If you invite a critic to a workshop performance, should you expect a review? Theatre Building Chicago marketing director Tom Ballentine admits he solicited Hedy Weiss’s attendance at Stages, TBC’s annual weekend-long festival of semistaged new musicals last month, providing her with tickets, a hefty press kit, and photos. But after Weiss published capsule reviews of the eight nascent musicals she sampled during a 12-hour day, Ballentine, TBC executive director Joan Mazzonelli, and apparently the entire membership of the New York-based Dramatists Guild were incensed. Admitting up front that she only sat through the first act of each piece—if nothing grabbed her, she moved on—Weiss pronounced the works “deeply flawed” and said the experience suggested the “artform has fallen on very hard times.” It probably didn’t help that her stated point of comparison was Ravinia Festival’s fully staged megaproduction of Gypsy, starring Patti LuPone and backed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
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“Maybe they weren’t happy with the review,” Weiss says, “but frankly, I was extremely generous.” She calls the complaints against her a “complete corruption,” noting “there’s nothing in the press kit that says not to review. Why [else] would they send me photos the next morning? They invited me to come, and there’s a history of both myself and the Tribune reviewing them.” (A search of the Tribune archive, however, only turned up previews of the festival, not reviews.) Weiss says that if she’s told an event isn’t reviewable, she absolutely won’t do it. “I understand the workshop process. That’s fine—don’t invite me. But if you do invite me—unless it’s written in the press kit, ‘don’t review,’ ‘ignore this CD’—and I’m there for 12 hours, don’t be surprised that I’m reviewing.” Chris Jones of the Tribune says the rules about this sort of thing are “hard and fast in New York, where workshops tend to be closed, but in Chicago it’s a gray area. I haven’t reviewed Stages in the past, and I wasn’t planning to this year, but I wasn’t aware that I wasn’t allowed.”
