I Have Only 100, 200, 300 Words. How Do I Write a Fair Review?

On Performance Monkey, a nifty, jazzy blog by a Londoner named David Jay that I have been following, there is a post about a problem I have often faced myself as a theate critic: insufficient word count to cover everything I’d like to write. Jay, who is freelancing for the Sunday Times in Merrie Olde Elizabethland, says one of his critical “pleasures” is “collecting gemstone performances in smaller roles.” But there’s rarely a chance to include them in his pieces.

Buster, get in line. At Back Stage, a review is 300 words; during the years I served as first-string critic, I was allowed up to 500 words. For New York Press, I’ve gone as long as 900 words. Both are absolute luxuries if your name doesn’t happen to be John Lahr, Hilton Als, Ben Brantley or Charles Isherwood.

(As a side note, the column inches those gentlemen receive leaves me scratching my head. Not because long-form reviewing is anathama; if you’ve read even a few of my 1,350+ posts on The Clyde Fitch Report, you know I adore the opportunity to pour our 1,000, 3,000, even 5,000 words on a topic. But in this troubling era of drastically shrinking coverage and steadily declining column inches, when I see The New Yorker devoting two pages to one production — virtually never outside of New York — it strikes me as a critical case of cataclysmic myopia. Are they collectively that clueless regarding how much work there is out there? For heaven’s sake, if Peter Schjeldahl can caravan all over God’s green earth in search of great art reviews, how about we help Als rack up some serious frequent flyer miles on behalf of the regional hinterlands? Then again, given the volume of Charles Isherwood’s travels, perhaps I should omit him from my list of the enviably ensconced.)

But back to Jay’s post, which laments those aforementioned “gemstones” — those performances that seem delightful, delicious, delectable, pick your D, but which simply cannot be included or even touched upon in the final cut. These are the actors, Jay rightly notes, who “may not carry a play” but who nevertheless “nuance it, colour its atmosphere in almost imperceptible ways.”

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