While many will say it is a dying art, I strongly feel there is still a place for theater criticism. Does it sell tickets? Maybe not in the short-run, but that isn’t the goal of a review. A review is for the audience. It invites them into a conversation about the work that they have seen or are thinking about seeing. It provides a language and a framework for audiences to delve deeper into the theater arts and in so doing, makes them more committed and more passionate theater-goers who are likely to become patrons and donors.
In my first college newspaper internship, I was assigned books to review. At my first post-college newspaper job, I was the “Munchmeister,” writing restaurant reviews. From there, I went on to write more than 500 book reviews for two different sites that are now defunct. In 2005, I started writing theater reviews and it is there my heart now lies.
Here are some samples of reviews from the past several years: