This whole list phenomenon is getting out of hand

I understand the need for top 10 lists at the end of the year. No critic likes them, but they sell papers, so they must. But what I don't understand is providing lists when they are unprovoked, just for the hell of it. I thought this was the whole phenomenon High Fidelity mocked. Witness every issue of Time magazine of the last decade for how these things get out of hand. The only pseudo-unprovoked lists that work, in my mind, are the A.V. Club's weekly feature, which are so over the top in their specificity that they usually end up mentioning every relevant work. McSweeney's lists are a clinical study of pretension.

In any case, the most recent absurd list may top them all, and it comes from someone who should know better. Benedict Nightingale, general guru of all things British Theater and The Times's head theater critic, recently came out with his list of top 10 Hamlets he's ever seen. His analysis of what makes a good Hamlet is interesting, but nothing new. Of course, very few people will actually read his analysis, they'll skip to the list, where he not only mentions the top 10 Hamlets (out of 60) that he's seen, but gives them a numerical order (ugh). Simon Russell Beale at the National Theatre in 2000 (woohoo this blog's namesake!), who of course gives a mind-numbing analysis of the role, summarizing Hamlet as a "decent chap."

In my mind, why not go further back? Why not go to David Garrick, inventor of the famed "dramatic pause" or Edmund Kean, famous for wowing audiences in the ghost scene by spinning three times, or Richard Burbage, the man who started it all?

Onion Theater Humor

There are very few things that get my juices flowing more than mainstream humor outlets making jokes about theater (one of them being jokes about hockey, as well as combining the two with Tracy Letts). So when The Onion makes a joke about theater, in the words of a threadless shirt, "I'm totally blogging that."

I seriously want to know where they got the idea for an advice column with the stage directions from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. More precisely, I want to know why I didn't get the idea first.

Enjoy, folks,

Ask The Stage Directions To Tennessee Williams' Cat On A Hot Tin Roof

New Stanislavski translation: RTFM, Actors!

(RTFM means Read the Fucking Manual, for those readers over the age of 28)

One of the constant annoyances I face when I am introduced to people is that they automatically assume my name is spelled Stanislavsky. I am thus faced with the dilemma of either going into detail about how the real version of the name is the Polish version, but I'm not Polish, etc. etc., or just give them the correct spelling and say "I know, weird right?" Still, it's not a bad name to have for theater circles, and I was once even given free tickets to a show desperate to fill its house based on my name alone. So all in all, I'm about even with my last name.

Not so much for actors, to whom the most famous person named Stanislawski (or one of its alternate version) is still a constant source of contention. One of the biggest misconceptions about Constantin Stanislavsky is that he invented Method Acting, when in fact it was invented by Lee Strasberg and Uta Hagen in the Group Theater of the 1930s, who used a modified version of Stanislavsky's technique based on An Actor Prepares. Benedict Nightingale wrote an excellent review of a new translation of Stanislavski's works, including the often-ignored Building a Charachter, which was unfinished at the time of his death. Wouldn't you know it, it turns out that "affective memory" is a minor part of the original Stanislavskian technique, instead the real emphasis is for the actor to truly imagine being in that situation. That's not to say Method acting doesn't work, but that it would be better off called the Strasberg Method than Stanislavsky. Though I suppose that would mean I wouldn't deserve the nickname "Method Man" that I acquired in the Maroon office last year, a nickname that I'm quite proud of.

The Guthrie Theater gets childish

It never ceases to amaze me how theater companies across the nation, even those as prominent as the Tony Award-winning Guthrie Theater, simply cannot take their lickings from the press. I understand that theater, which is more limited in appeal than movies or television, has a harder time recovering from negative reviews than other media. But that still doesn't mean that they're not in a position of public exposure, and subject to the exact same criticism as anything else in public exposure.

In the latest case of critical reactionary drama queenery, a full page ad by the Guthrie was placed in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune after the paper gave their most recent production a negative review. While the ad had been "planned for months," the content, decided upon after the reviews came in, feature a near-exact copy of the positive review from the alternative weekly CityPages. The Guthrie's former Broadway marketing guru Trisha Santini had this to say:

"There was something about the way [CityPages critic] Quinton talked about" the show, Santini continued, "that I think spoke to audiences trying to make a determination. There was a way in which he framed it which was in sync with what we hoped for."

Yes, because it was the lone good review after all the other major papers' reception to the play could politely be described as sub-par?

Santini denied that the ad was out of sour grapes: "This is not getback; it's not a retaliatory strike of some sort. We don't have the luxury of doing that. And even if we did, we wouldn't do it." This is what we in the media biz call "horseshit," especially after you talked about how the CityPages critic "spoke to what you were trying to do." Ultimately, this is a black eye for the otherwise respectable Guthrie. They've turned a mild slump—one that every theater goes through—into a credibility issue. That's Broadway-level marketing right there.

Zero Star Hall of Shame

One of the benefits of regularly reading The Guardian's theatre blog is the discovery of new theater blogs. Though they've seen to pop up like candy this past year, the best ones are still hard to find. Kudos to Kelly Nestruck for directing me to the West End Whingers. Specifically: they're zero star hall of "fame" which chronicles shows getting a zero star rating in the London press. As much as I will defend American theater, this type of thing simply couldn't exist in the states. For one, the little press theater gets in New York or Chicago rarely gives star ratings. And even if they do, most refuse to go lower than 1 star. It was even controversial years back when the New York post introduced the "half-star." Compared to the British press, U.S. critics remind me of the following exchange from The Critic:

Duke: Why the hell do you have to be so critical?
Jay: I'm a critic.
Duke: No, your job's to rate movies on a scale of good to excellent.
Jay: What if I don't like them?
Duke: That's what good's for.

That being said, it's still a rare entity, as even the particularly bitchy British press only had 5 inductees into the Zero Star Hall of Fame. See, we critics are not that bad, honest!