The Critics Say...: 57 Theater Reviewers in New York and Beyond Discuss Their Craft and Its Future by Matt Windman Page B
Authors: Matt Windman
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was discussing the play, making connections to society, and getting all these voices into the piece.
Linda Winer: Everybody comes in through a different backdoor. I was a classical music major, with no thought about what I was going to do with it. I read about a two-year program that the Rockefeller Foundation had set up for the training of classical music critics. The first year, we were out in California, around the University of Southern California and the Los Angeles Times . We spent the whole year writing practice reviews. Critics from all over the country and England came and spent time with us. Virgil Thomson spent a week with us. They would tear at our stuff and help us understand what went into a review. The great thing about it was that there was no party line. The more people we talked to, the more we realized that everyone went about it in a different way, and that we were going to have to find our own way. But at least we learned what the basic standards were.
During the second year of the program, I was an apprentice at the Chicago Tribune . I grew up in Chicago. After the apprenticeship year, they kept me on as an assistant music critic. Then I got more and more interested in dance. It was right around the time of the so-called “Dance Boom,” so the Tribune sent me to a program for the training of dance critics at Connecticut College. Martha Graham would sit there with her turban in the cafeteria. Again, we wrote reviews, and all these different critics would come in and tear our reviews apart.
At the time, the theater critic at the Tribune was an old pro named William Leonard, who reviewed touring companies and dinner theaters. That’s pretty much all there was in Chicago at the time. But what we now know as the Chicago Theater Movement then began. There were all these people who lived in my neighborhood and were putting on plays in little storefronts. We were all the same age and seemed to have the same interests. The Tribune wasn’t covering them, so I said, “I’ll do it.” I had taken a lot of theater courses in college, but I was not a trained theater professional. The first play I reviewed was The Duck Variations , David Mamet’s first play in Chicago. I started at the Tribune in 1969, and I left in 1980. During my last seven years there, I was the chief theater and dance critic.
I really wanted to move to New York. The repetition in Chicago was getting to me. I couldn’t review Warp! , this sci-fi storefront extravaganza, one more time. The Daily News was starting a separate afternoon edition of the paper. They were trying to reach the readers who read the Times on their way to work. They hired about 300 really good people, and they brought me to New York. I was called a cultural affairs specialist, which was a kind of critic-at-large. The afternoon edition only lasted about 10 months, but fortunately, the Daily News kept me on as the dance critic at the regular part of the paper.
Then I got a call from some people I had never heard of. They took me out to lunch at the Oyster Bar, and they said, “We’re starting a national newspaper. Would you like to join us?” And I thought, This is only going to last six months, but at least it’ll be something else. And that was USA Today . I offered to be the theater, dance, and music critic of the country. I was there for five years. At the beginning, it was really fun because they didn’t have the form set in stone yet. There was more of an opportunity to have an individual voice. By the time I left, it was this big, established national newspaper.
Meanwhile, editors from Newsday called and said, “We’re going to start a New York edition of the paper.” They hired about 400 people. It was going to be an upscale New York edition called New York Newsday , completely separate from the Long Island edition. Allan Wallach was already the theater critic, but they asked if there was something else I wanted to do there. I said, “I would like to
Linda Winer: Everybody comes in through a different backdoor. I was a classical music major, with no thought about what I was going to do with it. I read about a two-year program that the Rockefeller Foundation had set up for the training of classical music critics. The first year, we were out in California, around the University of Southern California and the Los Angeles Times . We spent the whole year writing practice reviews. Critics from all over the country and England came and spent time with us. Virgil Thomson spent a week with us. They would tear at our stuff and help us understand what went into a review. The great thing about it was that there was no party line. The more people we talked to, the more we realized that everyone went about it in a different way, and that we were going to have to find our own way. But at least we learned what the basic standards were.
During the second year of the program, I was an apprentice at the Chicago Tribune . I grew up in Chicago. After the apprenticeship year, they kept me on as an assistant music critic. Then I got more and more interested in dance. It was right around the time of the so-called “Dance Boom,” so the Tribune sent me to a program for the training of dance critics at Connecticut College. Martha Graham would sit there with her turban in the cafeteria. Again, we wrote reviews, and all these different critics would come in and tear our reviews apart.
At the time, the theater critic at the Tribune was an old pro named William Leonard, who reviewed touring companies and dinner theaters. That’s pretty much all there was in Chicago at the time. But what we now know as the Chicago Theater Movement then began. There were all these people who lived in my neighborhood and were putting on plays in little storefronts. We were all the same age and seemed to have the same interests. The Tribune wasn’t covering them, so I said, “I’ll do it.” I had taken a lot of theater courses in college, but I was not a trained theater professional. The first play I reviewed was The Duck Variations , David Mamet’s first play in Chicago. I started at the Tribune in 1969, and I left in 1980. During my last seven years there, I was the chief theater and dance critic.
I really wanted to move to New York. The repetition in Chicago was getting to me. I couldn’t review Warp! , this sci-fi storefront extravaganza, one more time. The Daily News was starting a separate afternoon edition of the paper. They were trying to reach the readers who read the Times on their way to work. They hired about 300 really good people, and they brought me to New York. I was called a cultural affairs specialist, which was a kind of critic-at-large. The afternoon edition only lasted about 10 months, but fortunately, the Daily News kept me on as the dance critic at the regular part of the paper.
Then I got a call from some people I had never heard of. They took me out to lunch at the Oyster Bar, and they said, “We’re starting a national newspaper. Would you like to join us?” And I thought, This is only going to last six months, but at least it’ll be something else. And that was USA Today . I offered to be the theater, dance, and music critic of the country. I was there for five years. At the beginning, it was really fun because they didn’t have the form set in stone yet. There was more of an opportunity to have an individual voice. By the time I left, it was this big, established national newspaper.
Meanwhile, editors from Newsday called and said, “We’re going to start a New York edition of the paper.” They hired about 400 people. It was going to be an upscale New York edition called New York Newsday , completely separate from the Long Island edition. Allan Wallach was already the theater critic, but they asked if there was something else I wanted to do there. I said, “I would like to
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