Reviews

This week I'm finding myself fascinated with critic's reviews, be them for concerts, movies or theater. This is because a musical that I have been working on premiered last week and every few days a new review is be published about it.
I really like the whole idea of a review; they're not summaries of the event or hard news, and they aren't a general consensus on what the general public thinks of a show, but instead the complete subjectivity and opinion of one reviewer. Focusing on the reviews of New York Musical Theater Festival shows over the last few weeks, especially those of 'I Got Fired: A Semi-autobiographical Sort of Revenge Musical' I have learned a lot about reviewing, and how sometimes I review can be as fun to read as the show itself is to watch.

In a New York Times Article 'Setting Life and Loss to Song, and Seeking a Stamp of Approval' by David Rooney, published on October 8th, compares two shows in the festival that are both kind of musical memoir of times in their writers and stars lives.


Rooney compares Kieth Varney's 'I Got Fired,' the mostly true story of how he was terminated from an office job in 2008, with Anthony Rapp's 'Without You' which chronicles the actor's journey in being part of the original company of 1994's RENT and the sudden death of the show's writer and composer, Jonathon Larson as well as the actor's experience watching his mother slowly fade and eventually pass away.

Rooney speaks of the difference of tone of the two musicals, Without You being a somber piece, with songs by REM, RENT and a few original compositions by Rapp. Rooney seems to hold the fact that the majority of the songs in Without You are not original against Rapp and said that his own deepest connection to the show came only during one song, when melody, meaning and a surge of genuine emotion made me sit up and pay attention. It’s telling, however, that the song was “Losing My Religion.”

Rooney applauds Varney for an original, catchy score but finds fault in it's redundancy. "The lyrics too often fall back on sophomoric vulgarity, but Mr. Varney, who plays himself, writes a punchy tune. And beneath the jocular tone, there’s an expansive shout-out to the masses of overqualified people stagnating in office cubes across the globe, performing menial tasks while less-deserving climbers who refuse to play fair forge ahead." So Rooney kind of turns a little review about a show into a something a lot of people can connect with, through looking at the bigger picture of what it really means to get fired.

I Got Fired, which has overall good reviews, many with instructions on how to make the show better and more universal if it goes further, but I also like that as a critic you can point out things you really do not like about a show, as Avi Glickstein did in October 2nds, nytheatre.com review.


"I found other aspects of the show disconcerting. Kathy, the office boss (..) tosses around racial gags—"sounds like a Mexican garage sale in here"—that seem to be an attempt at imitating un-PC musicals like Avenue Q, except that they are shocking simply for shock's sake. Kathy's blatant racism is never addressed or acknowledged in any way, something I could feel in the audience's progressively tepid responses to the jokes as the performance went on.(..) Maybe there was a foul-mouthed, racist boss or an Asian accountant ("who you?") or a well-endowed, sultry Latina in Varney's office, but in performance, they simply come across as stereotypes." Glickstein writes.

I think that pointing out directly what you do not like in a review is helpful to the creators, and can often help them in future rewrites.

I also like that a review is not necessarily telling you how to feel about a show, just one person's observation, and the reader can decide for themselves what to make of it.