Yeesh

Sorry for the arid desert between posts here... it's Tax Time.  'Nuf said.

There's something about going through last year's mileage records (really?  I drove to Fort Worth again that day?) and old pay stubs (really?  that little?) and badly folded receipts (really?!  that much!) that makes me feel all jaded and Wordsworthian:

"The world is too much with us; late and soon / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers..."

I love my theater design job, but annual tax up-gathering sure can suck the juice out of it.  Like a bad review.  (Not much like W's "sleeping flowers," all these shekels.)   

Meanwhile, actual reviews have been good: Gidion's Knot at Kitchen Dog Theater is getting good press.  A tremendous clash of actress power in this show!  (The set's getting nice notice too - "meticulously executed."  I'll take it!)

Here's the full Wordsworth piece for Today's Poetical Pleasure:

         THE world is too much with us; late and soon,
          Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
          Little we see in Nature that is ours;
          We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
          The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
          The winds that will be howling at all hours,
          And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
          For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
          It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
          A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;                        
          So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
          Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
          Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
          Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

A moonlit sea by Carlsen - a public domain image from Vintage Printable

Importance of Critics

Sure I grouse now and then about critics...  Theater people do.

Eventually everyone gets a slighting review and it's no fun when a critic doesn't like a show you've invested a lot of time, thought, work, and blood into.  It's downright maddening when the critic just flat misses the point.  (That sometimes happens.)  Then again, we all enjoy a good review.  But - beyond the tender-ego issues - critics are important.

They keep artists honest.

No one ever intends to be a lazy designer or to phone-in a performance.  No one plans a flop.  Self-respect, honest craftsmanship, and peer pressure all encourage good work.  But there's no motivation quite like public praise or the public pillory!  Bad reviews work like the ol' throw-stones-at-the-miscreant system of justice: if praise is motivating, so is bruising.

For this reason, I wish architects had more critics.

I especially wish local architects had a critic.  The late David Dillon was once on-staff architecture critic for The Dallas Morning News, one of the few in the country.  He was especially good at explaining the complex relationships between real estate interests, politics, power, and money that shape large building developments.  He also had a good sense of architectural form and design, I thought.  Perhaps his reviews were a little too often about Important Buildings Elsewhere or Important Out-of-Town Architects (not helping Dallas' inferiority complex any), but he did  hold local architects to higher standards.  He made Architecture (capital A) a topic for discussion.  Which helps.

I'm saddened to say that New York City, the country, indeed the world-wide architecture conversation, has lost a very good critic with the recent death of Ada Loise Huxtable.

Photo of Ada Louise Huxtable from Atlantic Yards Report

Starting in The New York Times in 1963 and writing her last piece for The Wall Street Journal last month, Ada Louise Huxtable helped set the tone of architectural discussion for half a century.  She was an early advocate for historic preservation.  She wrote several books including Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard? which I read in school long ago... and which remains wonderfully biting and relevant.    She even received her share of criticism of her own work - including a Pulitzer and a MacArthur "genius" grant, which is not bad.

We need more critics this good.


Read this this article HERE for an interesting discussion of the role of architecture critics today (well, 2006).  Or look in the Set Design Archive  HERE  for my earlier posts on "Critics & Reviews."

Pictures in the Paper

Part of the set designer's career is to keep track of what "the papers" - nowadays mostly blogs - have to say about your shows. Luckily, reviews for my now-on-stage productions have been pretty good, which is always a relief.

(Many theater people say they never read reviews... yet somehow they always know.  Psychic, you think?  Me, I read the reviews.)

Here's a sampling:

Boeing, Boeing at WaterTower Theater

Sketch for Boeing, Boeing at WaterTower Theater

HERE's a pretty detailed review of WaterTower's Boeing, Boeing at CriticalRant.com

Ruth at Kitchen Dog Theater

And a review of Kitchen Dog's Ruth HERE at The Observer.

Next up - Circle Theatre's Mistakes Were Made.  I thought the show and the chief actor were electrifying in rehearsal!  Guess we'll see what the critics have to say soon... opens Friday.  Tomorrow!

Or, better still, buy a ticket to one or all of these fine shows and form your own opinion.  

Good Reviews!

The Whipping Man is getting very good reviews.  Always nice.

As a set designer though, you shouldn't necessarily expect to set your set in any review, good or bad.  (I've mostly been pretty lucky.)  Here's my take on how reviews work:

1)  A review will always identify the theater venue and company, the show, and its creators (playwright, composer, etc.).  If the show has credentials - Broadway, megahit, recent film staring Justin Beiber, Tonys, whatever - that gets mentioned toward the top.  And there's at least a brief explaination of what the show is about and its type: musical. drama, comedy etc.
2)  A review will always discuss the acting.  Almost always the direction.  The amount of detail depends more on the space allotted to the text, than to any other factor.

And then... I figure the  reviewer has room for one more thing...

3)  If the show is a new work, then the reviewer needs to spend much longer explaining the story than for, say, Hamlet.  This usually exhausts all available ink.

But then - all in a rush...

4)  The reviewer will try to throw in a fast mention of set/lights/costumes/props (ha! as if).

If the new show happens to be easy to explain or if there is extra room because the actors' names are short, the reviewer may elaborate on production values or on some other aspect of the production that catches his or her fancy - maybe the remodeled theater lobby.  Online critics get more room (blog-inches and pixels for words not being in short supply), but mostly they forget that fact or follow the traditional formula or get tired and want to go to bed.  Once in a great while, a reviewer will get excited about a set or costume or lighting effect and will steal words from the other stuff.  If a "technical" aspect of the production pops to the top of the review, then the critic really loved or hated it!

So far The Whipping Man is getting good mentions for the playwright and play, the actors and direction, and "production values" have been discussed mainly online.  (Nicely.)  In print though, there was apparently only room to discuss the fire drill.

Sigh.

Public domain image.

In fairness to the critic, maybe the fire drill was added as in-fairness-to-the-actors?  They were very cool about it, actually.  

Honestly

Some playwrights make it hard to design much of a set.

Either they set their story in yet another default living room - which can be designed well, of course it can - but seriously?  How many good, different, nuanced present-day living rooms does any designer have in them?

Or the playwright picks somewhere so impossibly big, grandiose, or detailed that few performance spaces or budgets can handle it well.  Or too many scene changes ditto.

Or they pick somewhere... visually boring.  Recently it was a soccer field.  Flat.  Green.  Grass.  (Grass if the budget allows anyway.)

Reason for this mini-rant?  A reviewer objected to my giant leaves/clouds as too fanciful for a soccer field.  Because there are (and this is very true) no trees on soccer fields.  Of course the playwright actually describes a soccer field with autumn leaves...

Sigh.

Playwrights.  Please consider setting your stories in locations with both some fresh visual potential and some possibility of a reasonable budget.  Personally, I think these might be interesting settings and some have been used a few times:

A garage, either residential or a repair shop; a retail store (that doesn't need too much stock displayed); a basement rec. room, possibly taken over by the computer game obsessed teen; a tool shed and garden; a fishing cabin; inside a camper; a circus tent or sideshow; inside a warehouse, the kind with tall racks and rolling ladders and dollies; inside a huge storm drain, a la Ninja Turtles' hideout; a computer room with banks of CPUs and lift-up floor and ceiling panels; a steam room; a ship's engine room; a teachers' lounge; a Las Vegas bar; the crawl space under an old house and the kitchen above; maybe an attic room and on top of the roof outside the window; an artist's studio; a space ship; a dorm room; a nursing home bed-sitting room; the bottom of a tenement light-well and/or its communal laundry room...

Public domain image of computer room from Clker.com

Don't one or two of these locations just cry out for a story to go with them?

Earlier posts on the slandered leaves HERE.

Set Designer's Day, the Press, and Treasure Hunting

Always nice when a day starts with a photo of one of your shows on the cover of the Dallas Morning News' weekend Guide: a close-up of actress Molly Franco, who plays Anne Frank.  (Beautifully plays.)  So far both The Diary of Anne Frank and The Frequency of Death! are getting good reviews... and with those, a few nice mentions for their sets.  (I'll take "pretty spectacular" when I can get it.)  Deeper into the Guide is a nice shot of Frequency under "Hot Show of the Week."

(You can read DMN's online review of The Diary of Anne Frank  HERE.  And HERE's their review of The Frequency of Death.)

But no time to reread for me.  I need to hop into the car to make the visit with the scenic painter on The Secrets of a Soccer Mom that was supposed to happen yesterday.  It's even colder this morning!  Poor painter.

After that, a shopping trip to that favorite source for discount fabric, The Golden d'Or (which translates as "The Golden Golden").  It's having its annual HUGE SALE.  I'll see what treasure I can dig up!

Pirate treasure painting by, I believe, Howard Pyle, public domain

Later tonight is a run-through of Collapse at Kitchen Dog, followed by a really late production meeting.  So much for Friday Date Night, huh?

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.

First Review Is In

The Traveling Lady opened last night (a good show, I thought, more on that later).  This morning the first review is online, from the Dallas Morning News.  A good one.

As a designer - anyone in theater - you try to develop a thick hide.  You must.  I'm lucky that I've never been afflicted with terrible nerves, so I can usually sit through Opening Night stolidly, only cringing a little when I spot a gap in the masking or whatever.  (My friend Wade paced the lobby.  I do miss Wade.)  But it IS a relief to have a first review positive, some slight shock absorber for whatever jolt comes next.  Best if the good one is from a major source, though I'm glad to have a good opinion from anyone!  Grateful.  But, say, the Tony committee's opinion would count more, in a worldly way, than my Mom's.  (Sorry Mom.)  Still, the insulative qualities of one good review are sometimes insufficient to cushion the next blow... take my word for this.  So I'm still braced.

The sad part about reviews - once you recover from the elation, hurt feelings, outrage, or delight  - is that it colors all the rest of that show.  If you suffered during the process, that is soothed a bit by the flung roses of a triumph; if you're trashed in review, then however proud you feel of the work, it's roses turning brown.

Reviews mess with your head.