Promo Seltzer. This week the Windy City was blowing gusts of disgust in a knock-down exchange of letters, emails, blogs and articles. The tempestuous snit between the 'Chicago Sun-Times' and Theater Building Chicago, a 30-year-old company, attracted the input of nearly two dozen of theater’s most distinguished blowhards, including Edward Albee, Tony Kushner, Arthur Kopit and Dramatist Guild President John Weidman.
What sparked the dramatists' high dudgeon was Sun-Times Critic Hedy Weiss’ review of the company’s 2006 showcase of new musicals. Even though the works are billed as in development and in some cases not completed, Weiss, a former dancer who has been reviewing for more than 15 years, had drifted from doing advances to help promote the festival to doing reviews.
In her defense, Ms. Weiss, who truly seems not to know better, was not condemned in 2005 after writing what amounts to brochure copy on that year’s works-in-progress. She called the musical Tevya, "a remarkably fine piece of work. Not only does it play fully on the powerful frame of reference created in Fiddler, it moves the story forward in intelligent and believable ways, stepping gracefully and confidently into those giant footprints while building on the blend of humor, bitterness and debate that animated the original."
She said the musical version of Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, "deserves a thriving future. Along with its ready-made tragicomic story and marvelous characters, it comes with a lovely, lyrical score that very skillfully blends traditional Irish melodies and a Broadway sound.”
On August 16, 2006, her overview story stated that "the eight deeply flawed new musicals showcased in this year's Stages 2006 marathon at the Theatre Building seemed to suggest the artform [sic] has fallen on very hard times."
This was an egregiously inappropriate opinion for a major paper to print regarding theater pieces that were expressly available as part of their development. But technically, it was no worse that the raves she gave shows last year. The problem for the American theater is that our only true allies are newspapers, a community that is itself increasingly marginalized. The point of contact between theater and paper, which I know only too well, requires a kind of rigidity that may cost a story.
As barrage after barrage of pent-up critic-critique from America's greatest living playwrights was gathered by DGA to be dumped on the desks of Sun-Times editor John Barron and publisher John Cruikshank (like Albee's "Ms. Weiss has a reputation as an irresponsible critic, and there are many occasions that are brought to my attention where her reviews have been shocking in their irresponsible provocation and others in which her opinions and prejudices have seemed curiously contrived."), the theater's executive director Joan Mazzonelli began to look for cover. Whereas she earlier had told Jeffrey Sweet (as reported on his blog), "Ms. Weiss was explicitly told that these presentations were not for review," when she spoke to Campbell Robertson for yesterday's New York Times story, she was "acknowledging that she had not made the festival’s policy clear to Ms. Weiss, whom she had encouraged to attend, along with other members of the press."
Whether Ms. Weiss is a good witch or a bad witch, the issue of theater criticism in this country is one which needs much more attention. (And, publicists need to keep a stiff spine despite the potential loss.)
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