Subject: [removed] Digest V2003 #100
From: "OldRadio Mailing Lists" <[removed]@[removed];
Date: 3/3/2003 10:29 PM
To: <[removed]@[removed];

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                            The Old-Time Radio Digest!
                              Volume 2003 : Issue 100
                         A Part of the [removed]!
                                 ISSN: 1533-9289


                                 Today's Topics:

  Struts and Frets; On Critics          [ Charlie Summers <charlie@[removed] ]

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Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2003 00:05:41 -0500
From: Charlie Summers <charlie@[removed];
To: [removed]@[removed]
Subject:  Struts and Frets; On Critics

STRUTS AND FRETS

by Harry Bartell

 ++++

On Critics

Among the crosses the actor has to bear, auditions and unresponsive casting
directors for example, is an institution known as The Critic. I can't prove
this, but I would be willing to bet that when Aeschylus opened Agamemnon at
the Theater of Dionysus ca. 458 BC, there was some joker who released a
scroll the next day complaining that the presence of a second actor was a
terrible mistake, that tradition was being destroyed, that the music was  too
loud and so forth. By Shakespeare's time the theater itself had come under
fire, and in the 1600's Samuel Pepys was writing regular reviews. Having read
some of them, I can say with authority that they were not all favorable.

The Golden Age of Radio overlapped what might be called the Golden Age of
Critics. Names that include John Mason Brown, Dorothy Parker, Alexander
Wolcott, George Jean Nathan, Robert Benchley, and Brooks Atkinson among
others were busy people in theater seasons which might see 200 or more new
plays. Their reviews have produced some classic lines:

Tallulah Bankhead barged down the Nile last night as Cleopatra- and sank.
He played the king as though afraid someone else would play the ace.
Katherine Hepburn ran the gamut of emotions from A to B.
"The House Beautiful" is the play lousy.
"The Rotters" is no longer the worst play in town. "Abie's Irish Rose" opened
last night.

Comments like these are hardly likely to bolster the confidence or boost the
hopes of theater personnel. And it may have been something of this nature
that caused John Barrymore to explain that "America is the country where you
buy a lifetime supply of aspirin for one dollar, and use it up in two weeks."
Of course, in his case there may have been other contributing reasons.

I detest dropping names, particularly in a venue such as this where so many
of you  were not born during their heyday, but at the time they were writing
they carried considerable clout. The theater wasn't limited to multimillion
dollar musicals, and drama wasn't all revivals. Not all of the productions
were worthy of praise and that was explicitly pointed out. Robert Benchley
despised Abie's Irish Rose. He murdered the play at it's opening. It played
five years. Just as matter of principle, he wrote a weekly review panning it
during the entire run. The producers were delighted. It gave them free
mention and when the show finally closed they threw a party for Benchley in
appreciation.

It was during this period that radio made it's strongest gains. The 1930's
did not present a very favorable economic climate, as anyone who lived
through them will agree. Radio was free. In that time, when  theater tickets
might cost as much as $[removed], free was a nice word. Even movie tickets,
ridiculously cheap in light of today's prices, meant shelling out cash money.
So people listened to the Atwater Kents, and the Philcos and the Crosleys. By
virtue of sheer numbers, radio escaped the close critical attention that
other entertainment media suffered. Accepting the time span from 7 to [removed]
as the period in which the biggest shows appeared, that meant 56 shows per
week on each of four networks. I am not including the occasional one-hour
production, nor local originations. It would have been virtually impossible
to cover each show critically. The trade papers, Variety, Hollywood Reporter,
and Billboard would sometimes cover the season opening of a radio program and
there would be occasional articles in the predecessors of TV Guide such as
Radio Life and Radio Guide as well as the newspapers. If star names appeared
on shows like Lux  ads might be used to plug the show but the pressure of
constant critical attention was missing. Because it took so long for actors
to gain credits on broadcasts, the name value of an individual performer
never gained the attention that a film actor might receive. The Unholy Duo,
Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, formed their own critical bastions but
their criticism was mostly aimed at the radio star names and consisted
primarily of personal likes and dislikes or political positions.

So who were the radio critics? However many millions of people listened to a
show according to the Crossley or Hooper ratings. That in itself was fairly
iffy. The polling sample obtained by attaching monitors to individual radios
left a great deal to chance because the samples were so small and were
frequently challenged, especially by shows about to be taken off the air. In
other words, the supreme critic was a number, translated by the advertising
agency or network (whichever originated the program) into money. So things
haven't changed a great deal in the last 50 or 60 years.

Let's assume that the numbers were correct. Why do we like one show and not
another, or why, given a choice of two programs playing at the same time, do
we nearly always choose one over another? At this point, we are in big
trouble. Definitions cannot be very definite. There are so many factors which
enter into individual taste, probably beginning with genes and chromosomes
and colored by social mores at any calendar date, that there is no real
consensus possible. I think there is one constant in appreciation of any art
form: experience.

The critics mentioned in connection with New York theater started, for the
most part, as journalists many of whom became critics the hard way - by doing
it. They gradually saw enough plays to be able to make comparisons, to relate
those plays with their own tastes and judge accordingly/ A few, like Brooks
Atkinson and George Jean Nathan, were learned men with reams of reading
material behind them. Yet even that could not eliminate personal biases. It
merely gave them a head start because of familiarity with dramatic form.

The academic approach to criticism, in my opinion, has some serious flaws as
well. While working on a master's degree. I ran into big trouble during a
seminar on comedy. There were all sorts of analyses of what constituted
humor ranging from Freud to Berenson and beyond. I could never get across the
idea to these great brains that performance, when theatrical humor was
involved, played a key role in its effectiveness. The greatest joke in the
world can get smeared if the timing is off. Maybe the radio audience, in its
collective wisdom, took this into account and decided that Fibber McGee and
Molly   should stay around for umpteen years while other attempts at comedy
went down the drain.

>From what I can gather from reading the OTR Digest, appreciation of
individual shows is heavily influenced by childhood memories or first
contacts with radio. In other words an element of emotional attachment is
involved in criticism. In my own case, there is a reverse element. I have
been able to listen coldly and impartially to shows which I am hearing for
the first time 50 years or more after the fact, judging by my own standards
of excellence as to the worth of the script, production, and performance.
There have been a few shudders, a bunch of OK's, and some Yes!!'s. But then,
I'm not a critic.

- ------------------
Harry Bartell maintains that his major accomplishment as a professional actor
for forty years was to survive with his mind, morale and marriage intact.

Born in 1913 in New Orleans, he grew up in Houston and graduated Phi Beta
Kappa from Rice University in 1933. After a stint at Harvard Business School
and a couple of years forced labor in a department store he moved to
Hollywood and stayed there for the next fifty-one years. Three seasons at the
Pasadena Playhouse led to work in 185 radio series and 77 TV series plus a
dozen or so properly forgettable motion pictures.

This article will be archived at:

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End of [removed] Digest V2003 Issue #100
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