A Critic’s Life

This month marks the one-year anniversary of the conclusion of my career as a performing-arts critic.

To be clear, I still hold numerous opinions about our country’s cultural landscape, and I still get paid to issue those opinions in the form of what I hope are fleet, funny, and felicitously phrased reviews. 

What has changed is the subject matter I am tasked with professionally consuming each week. I continue to review a boatload of books, a multitude of movies, and the stray streaming series, but I no longer cover music concerts, ballet performances, or live theater of various kinds. 

That I ever did now strikes me as so unlikely—so representative of a now-bygone era both in the arts and in local journalism—as to be almost unbelievable. I find myself asking: Did I really see the senescent remnant of the Beach Boys perform with symphonic accompaniment? Did I actually see Riverdance in person and not just on public television? Well, I did, but it all seems like a bit of a dream . . . 

In the summer of 2013, I received an invitation to write performing-arts reviews for my hometown daily newspaper. My initial assignment was to review the city’s local dance troupes, but my mandate eventually expanded to include classical music, opera, and the odd choral ensemble, pop act, or touring production.

Now, my acquaintanceship with pirouettes and Puccini was limited compared to my deep knowledge of, say, the novels of John Updike or the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Even so, I knew I had the advantage of trusting my own eyes and ears: When I watched or listened to something, I was confident in expressing an opinion about its relative strengths and weaknesses. That I could do so in an hour or less undoubtedly secured my position for years to come.

You see, my reviews were earmarked for the actual newspaper that was printed the morning following an opening-night performance. There was a space waiting for me in the Metro section, but if I wanted it to be filled with my great insights, the copy desk needed my review by 11:45 p.m. Early on, I missed this deadline by a seemingly trivial (but actually incredibly significant) 15 minutes, which led me to subsequently keep track of every second at my disposal. 

If an average-length concert or show got underway at 8 p.m., I could reasonably expect that I would leave the theater at 10:15 p.m. (accounting for intermissions and other interminable delays). I learned to select aisle seats to avoid navigating a large and slow-moving crowd upon exiting; rudely, but practically, I never stayed for a standing ovation. If I arrived home by 11 p.m., I had about 30 minutes to sift through my notes, draw upon my reserves of inspiration, and mold a fair and just review. I might have 15 minutes to check the spellings of names and titles, but in truth, I was often giving one last look at the cast list just before I hit “send.” 

This I found electrifying: I have seldom experienced a feeling of accomplishment greater than calling the copy desk to confirm receipt of my review, which, if all went according to plan, would greet me, complete with a witty and apropos headline, the next morning. Since the paper printed more than one letter-to-the-editor explaining how wrong I had been about this or that performance, apparently others were reading, too. I rolled with the punches. Even after my deadlines were shaved to 11:30 p.m., I learned to sift through my notes more quickly and organize my thoughts more clearly.

My attitude only began to change when, a few years in, my reviews started running online only. The novelty was gone; so was the adrenaline rush. Paradoxically, writing without serious time constraints for the internet made me more anxious than writing with severe deadline pressure for print: typos, flubs, and hasty first impressions are less easily excused when not facing a ticking clock. Besides, there are only so many things to say, in 325 words or less, about The Nutcracker, the opening night of which I attended for seven consecutive years.

In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic spelled an end to live performances and the reviewers who wrote about them. Then, in October 2023, I asked to review the local ballet company’s season-opening triple bill, which included Twyla Tharp’s marvelous Nine Sinatra Songs. My mother had died a few weeks earlier. I needed to get out of the house. I was curious to see whether I still had the chops. I did, but the whole experience was rather grim and ghostly—like I was playing the role of a formerly important person, the performing-arts critic. 

I was no longer writing for the solidness of print, and I wondered if my remaining readership, having lived without my brilliant insights for more than three years, still cared what I thought about this duet or that piece of music. Did I? It was my own final curtain.

I have come to feel I lived through the autumn of the performing-arts critic. Along the way, I attended about a great many shows that have stayed in my mind: a recital by pianist Joyce Yang, a performance by the Dance Theatre of Harlem, memorable local productions of George Balanchine’s Who Cares?, Jerome Robbins’s Fancy Free, and Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, and the voices of the touring St. Olaf Choir inside a beautiful Downtown cathedral. 

That I got to memorialize my impressions of those performances was a privilege. Yet to assume that such a transient job would last forever is a bit like, as a famous Broadway lyricist once wrote, trying to hold a moonbeam in your hand.