1. Giving and Receiving Criticism

3. OVERVIEW
Every production engenders a response. Theatre students and other artists need to grow by listening seriously and thoughtfully to the feedback your work receives.

4. Performance
A production is never finished until an audience watches and responds
Feedback allows the artist to grow
Dedicated artists not only listen, they also hear

5. Two sources of feedback
You must hear
You must listen

7. Goal
Understand why compliments are rewarding to hear but that real growth comes from hearing what needs additional attention

8. How to use feedback Criticism is, like art, a form of self-expression
Use criticism that is helpful
Reject that which is not
But, if someone tells you that a moment didn’t work and they were not sure why, you have the beginning of a useful conversation…

10. Receiving criticism Tuck your ego in your back pocket Listen
Take notes
Ask question
ASSESS…especially useful when considering contradictory notes

11. Giving criticism Be direct Be specific Ask questions Be honest Be kind
Respond to successful aspects

12. Goethe on criticism
“I had a fellow as my guest Not knowing he was such a pest, And gave him just my usual fare; He ate his fill of what was there, And for dessert my best things swallowed, Soon as his meal was o’er, what followed? Led by the Deuce, to a neighbor he went, And talked of my food to his heart’s content. ‘The soup might surely have had more spice, The meat was ill-browned, and wine wasn’t nice.’ A thousand curses alight on his head! ‘Tis a critic, I vow! Let the dog be struck dead.”

13. Goethe’s 3 canons
Critics in many fields tend to agree that the principles of Goethe ( ), a German philosopher, critic, and playwright, provide a sound basis for criticism.  
What was the artist (author, actor, director, designer) trying to do?
How well did the artist accomplish it?
Was it worth doing?

15. Dwight Garner HOW TO BE A CRITIC
Criticism is a damned and doomed activity, because critics have (or should have) a sick feeling of bad faith every time they lift the pen or strike the keyboard. Criticism is a parasitical operation that depends not only on the activity of others (most jobs do—a builder doesn’t hew the wood or design the building) but also on the greater activity of others. It takes months or years to make a film or write a book, a few hours or a few days to dash off a review (a long and serious study is another thing altogether). A review, however rapidly composed, may well have an aphoristic brilliance or a mercurial insight that’s missing from a work under consideration (at its best, criticism is aesthetic philosophy practiced in a periodical or is in itself a literary performance). But even in the midst of such inspirations, the critic ought to harbor the shadow of a doubt whether these flourishes are conceived in the spirit of the art or at its expense.

16. Of course, an awful lot of art and music is made and sold and much of it isn’t particularly worthwhile; plenty of movies are deadening to watch, and the attempt to give a neutral parsing of something that sparks revulsion or even boredom is a task made in hell, because it’s a further deadening of the writer’s emotional responses. Negative criticism is as much an obligation of the nervous system—indeed, of the soul—as it is a part of the critics’ job, a responsibility to readers. But the fact that it is so—that negativity is undertaken both to save one’s sanity and to win one’s bread—is all the more reason for critics to submit their own judgments to questioning, to take their own reactions as a crucial part of what’s under their own consideration, reëvaluation, and skepticism. It’s crucial for critics to acknowledge their activity as the personal enterprise that it is. If criticism is the turning of the secondary (the critic’s judgment) into the primary, then the judgment should, in turn, be judged. Criticism, if it’s worth anything at all, is, first of all, self-criticism.

17. It’s an impractical and difficult thing for critics to do
It’s an impractical and difficult thing for critics to do. It’s also a reason why it’s unseemly for self-interested critics to beat their breast in pride over negativity. But this has become a popular stance, as in a Jacob Silverman’s recent post at Slate. Its very title, “Against Enthusiasm,” rankles. Enthusiasm should be more or less the only thing that gets a critic out of bed in the morning, except in the case of ghouls who are aroused by the taste of blood. But Silverman is worried:
If you spend time in the literary Twitter- or blogospheres, you’ll be positively besieged by amiability, by a relentless enthusiasm that might have you believing that all new books are wonderful and that every writer is every other writer’s biggest fan.
And, who knows, it could be so; but I doubt it. Certainly, in the online discussions about movies, invective, endorsement, (often superbly trenchant) analysis, and personal discussion all blend together into a remarkably vigorous and enlightening virtual conversation. Are things really that different in the world of books? Silverman thinks so, and so does Dwight Garner, who wrote in the Times last week in favor of negative criticism. Citing and praising Silverman’s post, Garner says,

18. What we need more of, now that newspaper book sections are shrinking and vanishing like glaciers, are excellent and authoritative and punishing critics—perceptive enough to single out the voices that matter for legitimate praise, abusive enough to remind us that not everyone gets, or deserves, a gold star.
“Punishing”? “Abusive”? It sounds like the strap-wielding father who tells his children that they’re being beaten for their own good, and that’s the institutional menace of criticism—the sense that the critic represents a kind of order or rule to which the unruly artist needs to be recalled. Garner doubles down on the violent metaphors in this strange passage:
To writers, Edna St. Vincent Millay offered the wisest counsel. It rings down the decades. “A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down,” she said. “If it is a good book, nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book, nothing can help him.”

19. To me, it seems obvious that a person appearing in public with his pants down is susceptible to being grievously hurt or kindly helped, whether his book is good or bad. Millay may (for all I know) be right that the knowledge of having written a good book may make it easier to endure a resulting act of cruelty with stoic restraint, but this doesn’t justify the cruelty. It’s certainly the case that artists do well to ignore the nastiness and simply continue creating (Daniel Mendelsohn recently pointed out to me via Twitter that Euripides wrote “The Bacchae” in response to the caricature of him in Aristophanes’ “Thesmophoriazousae”), but critics can’t have it both ways—it’s naïve to think that negative reviews have no effect on artists’ psyches or careers, and critics should consider what it takes to recover from wounds before inflicting them.

20. It’s as silly to deplore nasty criticism as it is to deplore snark or wit or sarcasm or just plain crankiness. It’s how we are—it’s how I am—and nastiness is as inseparable from criticism as it is from family life, from politics, from business, from the playground, and, for that matter, from art itself. One of the defining qualities of art is its implacability—its representation of violent and dangerous emotions, its ardor for and even embodiment of the negative, the destructive, the repugnant. Art is a place of maximal danger; it endangers the soul of the artist no less than the soul of the reader or viewer or listener. Exaltation comes at a price; sublimity, after all, involves a type of terror. Critics don’t need to be nice (programmatic niceness is itself another sort of self-falsification and self-punishment, and is at least as sanctimonious as self-justifying meanness), but they do need to know where they stand.

21. I’m reminded of a great scene from a great movie—Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere,” in which the protagonist, an actor (played by Stephen Dorff) strips naked for a massage. His masseur (not his usual one) prepares to administer the massage by taking off his own clothes, telling the actor, “I feel that if my client is naked, it’s more comfortable if I meet them on the same level.” The relationship, of course, is not on the same level— the actor is prone and vulnerable and the masseur looms above, active and handling the client—which renders their nakedness altogether incomparable. There’s no particular method for practicing criticism, no technique to prescribe and no tone to recommend, any more than there is for art. It’s a matter of sensibility—and of sensitivity.

22. About the NCI
Feb 22, 2017
Will Charles Isherwood Win His Case Against The New York Times?

23. George Jean Nathan ( )
Criticism is the windows and chandeliers of art: it illuminates the enveloping darkness in which art might otherwise rest only vaguely discernible, and perhaps altogether unseen.
Criticism is the art of appraising others at one's own value.
To ask of a critic that he dismiss his personality and its various facets from his criticism is an affront both to him and to criticism itself.

24. Brooks Atkinson
The most fatal illusion is the narrow point of view. Since life is growth and motion, a fixed point of view kills anybody who has one. “There is no joy so great as that of reporting that a good play has come to town.”

25. Michael Billington (b. 1939)
What makes a good critic? The ability to write An insatiable curiosity A point of view Stamina

27. Frank Rich (1949-)
“I found a method for preserving the spontaneity of theatergoing, so essential to the joy of the experience. I didn't read about new plays before seeing them (or read their scripts); I didn't listen to friends either. This allowed me to still feel that rush of anticipation and surprise when the curtain went up…I gradually aspired to write reviews as stories evoking the play's impact rather than as merely report cards leaning on adjectives and plot.”

28. Daniel Sullivan Los Angeles Times, 2009
It may sound strange for a theater critic to say this, but it’s time somebody did: 1. Life is not theater. 2. People are not characters. 3. Truth is not the same as a nice moment. 4. The business of America is not show business… What I like about going to the theater is that you know it’s going to be fiction.

29. Jeremy Barker NY Times, 2012
Reviewing serves its purposes. But it shouldn’t be mistaken for criticism, thoughtful work that explores cultural endeavors and grapples with history, trends, ideas, formal developments in the arts and the relationship of the arts to the broader culture. If professional critics really are the experts they’re supposed to be, then surely they have something more to offer on this front than advice on how best to spend one's Friday night.

30. Robert Trussell
An American Classic Lives Again in Dazzling Lyric Opera Production
Heat, passion, romantic longing, revenge and sudden violence — these are the prime ingredients of flamenco, Shakespeare and film noir. And all are present and accounted for in the 1957 Broadway classic, “West Side Story.”
Kansas City audiences have seen road companies of “West Side Story” at Starlight Theatre and the Music Hall  but never have they experienced this legendary Broadway musical about youth gangs and star-crossed lovers with a full symphonic orchestra and the technical resources the Lyric Opera brings to bear.
“West Side Story,” conceived and choreographed by Jerome Robbins, may be a Broadway musical, but Leonard Bernstein’s score is one of the most complex and mesmerizing to ever grace a theater stage. Director Francesca Zambello — artistic director of both the Washington National Opera and the Glimmerglass Festival — stages the material with the kind of formality one expects in classic operas, but she allows the performers a degree of freedom that gives the music room to breathe. And freedom — or the illusion thereof — is what energizes the original Robbins choreography, recreated for this production by Julio Monge.
This show, in fact, originated as a co-production of Houston Grand Opera, Glimmerglass and Lyric Opera of Chicago.
Based on William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” the book by Arthur Laurents reflects news accounts of the 1950s about youth gangs and juvenile delinquency in New York. Laurents’ plot describes a turf war between two gangs — the Puerto Rican Sharks and the Polish-American Jets — and the series of events that unfold after Maria, sister to the leader of the Sharks, and Tony, a former member of the Jets, meet at a high-school dance and fall instantly in love. Stephen Sondheim, who made his Broadway debut with this show, wrote lyrics that have withstood the passing of time…

31. Ben Brantley – NY Times

32. Theater Reviews

33. Recommended Theatre Blogs