THEATER CRITICS

THEATER CRITICS. One of my hobby horses is that theater critics, especially in New York, too often fail to allow for the imagination that a theater audience must use. Thus, John Simon always insisted that if the script said that a character was beautiful, the actress playing her had to be beautiful. Special effects became very important. An example turned up last Friday just in time for beginning this blog. Terry Teachout announces in the Wall Street Journal that he had never seen LES MISERABLES during its original sixteen year run. He has gone to see the revival, and has two paragraphs on the show, including the following sentence, which shows how important special effects have become: “John Napier’s sets are impressive, but his use of a turntable to shift the scenes soon grows visually tiresome.”