It’s bad enough everyone trying to fit everything in without the producers themselves making a mess of Press night coverage, as Sonia Friedman and her colleagues are about to do with the opening early next year of the Legally Blonde musical.

They’ve designated five Press performances for the show next January with an embargo (how can they possibly enforce this?) on reviews appearing until one week after the first one.

If I’m a newspaper editor, and my critic’s in the theatre, I want his or her report the next morning, thank you very much, or not at all, and certainly not a week later.

I can see the dodgy thinking behind this New York experiment. The newspapers themselves have let the “on the night” coverage slip to a sad, incompetent degree and the Sunday broadsheets — whom this arrangement is particularly designed to accommodate — treat arts reviews like magazine features and want copy in by the middle of the week latest.

It is ridiculous beyond belief that the Sunday Times, for instance, can’t run a review of a Thursday opening, and last week didn’t even have a report of arguably the most important play of the year, Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, which opened on the Wednesday. 

It’s so different in New York where the main critics have a fraction of the openings to cover that our critics subject themselves to in London, not to mention the regions, and I don’t think anyone could say that the reviews of Ben Brantley, brilliant though they are, or of his predecessor Frank Rich, equally brilliant, ever fly off the page with heat or fire.

They reek of too many nights to think about the show and they end up looking like wannabe academic treatises rather than thud and blunder reviews.

Which is what we want, surely, in newspapers, broadsheet or tabloid. You want the sound of battle and the whiff of gunshot of a big West End opening, or the friendly fire of a significant night on the fringe. We’re already in danger of grinding our review coverage down into a dull and homogeneous mulch, without the producers hastening the process themselves.

One’s suspicions are always aroused, anyway, that a show that needs to do this to its Press coverage very probably has something to hide and someone thinks this might be a way of disguising the problem.

You won’t find Cameron Mackintosh or Andrew LLoyd Webber resorting to these muffling tactics or, if they do, something really will be amiss with the confidence and bravura of the West End.

I’m surprised that the Press officers involved don’t tell Sonia and her chums what a mess they’re making. Arts jounalists’ and critics’ diaries are already overcomplicated with the pile-up of fixtures without these distracting embellishments. What happens to the big openings in the week after Legally Blonde on Tuesday and Wednesday?

Will an editor be disposed to make room on his news pages for a show that opened last week and has been in cold print storage over the claims of something much hotter and more recently off the presses? I don’t think so.

Instead, the Legally Blonde reviews will be safely locked away in the supplements, downgraded in news value and mixed up with everything else.

I would like to hear the replies of the Daily Mail, Guardian or Standard editors when told their critics will be sitting on a major West End review for a week before publishing.

They’d go something like: “Drop dead,” or “Get lost,” or “We’re not a frigging magazine, wer’e a frigging newspaper,” or words slightly less polite to that effect. And we as critics should sound the alarm before it’s too late and the enthusiastic generosity with which the West End theatre is written about in newspapers dwindles still further and beyond salvation.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 24th, 2009 at 12:24 pm and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.