Art of Criticism

(Page 2 of 4)

So, you know, it was cool. You should totally go. Just don’t go with your parents. They’ll probably ruin it.

************

Don’t take your parents, indeed. And definitely don’t take a critic – let alone, two dozen of them. I wrote this review of Jason Robert Brown’s new musical, 13, while participating in the third annual National Endowment for the Arts Journalism Institute in Theater and Musical Theater, held this past February at the USC Annenberg School of Communication in Los Angeles.

I was one of twenty-five professional arts journalists and critics from around the country chosen to participate in the institute, which offers an intensive immersion in the theatrical world of Los Angeles.

L.A., we quickly learned, is home to more than 200 theater companies – every one of them anxious to prove that important theater sometimes happens outside of New York City.

“One of our major efforts here is to elevate the reputation and profile of what we do here in Los Angeles,” said Michael Ritchie, artistic director of the Center Theatre Group, on the first day of the NEA institute.

Center Theatre Group runs three theaters (including the Taper Forum, where 13 premiered) and boasts an annual budget of $45 million. Past premieres by the company include Biloxi Blues, Angels in America, and Children of a Lesser God. This is no minor theater company, even by world standards.

Why, then, the insecurity? Something of an answer came the next night from John Lahr, senior theater critic for The New Yorker. Speaking before an audience that included notable movers and shakers of the L.A. theatrical world as well as journalists from far-flung regions of the country, Lahr declared:

“If it’s not in The New Yorker, it doesn’t exist in the culture.”

To be sure, Lahr has written about theatrical events in Los Angeles and elsewhere for The New Yorker; his is certainly the most broadly studied and thoughtful voice in American theater criticism today. But the implication of his assertion was nonetheless clear: The majority of important theater happens in New York; and you can tell it is important because it is the theater most often covered in The New Yorker.

It’s a fair bet that John Lahr will never critique 13 in the pages of The New Yorker. Brown’s musical bonbon will not attain the broad cultural significance of even the least works of Tennessee Williams or David Mamet. Its songs, though catchy, are destined to be washed away in the wake of Disney’s High School Musical tsunami. Because 13 calls for a cast of thirteen teenage singer/actor/dancers, it won’t become a staple of regional or school theater companies, most of which do not enjoy the wealth of available talent one finds in Los Angeles.

But whether 13 exists in Lahr’s culture, it exists in somebody’s culture. How else to explain the sold-out crowd on the night that I attended the production?

As I thought about Lahr’s comment over the two weeks of the institute, I found my mind constantly drawn back to Montana, to the thousands of local productions over the years – many of them quite ambitious – that have never made it into the pages of The New Yorker, nor any other major national chronicle of the theater.

Does this mean that Montana theater (or dance, or music) does not exist in “the culture?” Of course not.

More than anything, Lahr’s bias only served to silhouette the dominant fact of American culture today: its fragmentation.

Over the course of just one generation, the range of art and entertainment available to anyone, anywhere, anytime has expanded exponentially.

And people are eating it up. Headlines often paint a sorry portrait of the modern arts world, but the facts speak clearly: More people spend more money on more art today than ever before in American history. Culture – in the form of music, movies, performances, and so on – is now the largest American export, at more than $134 billion per year.