be funny. I’m talking about the revival of Cabaret and how I think they over-emphasized the MC and lot of posturing and performance of maleficent evilness and to me that’s very on the nose. So I said: “The theory seems to be that increasing the Emcee’s power exponentially will make him more exciting: that energy, if you will, is equal to Emcee squared.” But for that line to work, you have to have the setup, as I had already, my opinion about how to use the MC, and then “increase his power” so that the pun makes sense. Otherwise, its too dense.

Some people will say when you put in a very showy pun like that, oh you must have been sitting on that for a while. People say that a lot. And that’s not true. I never write around a pun. It’s always the other way around. I’ll think: here’s my opinion, how can I say that in an entertaining way? And the challenge for that is to do that in positive reviews. It’s much easier to be funny when you’re writing a pan. Negative feeling is already, because of the shock value, inherently funny to people. And reaction to that is a laugh often. So trying to write engagingly on a sentence level is part of what I consider to be my job as a critic. I consider writing well, or trying to write well, as an important part of being a critic. Not just having an opinion – you’re not writing a book report, you’re writing a piece of writing that’s meant to be entertaining on its own terms. Especially theater criticism, because a lot of times people will not actually be seeing the show. So this little piece that you’re writing is their only experience of the show, and they’re reading it, in a lot of ways, for the pleasure of reading your piece as a writer.

Writing well is an important part of earning the trust of a reader. All critical power is to some extent arrogated. You’re saying, I trust that my opinion is valuable and you should too. How do you prove that, within the thing itself, that you are trusting yourself and the trust that you want them to have in you is credible? You do that by demonstrating intelligence and taste in the way that you write. That is important in having an effect for what you want to get across.

— Transcribed, heavily “linked,” and lightly edited by Martha Wade Steketee