Sunday 9th June 2013 by Will Langdale
What's the point of critics if no one's listening?
Let’s face it, if you’re going to take a significant part of the arts press and rename them “critics”, part of the label means they’re going to need to vocally hate stuff. And hate stuff they do. The art of the hatchet job has been a critical staple since time immemorial – there’s even an award for it these days – but sometimes these cultural tastemakers can get it oh-so wrong. Sometimes a show’s dismal critical response is only equalled by the audience’s overwhelmingly positive one. As The Guardian’s Lyn Gardner bemoans, musical theatre often gets particularly cruel critical stick.
Lyn Gardner should know. She was one of many, many critics who panned the original production of Les Miserables at the Barbican in 1985, adapted from Victor Hugo’s classic novel of 1862: “that they manage to stage it at all is a minor miracle” she wrote in the now-defunct City Limits. Michael Billington was kind when he said “Hugo’s novel is infinitely more dramatic than the musical” – Michael Ratcliffe, of The Observer, spent half his column length in vicious polemic at the RSC, who staged it: “they have emasculated Hugo’s Olympian perspective and reduced it to the trivialising and tearful aesthetic of rock opera”. Kenneth Hurren of The Mail on Sunday was, mercifully, merely bored: “watching it is rather like eating an artichoke: you have to go through an awful lot to get very little.” 25 years later, now the longest-running musical in the West End, it turns out audiences quite like artichokes.
Another show that’s celebrating over a decade in the West End despite extremely bad reviews is We Will Rock You. Bad is perhaps an understatement – We Will Rock You’s reviews are preposterously awful, totally, singularly appalling, and couldn’t have been much worse if Ben Elton had a made a Producers-esque decision to make the worst musical of all time. To some, such as the Daily Mirror’s Kevin O’Sullivan, that may as well have been what actually happened: “Ben Elton should be shot for this risible story”. Caitlin Moran, from The Times, balked at “two-minute blasts of knob gags and misplaced polemic”, and The Guardian’s Brian Logan called it “ruthlessly manufactured”.
Despite We Will Rock You’s success – productions can be found all over the world – some of these reactions are understandable given Ben Elton’s status as a hero of underground comedy in the 1980s. Having written for shows such as The Young Ones, and been part of the pro-Labour Red Wedge, which attempted to oust Thatcher in the 1987 general election, Elton’s chintzy pastiche of ‘revolution’ 15 years later was something of a slap in the face.
Some shows are popular even before they’ve hit the stage, and one show that made the news for its record-breaking £12 million of pre-sold tickets was Dirty Dancing. Based on the hugely successful movie and with thousands of fans desperate to see it before it even looked like a half decent show, reticent critics reviewed like they knew it was a waste of time. Poor Quentin Letts, from the Daily Mail, was confused by moving platforms and concluded that “Dirty Dancing is a night of good, jiggly rubbish, blameless silliness”. Lyn Gardner, this time at The Guardian, was once again on hand to chastise: “It would take a complete rewrite for this to have any chance of being a satisfying theatrical experience”. Whatsonstage.com’s Michael Coveney ended his article like a fallen soldier, insisting that some corner of the Aldwych Theatre will be forever critical: “in the end, you feel as though you’ve been cudgelled by a brand product, not gone through the genuine experience of musical theatre”.
Dirty Dancing, by the way, has just returned to the West End after a successful national tour, still going strong since it opened in 2006.
It’s a hard life, being a critic. You spend your days honing a nuanced opinion of the twentieth production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream you’ve seen in a decade, all the while trying to fashionably keep up with whatever they’re doing at the Royal Court. You read Ibsen, Brecht and Churchill – Caryl, not Winston, you philistine. A 3-hour musical with 20 or more songs derived from other, more popular pieces of media can seem like a bit of an irksome prospect. It doesn’t help that more than ever, critics are not at all guardians of a production’s success. Shows like The Book of Mormon fill seats with clever marketing rather than reasonably warm reviews.
So we’d like to tip our hats to people that largely don’t care whether Rock of Ages is going to provide a serious interrogation of the politics of the Sunset Strip. Well done to everyone who wants huge casts, awesome songs, a romantic subplot and to leave the theatre feeling on top of the world. Good on them. Critics are boring. Leave them to their newspapers and blog post comment wars – I’m off to watch Baby not being put in a corner, in three-part harmony if at all possible.
You can read loads of original reviews of Les Miserables on one incredibly dedicated tumblr.
Here's where the BBC’s roundup of reviews of We Will Rock You can be
found.
Finally, here's Whatsonstage.com’s roundup of Dirty Dancing’s reviews.