I've got a pretty good day job but, if truth be told, it's my professional dream to be a theatre critic. I tried once. While covering city hall at the Orillia Packet & Times when I was young and single, I volunteered to travel all over southern Ontario to review about two dozen summer theatres — from Ganonoque to Gravenhurst to Grand Bend, I used to say — along with the fall and winter seasons in Toronto. CBC Radio's Ontario Morning would put me on once a week in the summer to talk about the plays I'd seen and they were kind enough to send me a hundred bucks or so every month for the privilege.
Later, when I moved up the Thomson newspaper chain from Orillia to the Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal, I tried to carry on with my tryout to be a real theatre critic but there just wasn't a whole lot of theatre in Northwestern Ontario — and it was a six-hour drive to the Guthrie in Minneapolis (which, for the two seasons I saw there, is vastly overrated and doesn't hold a candle to the work done at Stratford and Shaw, but I digress …)
But it's tough to crack the professional theatre critic lineup. Indeed, I would say it's easier to become a professional actor than to become a professional newspaper critic in Canada if only because there might be two dozen professional theatre critics in this country — and I may be overestimating here — but there's got to be at least a few thousand professional actors. (When I say professional here, I'm talking about earning all or most of your annual income by reviewing live theatre or performing live theatre)
And so we come to John Barry who writes theatre criticism for a newspaper in Baltimore. He doesn't make a lot of money but perhaps he'll get some great notoriety for this charming from-the-heart essay on reviewing theatre:
Okay, it was a crappy production. Tom Stoppard's going to take the bullet. Not that I have anything against Stoppard. It's just that if he hadn't written the play, I wouldn't have wasted my rainy night trying to squeeze something useful out of an amateur production. I start to type: Stoppard is funny. He's smart, he makes you think, he makes you drink. The problem is that unless someone puts a cork in the Merlot at some point, he won't shut up…
That's it, Tom. Take that cork and shove it. And another thing. If I'm only getting paid $55 for a sidebar review, don't tell me to bone up on Richard Feynman if I want to get the jokes. And the actors themselves. Think of them. They have day jobs. You know what a day job is? Did they ever teach you that at Oxford?
It happens every time. I can't slam bad community theatre. I want to. I want to be contrarian. I want people to hang on my next word. The dream will never die: getting drunk on martinis at Sardi's after closing down a Disney-sponsored Broadway production, and possibly, later in life, getting a chance to rant on a weekly basis in the opinion pages of the New York Times [Read the rest of the piece]