Notes - 11.27.12 - Jess

Notes – 11.27.12

·      Ellen – I thought this was very fruitful; I hoped that we could think a little bit about what it means to review a long-seen performance; it’s an important way to think about writing about performance; I was interested to see what your thoughts on those productions look like through the mists of time; Let’s try and work out in reverse the best practices/methods for reviewing, by taking up the flaws of specific reviews and on a broad cultural level;

·      Amy – let’s break into two groups;

·      Jennifer – We talked about the quandary of the reviewer, because their audiences aren’t clear; the reviewer might need to explain who the audience for this show should be;

·      Dorothy – it was less of “it’s great for all ages”, but to maybe mention a graphic sex scene.

·      Jennifer – These reviews don’t necessarily fulfill these, and they are full of elitist, incomprehensible allusions

·      Amy – we touched on the “snark” factor, and how it might relate back to the viral restaurant review; when is it okay and when is it an ad hominem attack benefitting no one but the reviewer? establishing or maintaining the authority of the reviewer but not having the entire review say “I have the authority because I hold the knowledge.”

·      Derek – I wrote down some things we talked about; Jones thinks “Black Watch” is a culinary play, he utilizes very theatre-specific terms, uses his own feelings about the play and Scotland;

·      Ellen – we had a more measured discussion of what was being said, but not fully articulated;

·      Sara – I was saying that I appreciated Jones’ contextualization of the play as a consumer-product that has past it’s moment, but that it doesn’t mean it’s not super fun to watch; it’s very coded; we talked about the shepherd’s pie non sequiteur - - - perhaps it’s a coded message that addressed some of Cody’s concerns about the politics of the play; I think there was a certain subtle inclination to say “This play is way past talking about those issues”; there was a winking acknowledgement that this is now a consumer product and not a piece of “theatre”

·      Andrea – about the cultural pressure on the reviewer, we kind of sensed some hesitancy to criticize the play because it’s about the military;

·      Amy – Let’s talk about the marketing, and that falls under the heading of the point of these reviews; there seems to be a horrible dysfunctional relationship between reviewers and the theatre on a business level; something is not working; after reading Justin’s review, I felt that something needed to change

·      Justin – we’re looking at a smaller non-profit theatre’s review and trying to compare that to a Broadway show’s review, that’s going to drive audiences into the theatre; when I worked for a small theatre, we wanted good reviews to send to grant givers to say “We’re awesome!”

·      Jenna – I worked at Victory Gardens and mined reviews to find selling points

·      Justin – you make a sheet of positive sound bytes of good reviews; performance review is not an option we included in our audience surveys; “from a friend” and “loyal subscriber” were the most popular choices; the audience at ‘Black Watch’ seems to be at least half full of people who saw it 18 months ago; performance reviews don’t necessarily capture the performance; if they’re reviewing a small theatre, they’re not going to want to hurt the little guy

·      Sara – I found it funny that the reviewer remarked that the best audience was actually us, and how wrong he was! are they taking a shot at us? An anti-intellectual comment? A mis-characterization?

·      Dorothy – we did talk about that and something that was brought up was that it’s more of Jones’ posturing above that kind of humor; “Yeah, I thought that stuff was funny….once.”

·      Ellen – It’s an inane understanding of what academic knowledge in this fields constitute; you’ve completely misunderstood who we are.

·      Whitney – the exclusive snarkiness closes out the people who should be seeing it, in his opinion; his review paints a bad picture of it for people like us

·      Sara – It’s so middle-brow, bourgeois

·      Dorothy – it’s a good play for people who like bad things!

·      Amy – You have horrible taste and are snobby!

·      Dorothy – I feel that comes up a lot in bad reviews – this is terrible! But if you had taste, you wouldn’t like it! The people who go to Fieri’s restaurant don’t care what the NY Times thinks of the restaurant!

·      Amy – it’s one thing to provide a vicious takedown of Spiderman: Turn off the Dark, but there is a financial responsibility to a reviewer to say “if you’re going to spend $500 on a ticket, you shouldn’t see this one”; the review did give me a really excellent sense of what it would be like, eating in Fieri’s restaurant; I agreed with Jones about Equivocation but I though he was an asshole!

·      Ellen – Even in Hedy Weiss’ overly superlative, headache-inducing review had a lot in common with the Jones review in that they’re trying to be overly witty; in doing so, they’re emulating the show; I find that very informative; it only really comes into clarity when you read multiple reviews by the same reviewer; this can be a source of genuine information;

·      Amy – Dorothy mentions that by referencing Max Bialystock, he’s doing the same thing!

·      Dorothy – snarky things can be made well if they do have different layers of why a person is being snarky about it, not just that they didn’t like something; the restaurant reviewer is making fun of more than just the food, but everything;

·      Ellen – the quality of the restaurant is exaggeration, overmuch, always; the review is too much! it spills beyond the bounds of a normal food review; it captures stylistically what’s up, and what particularly offends this food reviewer; lack of seriousness, technique, carefulness, and so on.

·      Sara – I appreciated that the reviewer points out that Fieri is making fun of his customers; I’m going to give you the best of your food, and he’s just serving you Applebee’s and calling that genuine; that’s really offensive to me; the reviewer does a good job at expressing his hopes for Fieri’s sincerity, and his letdown.

·      Iris – I’ve totally been that person in the restaurant; he used specifics to snark, and I understood the restaurant much more

·      Ellen – the location and site of the restaurant tells us that this is a business enterprise; he hawks mac n’ cheese and porkchops, but you should get good food, not bad food; the review is all about the cruel bait and switch; this would be the restaurant for people who wouldn’t want to go to a place like Café Bouloud

·      Amy – part of the role of the reviewer is as gatekeepers; we were supposed to see Black Watch because Jones told us to;

·      Jennifer – This reminds me of the Grand Forks Herald review of the Olive Garden; she goes on to share details and people made fun of her for really appreciating Olive Garden; I can understand why Jones wants to separate himself from reviewers like the Olive Garden lady;

·      Amy – I think there is a value to recognizing the difference between a Martha Stewart brand towel and the actual towel she has in her house; the role of the reviewer is as reporter, to acknowledge that this thing happened and this is the quality of the experience I had

·      Ellen – this is one of the strongest commonalities between blog posts - - I thought Jenna’s account of what was masquerading as review (only plot regurgitation); taking apart what happens when a reviewer applies praise; for better or worse, we are in the business of giving out praise in this profession; you have to learn to do it well and subtly; it is an art, and it seems to me that the review is setting up a false paradigm about praise; praise needs to be descriptive, it can’t be a bunch of adjectives attached to a plot synopsis; it’s very hard to do this; it’s astonishing to me that it remains such a conspicuous problem, even with Black Watch and the attempt to narrativize it, to ignore the extratextual goings-on; the one thing reviewers can rehash easily are basically what the script is; I wanted to talk a little bit about Cody’s blog post and talk about the demand for contextualization; I don’t think all of us left the production with the political problems on our minds in equal measure;

·      Amy – I think the question that Cody raised is that how do we hold reviewers responsible for political or historical contexualization without setting them into ideological camps? the fact of the matter is that most theatre/cultural events, though maybe conservative in some way, but it’s not a bastion of conservatism; where is the line between articulating an ideological and political position of the play and making an argument for/against it?

·      Dorothy – I think Jones did, in a way, make a clear political stance; I tend to historicize theatre reviews even if they’re contemporary; the way he’s comfortable with the military, that this war thing isn’t a big deal - - - this tells me a lot; I think they can’t avoid their political views; I don’t think it’s necessarily beneficial to have someone be more aware organically of their politics, since history won’t have an accurate portrait of this;

·      Cody – it seemed like very cursory mentions of ideas of the play; for me, I didn’t get a sense for what the play would be thematically; I think if a viewer went off of Jones’ review, they’d be really disappointed

·      Ellen – I want to see Jones ask “I felt this about this subject after I saw this play, and I want to know why and how I got there!”;