Author Archives: Zhenya Lavy

When They Take and You Give Reviewer Tickets

  By Zhenya Lavy • November 21, 2014 - 12:34 PM , , , ,

Prompted by a question about reviewers that was posted in the Facebook group, Seattle Theater Writers, I drafted a substantial enough response to merit sharing here, as well… especially given a related conversation I took part in with Ohio friends earlier this week.

ORIGINAL QUESTION:

Out of curiosity and some frustration I am inquiring about the following. It has always been my understanding that there is an informal contract signed between the inviting organization and the reviewer that there will be a review written of the show that the reviewer attended. After a production in which we have had three reviewers come to review it, none of whom wrote an actual review, I am just curious if my understanding of this contract was based in an actual understanding or rather some naiveté. Or if instead it is representative of the seattle freeze of rather than saying people didn’t like something, they just don’t say anything at all. Thoughts?

 

MY RESPONSE:
As a former managing editor of a newspaper and editor of a feature magazine; a sometimes reviewer of theatre, dance, music, art; a doctoral candidate in theatre history & criticism; and a maker and producer of theatre, I have a lot of thoughts on this matter.

Short version:

There is NO circumstance (except, perhaps, death or act of God) to justify any person or organization taking a review comp and then NOT publishing a review (or not publishing the review in a timely manner). NONE.

Additional comments for those with stamina:

  • If you didn’t like the show — and you believe that means there is nothing to be said or that you are doing the artists or the audience some kind of service by being silent — then you do not understand the work, should not be representing yourself as a reviewer, and should NEVER accept a review comp. To be clear: YOU ARE NOT A REVIEWER, no matter how many times you have published your thoughts about pieces you have seen.
  • If an editor pulls the plug on a review due to publication constraints (actual column-inch print issues due to other breaking news or the editor’s own planning incompetence, not problems regarding whether the writer could make deadline), then letters need to be sent to that editor and publisher requesting payment for the cost of the reviewer’s ticket. And if that editor’s behavior continues, and your org pays for advertising, you need to talk to your account manager about pulling your business. (And if that kind of problem is encountered regularly with a publication with which any cooperative advertising is in place, then the advertising cooperative needs to decide as a group how it will handle the publication’s failure to produce to expectation.)
  • Any writer not affiliated with a publication that vets contributors through a hiring/contract and editorial process who is not willing or able to operate with the same standards of professionalism and quality as expected of said publications, should NEVER accept review comps.
  • Whether a writer is publishing on a personal blog or a publication that instructs readers about what to see has NO BEARING on whether they should be exempted from writing a review if they accepted a comp ticket. You took a free review ticket? It’s now your job to produce a review — and to do so in a timely manner.
  • Any reviewer (independent or otherwise) or publication unwilling or unable to PUBLISH a review within days of having seen the production — generally less than a week… as in, by the Thursday before the next weekend… in time to have an impact on the next weekend’s ticket sales — needs to let the producing organization know what the expected publication schedule will be PRIOR to accepting any review comps. No oopsies. The arts sections of publications aren’t generally ruled by the same breaking news variables as the rest of the papers. I always knew a full month in advance, at least, what my arts sections were going to look like. Anyone who tries to convince you otherwise is full of shit. And independent publishers/bloggers have even more control over their publication schedule so… even more full of shit and, moreover, NOT a legitimate reviewer.
  • Any person who represents him- or herself as a reviewer, accepts one (or more) comps, and does not publish a review is stealing from the arts org — except under my aforementioned death or act of god exceptions. If they don’t produce a review at all, INVOICE THEM for the ticket. They aren’t a charity, but your org probably is. At least if you invoice them you have documentation for writing it off as bad debt.
  • If you are a producing organization, you have a responsibility to know who the reviewers are and whether the “named” online publications function professionally or more “loosely.” Do not give legitimacy to incompetent reviewers or erratic publications by giving them comp tickets. If they’re not capable of approaching your work with critical acumen or intellectual contextualization — going beyond the vapid “I liked it” / “I didn’t like it” garbage we so often see that’s supported by nothing more than plot synopses and a general run-down of the actors (maybe sprinkling in references to other things they’ve been in) — then they are NOT reviewers, they are NOT doing anything more than your well-written press release already does, and they do NOT deserve your free ticket unless you really, truly think it’s worth limiting your potential revenue for that.
  • If you are a producing organization and are about to give a person or publication rep a review comp: (1) You have every right and responsibility to ASK first what date they expect the review to be published. If they don’t know, don’t give them a ticket until they do. If the intended publication date is not going to be early enough to have any impact on your bottom line, tell them, ask them if there’s any way it can be moved up, and if it’s still going to be too late then don’t give them a ticket. (2) With anyone not reviewing for a known, regularly published media outlet, you need to make it utterly clear that you are giving them a ticket only with the understanding and condition that they are going to produce a review – and do so in a timely manner — and that if they don’t, they will be invoiced and responsible for payment of the ticket after the fact.
  • If you are a producing organization and are asked for comp tickets by someone you’ve never heard of who is claiming to be a reviewer, ask for credentials. Do some research. Find out if they’re legit. If they work more independently, actually assess their work (what have they reviewed that you or someone you know also saw?). THEN decide if you want to reduce your revenue by the cost of their ticket.
  • If you are a producing organization, you should never feel OBLIGATED to give more than one ticket to any reviewer. A reviewer can ask nicely — and you can decide whether you have sufficient business reason or ability to give away an extra seat to THAT particular person/publication for THAT particular show — but they should not expect more than a single comp ticket for themselves because it’s all that’s required for them to do the job they are there to do. Their primary purpose for being there is to work — to do a JOB — not to fund their personal date night. And funding their personal date night certainly isn’t YOUR responsibility. I don’t take my spouse to my workplace, and unless you and your spouse work together you don’t, either. Remember: their spouse or date or person reeled in off FB at the last minute is NOT going to write a review and is not going to feel responsible for talking up your show or convincing anyone else to buy a ticket. If you have extra free tickets to give away, give them to the cast, whose friends and family are far more likely to have an impact on your bottom line by spreading the word.
  • Producing organizations need to communicate with each other about people who take a review comp but don’t produce a review — or don’t produce a review in a professionally timely fashion — and EVERYONE should stop inviting those people to their shows. Name names. Those people are not reviewers, they are arts enthusiasts. Let them buy tickets like the rest of us. We should not subsidize their personal entertainment.

For those who may not remember: Joe Boling, who attended more performances in some years than there are days and who, if memory serves me, even sacrificed a relationship to feed his theatre passion — who wrote copious numbers of reviews (all of which called it like he saw it, no squishy “feelings” bullshit pulling of punches) and compiled end-of-year “top” lists that were actually representative of the broad range of local activity and WORTH paying attention to and celebrating — purchased the tickets to every show he attended. Whether he reviewed or not. And he refused to accept a comp even if you begged him to take one from you out of mere appreciation for his project and desire to help support him in continuing the effort. The man bought every ticket.

Let there be no doubt or confusion: We have more ability to shape the critical climate around our work than we tend to think. We need to stop diminishing our work by legitimizing incompetent reviewers and a sub-par critical environment. We need to celebrate and support those reviewers who actually write with critical acumen, who craft quality observations and prose WORTHY of the time and effort we pour into creating our work — and we all know that means supporting them whether their review is glowing or less favorable than we might have hoped.

Last thought for the moment: The two people I consider our region’s top reviewers do this for free. Every now and then you should kick them something via “Tip the Web” or whatever mechanism possible. Not to buy their opinion, but to fuel their capacity and enthusiasm to go on in a difficult and often thankless role.

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Strategies for Working with the Media

  By Zhenya Lavy • November 17, 2014 - 11:42 AM , , ,

A friend in Ohio asked a question on Facebook that generated a flurry of discussion, including a lengthy response from me. The critic in question is one I knew well, as I had rejected (for all the reasons JT Buck sites in his inquiry below) his appeals that I employ him as a reviewer both when I was at the newspaper for which he now writes and when I was at the magazine. Given the volume of commentary and general feedback about my remarks, I thought they merited sharing here, as well.

ORIGINAL POST BY JT BUCK:

Statement and Question: I just read a review of a local theatre piece in a weekly paper, written by a well-established critic with advanced academic credentials. While the review was positive in its appraisal of the show overall, the production team and audience were still done a disservice. Said review was so full of poor writing (theme misidentified with plot, logical fallacies, factual errors, confusing structure) I actually felt embarrassed for both the author and paper. In a sophomore communications class this would be C work at best. Worse still is that this seems to be a common occurrence not only from that particular outlet, but from several in the region.

We have an amazing arts scene here which requires and begs for intelligent and skilled coverage (both critical and feature) in our local media. Yet such coverage (with some notable exceptions) is too often not available.

So, Question: how should we in the arts community best respond to incompetent critics? Remember that the institution in question does a fine job of relating to the media on the marketing and editorial side. This is specifically a case of a critic who simply isn’t doing the job well, and doing harm to those he’s covering in the process.

 

MY RESPONSE:

As someone who’s worked the media side, the performer/producer side, and the arts advocate side in both Ohio and in Seattle, I offer these thoughts as starting points for actual discussion in your community around the question JT asked:

  1. The media outlets are under no obligation to cover theatre at all, so first it’s important to be grateful that there’s still anyone at a paying publication writing about theatre at all. Send thank you notes after you’ve been reviewed — to both the reviewer and the editor — no matter the substance of the review. Goodwill gestures are not futile.
  2. The media outlets are businesses, and they don’t cover theatre out of any sense of altruism or “greater good of art.” They cover it to the extent that they can make money: that they can secure advertisers willing to pay to support it. This means the arts orgs — large and small alike — should feel an obligation to advertise if they want coverage of the art form at all. (NOTE: Buying an ad doesn’t define the kind of coverage or review they’ll get, and no org should expect it to. You’d be amazed the number of conversations I had with theatre org administrators irate that their production did not receive glowing reviews even through they advertised.)
  3. The large houses need to budget adequately for stand-alone advertising. The small houses need to develop a cooperative advertising model that allows them to pool resources and possibly negotiate better rates.
  4. The PR kit you provide will go a long way to assisting in the quality of the work written about you. Draw out the major themes, structural elements, etc., that you are working with. Point critics in the direction of the historical and critical context you’d most like to see them tap into. Provide resources for further reading. Without descending to empty, unsupported hype and/or hyperbole, help them see your work as part of the larger (state, national, global) picture — not relegate it to the local/not-Broadway/inferior zone. They’re still going to write what they want, but you have done what you can to shape initial perceptions.
  5. I can’t stress enough the importance of cooperative efforts such as mentioned in #3 above.
  6. Develop a professional relationship with the reviewers and arts editors. Appropriate opportunities for a phone call or other communication — with realistic expectations for timing/frequency/significance/etc.
    Ex: If you’re launching a season announcement, it’s not a bad idea to help them understand important community tie-ins, special interest stories, etc, to help them decide if there is justification for a feature in advance of one of the shows’ openings… or which 1 piece of the season (assuming they’ll do advance features on no more than 1, at best, for a smaller house) you think might merit extra attention.
  7. Provide them with plenty of lead time to plan coverage. Unless they tell you otherwise, 4 weeks’ notice isn’t enough. For calendar entries, at least 6 weeks’ lead (gives the media time to process it, and gives you the best shot of having it hit at least 3 weeks in a row before your show opens so it can solidify as a real thing in people’s minds… in general, people need to see things 3x at least before they take action). The media outlets need time to process your info through their operations, decide what/how to cover it, etc. And you want to give them every opportunity of getting any advance coverage they might do published far enough in advance for their readers to have time to fit it into their social calendars if they want to.
  8. Never miss a deadline or ask for special favors (ex: calendar entries, advertising).
  9. Provide quality images to accompany your advance kit and your reviewer kit. A less-than-stellar production with great images is going to have a better chance of good coverage than a great piece with crappy (or no) photography — or images conveying no action or other interest.
  10. Develop a solid, non-media network for effective and coordinated postering, postcard distribution, etc. — as well as communities of visibility and conversation (in person and via social media) around your work. The onus is on you to get people interested in supporting your work, not on the media outlets. But if you successfully generate the right kind of buzz, the media outlets will notice and will want to be part of it.
  11. Don’t expect review coverage for runs of 2 weeks or less. Especially for the weekly publications, it makes little sense for the publication to invest in review coverage of something unless their readers will have adequate opportunity to take action on their review… i.e. still be able to go see the piece.
  12. Be prepared for the possibility that their response to your request for better coverage of your work is something along the lines of “Then do better work.” What does this mean? Always take a professional approach. Work together. Demonstrate that the theatre community is a force, not disjointed happenstance. Exude quality in every element of your administration and interactions with them — including providing the highest quality content and materials you can. Be so good and professional — and helpful in providing them with content/materials that make their work easier — that they really, truly want to help you and to see you succeed.
  13. Be honest with yourself and them about the work you do. Give them reason to trust what you say about the work you are doing. It’s not all good. It’s definitely not all great. Indiscriminate use of words like “brilliant,” “innovative,” “unique,” reads as sophomoric and untrustworthy … and it’s certainly not your place to tell them whether something is going to be the “theatre event of the year.”
  14. Expanding upon #13: Don’t conflate YOUR production with “the Tony-Award winning” production [insert whatever NOT your production accolade you like]. If the thing wasn’t said about YOUR show [ex: “…a laugh-a-minute rollercoaster of fun” ~NY Times], don’t put it on your poster (or in your pr materials unless you attribute it clearly as having been said about someone else’s production). You’ll dupe some unsuspecting community member who doesn’t understand it’s not about YOUR show… who shows up at your venue expecting something of a quality that’s toured from NY and is neither impressed nor amused… and who then relays the disappointment to their friends. You may have gotten a few more people in to see your show, but you’ve done a larger disservice to the rest of local theatre community because you’ve likely driven that person to only take a chance on the big theatre institutions in the future.

Read the original post and full comment thread here:
https://www.facebook.com/jtbuck1978/posts/10152390203211496

Mini-Review of Fangs

  By Zhenya Lavy • November 14, 2014 - 10:13 AM , , ,

This time last year, I was working my way through the (digital) stack of original plays submitted to our inaugural “New Year, New Play” Sunday Salon. When I got to the title page of Jim Moran’s Fangs, I thought, “Vampires? Werewolves?” But what I read was something very different — delightful, even. We gave Fangs a developmental reading in January and were thrilled to learn it would receive full production at Eclectic Theater  and would even feature two of the actors from our reading –Samantha Routh and Shane Regan — albeit in different roles. Fast forward to last night, when Joseph and I attended its opening.

One thing I appreciate in Fangs is Jim’s excellence at crafting simple, inherently comedic characters — ably balancing text and space so the actors can really crack them open — with a more subtle approach to humor that yields the biggest laughs… every time. In this production, Ashley Bagwell takes the already wonderfully quirky character of Ed and develops him with such a fullness of presence and action that it’s hard not to walk away without feeling that this smaller role actually anchors the entire show. And Shane Regan takes Toby from his unassuming, uptight beginnings through a complete unraveling that… you should see for yourself. Jim has less success with the other characters, whose banter or attitudes are “trying” to be witty or funny, and through them we feel the playwright trying a bit too hard: these larger characters, ironically, become reduced in such a way that they never transcend caricature. That said, while Joseph and I have endured many a “funny” play of late that delivered few real laughs at all from anyone other than friends/family of the production, Jim’s Fangs succeeded in making us laugh a lot. The character of Ed alone — LMFAO!!!

Want to support new work by local playwrights in a vibrant community of development? Check out Fangs. Want the old-school, small theatre culture legacy of Capitol Hill to survive the neighborhood — and artistic — gentrification? Get out and support Eclectic and the other orgs hanging onto their real estate by the skin of their teeth.