What do playwrights (and their producers) want from the press? Feature stories! And lots of them. What they definitely don’t want are reviews of any play they haven’t declared totally finished. Never mind if the script has already traveled the workshop road and is getting a full production with sets, costumes, professional actors, and ticket sales to the public–if it has the word developmental attached to it, it’s verboten. Dramatists Guild president (and Sondheim collaborator) John Weidman, in town for “Hold the Press,” a forum hosted by the Theatre Building last week, put it this way: “Work in development never should be reviewed. The longer the critics can be kept away, the better.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The panel–part of Stages 2007, the Theatre Building’s annual festival of new musicals–was a response to the tempest that blew up over Hedy Weiss’s capsule reviews of the festival for the Sun-Times last year. Weiss, admitting up front that she caught mostly just first acts, wrote that the shows were so inferior they made her fear for the future of the genre. She’d been invited to the festival, had reviewed it in the past, and had not been expressly told that she was not to review this time. In fact, as she noted in her own defense later, one of her earlier (more positive) reviews had been cited by the festival in a grant proposal. But the Dramatists Guild, which apparently didn’t have all the facts, rushed into attack mode. Weidman issued a statement calling Weiss’s column a “shocking and irresponsible betrayal” and a “debacle” that could tarnish Chicago’s future as a theater hub. This set off a letter-writing campaign that turned into a virulent national castigation. Everyone came out muddied, but that didn’t end the discussion.
Jones says he called Steppenwolf and said, “Wait a minute, you have enough confidence in this play to produce it in New York? In a production that will be reviewed in New York? But you don’t want reviews here? That’s bullshit. That’s not treating Chicago appropriately.” Faced with what he saw as “an out-of-town tryout for an off-Broadway production,” Jones says, he felt he had to review. “I’m not doing my job if I allow the New York critics to weigh in on a play by this iconic Chicago theater, and somehow we’ve ignored it.”
Moot Suit
