Reviews

Another good review in for As You Like It (Trinity Shakespeare in general).

Funny, as much as reviews encourage or depress the reviewed-upon-one, they have relatively little effect: one producer told me a great review only adds 10% in ticket sales.  Any review gets the word out.  I've found that individual reviews - fantastic ("stunningly brilliant") or terrible ("crappy") - don't seem to have much immediate effect on a career... though their accumulation does.

(I've seen one critic campaign, over many reviews, to get a designer fired - and succeed.  The reviewer has started another campaign, so far inconclusive; I'm rootin' for the excellent designer!  Not me BTW though as a bystander I caught a little shrapnel.  Not me yet.)

But a review's effect isn't always what you'd expect.  If, say, a set gets mentioned favorably first in a review, such prominent praise is not always helpful to a designer's relationship to every director in the world... understandable, if they get dinged in the same review, but maybe even if that director gets praised in second place...

Of course, most theater people "don't read reviews."

There's a great NPR "Fresh Air" interview with actor Robert Duval where he quotes an early painful review - remembering it decades later, word for word.