The Critics Say...: 57 Theater Reviewers in New York and Beyond Discuss Their Craft and Its Future Read Online Free PDF Page A

who have meant the most to me wrote in other fields: Fairfield Porter and Clement Greenberg in the visual arts, Arlene Croce and Edwin Denby in dance, Edmund Wilson in literature, and Virgil Thomson in music.
    Ben Brantley: The critics I’ve been most influenced by are probably film critics—certainly Pauline Kael and James Agee.
    Adam Feldman: I love reading Pauline Kael on movies. Her passion for the art form is exciting, even when—or especially when—I disagree with her.
    Michael Sommers: I certainly enjoy reading criticism, all the way to James Gibbons Huneker, the great progenitor of the American theater critics. He was a music and theater critic for various publications in New York at the turn of the last century. He had an urbane, modern style. I also admire the New Yorker style that Robert Benchley had in the 1930s and the amiable persona that he put out.
    Aside from Brooks Atkinson and George Jean Nathan, if you look at many of the New York critics, their careers didn’t last more than 10 or 20 years. They went off and wrote about something else, or they died. I guess there’s some burnout, too. I’ve been very fortunate to have been able to do this for so long—and I still love it. You should give it up once you don’t love it anymore. John Simon’s going to go out of the theater feet first. I think that’s how all drama critics want to go. When drama critics retire, they usually die. Look at what happened to poor Jacques le Sourd. Howard Kissel didn’t last that long after he stopped writing. We have to go forward like sharks or else we die.
    Alexis Soloski: The golden age critics of the 1920s are my heroes: Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, George Jean Nathan, and Dorothy Parker. They have a sense of play and delight that’s informed by a pretty staggering intelligence.
    Elisabeth Vincentelli: I just bought a collection of Mary McCarthy’s theater reviews. I wouldn’t say she’s my favorite, but her reviews are wonderful. It’s like opening a packet of bonbons.
    John Lahr: Mary McCarthy is hilarious. She’s always wrong, but she’s quite stimulating, and she can make an absolutely great argument.
    Ben Brantley: I was recently reading Mary McCarthy’s theater criticism. She’s interesting in the sense of someone whose judgment doesn’t reflect what would be considered good by posterity. She dismissed pretty much everyone, including Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, but she’s great fun to read because of the intellectual energy that she brings.
    Steven Suskin: George Jean Nathan, who worked from 1910 into the 1950s, was good at citing past shows to help put things in perspective.
    Linda Winer: Claudia Cassidy was the music, theater, and dance critic of the Chicago Tribune for maybe 25 years. She was famous and infamous and extremely tough. She was the closest thing I had to a mentor. By the time I got to the Tribune , she was semi-retired. But of all the people who could have patronized me, she always said, “Just call me Claudia.” She would go to a theater, dance, or music event, go back to the paper, pound out a review on her manual typewriter, and then go out dancing with her husband. She had long red hair that, as the mythology goes, Brenda Starr was modeled after. Tennessee Williams said that he owed his career to her because they opened The Glass Menagerie in Chicago, and he was an unknown. Claudia Cassidy went to see it and loved it. She reviewed it and reviewed it and reviewed it until the New York producers had to go and see it. Her name is now connected to Tennessee Williams forever.
    Chris Jones: For me, it would be Claudia Cassidy, who had my job, and in whose footsteps I am proud to follow in. She was an incredible critic, but she is not as well-known in New York as she should be because she wrote in Chicago. If people do know her, they know her as “Acidy Cassidy,” as a hatchet woman known for trashing second-rate touring shows and irritating New York