Reviewing the Reviewers

A few years ago a very good--but very irate--undergraduate producer became so incensed with poorly informed Crimson reviews that he considered denying the paper its customary pair of complimentary opening night tickets to a new production. His show was a rarity--a famous opera sold out six weeks in advance, lots of big-name Boston critics eager to see it. Besides that, he concluded that there wasn't a reviewer on the Crimson staff competent to knowledgeably criticize the piece. To demonstrate this lack of expertise he filed exhibits A through Z--reviews from earlier that year--on a Harvard Dramatic Club bulletin board. A jury of his peers and colleagues swiftly returned a verdict of guilty, and the paper was condemned for yet another year to twist slowly, slowly on the spit of resentment; fuel for fires in the rooms of theater people at Harvard long before the energy crisis was more than a twinkle in Exxon's eye.

What struck one most about the reviews was not that they were aesthetically displeasing, or grossly simplistic, or--given the paper's tendency to confuse freedom with license--simply gross. What the reviews demonstrated was a far more damning ignorance of the mechanical and artistic processes by which shows are produced at this college. I shuddered to think of the comping sophomore--unable to tell a master electrician from a technical director, unaware of what happens when a show is cast--viscerally reviewing a play he or she had clearly never read or even seen before. It may not make a great deal of difference in the case of a Gilbert and Sullivan or Hasty Pudding show, both organizations sport blindly loyal followers generally impervious to reviews, but a bad Crimson review can often destroy the potential audience for a Radcliffe Grant-in-Aid or House production, and even for some kinds of Loeb mainstage shows the impact is significant. How then, should The Crimson develop more sophisticated, sensitive, and better informed critics?

The simplest and best way would be by having reviewers actually see a production. No, I don't mean walk to a theater, pick up their tickets, gaze at their programs, and wait for the curtain to go up. I mean see a production: see it from its earliest stages and stay with it through opening night. At Harvard a hodge-podge of theatrical groups exists, and yet the actual phases of production display a remarkable similarity across the board. If a critic wants to write truly knowledgeable reviews, that critic must begin with the institutional structures that fund theater at Harvard: the House drama societies, the Gilbert and Sullivan Board, the Radcliffe Grant-in-Aid Society, Hasty Pudding Theatricals, and at the Loeb Drama Center, the University itself. In the main it is the student portion of these structures which decides who is to produce and direct what play, with what budget, and on what dates during the coming term.

Once that series of basic decisions is reached, however, the lion's share falls to the producer and director; if they fail to fulfill adequately certain well-defined roles the show suffers. A critic should move with those two figures--producer and director--as they give form to the production. For a producer the key problem is finding competent designers and technicians for every aspect of the show's stagecraft, while the director must select actors capable of turning in solid, creditable performances. The former, if experienced will know which lighting designers might be interested and capable of giving the show what it needs. If inexperienced, he starts from scratch and hopes his roommates have hidden talents with nails and hammers. The director relies on production people to publicize casting--and to have reserved sufficient space and time to handle the hordes that inevitably show up for musical or Shakespearean auditions.

A critic should be there that first night of casting--watching the director explain passages of the play to be read at the audition, watching the stage manager and assistant producer reading over the casting questionnaires filled out by the nervous, necessarily unprofessional actors, above all watching a director trying desperately to delineate the good first time readings of bad actors from the bad first time readings of good ones. A critic ought to come to call backs--those last night sessions in which directors split hairs trying to choose actors for leading roles on the basis of second, only slightly more polished readings. And then a critic ought to sit in on late night decisions as two or three people (generally devoid of total recall) wade through upwards of two hundred applicants in search of a cast.

That same critic should learn, too, how each of the designers and technicians proceeds up to this point. The set designer, constrained by monetary, artistic, and practical problems while attempting to give working drawings or models of the finished product to his technical director. The lighting designer faced with obstacles many of which must remain unknown until he or she sees the set, talks with the director, and fully knows the show from light cue to light cue. And of course, the good critic will spend time with those unsung heroes--the techies--those premed and pre-law students who devote hours to painting, hanging, hammering, and creating what the critic will see on opening night.

The critic ought to see the producer and production staff putting it all together; ought to see the scheduling problems of doing a musical in the Loeb, or those of selecting a new script for the Hasty Pudding show, or of converting a dining hall into a theater and reconverting it after each night's performance. A reviewer needs to see these things, not to encourage a more lax critical standard (theater people are generally among the most demanding play-goers at Harvard), but to encourage a better, different standard. If The Crimson wants to rescue its reputation for the fires of thespian damnation, maybe its editors should give reviewers some on the job training. Who knows? It certainly couldn't hurt.

Bill Kuntz '72 is a former undergraduate producer whose credits include The Most Happy Fella, She Loves Me, Arsenic and Old Lace, Funny Girl, Subject to Fits, and Rosencranz and Guildenstern are Dead.