The theater - the wonderful old Variety Arts, razed 15 years ago - was only a block away from where I lived in the East Village, so I knew that I would be living with the marquee’s reproachful image for however long “Annie Warbucks” ran.
But, no, I wasn’t all that pleased to start off with a pan. And the production wore its frailties so flamboyantly and desperately, it was a cinch to anatomize them.
You had to focus on a fleeting vision, which materialized on a stage (or runway) for a matter of seconds, commit it to memory, and instantly pass some sort of judgment as to its viability.īRANTLEY I was pleased to have a show (a singing comic strip!) that demanded to be written about with pop flair for my debut. But yes, reviewing fashion - just out of college, with no background in the field - was great practical training for reviewing theater. I said simply “the Tom Jones look.” As an English major, I would never have ennobled that foundling hero, and the misattribution made me suspicious of what I read in The Times for a good while. You were then writing for Women’s Wear Daily, in which capacity William Safire quoted you in his On Language column as an authority on fashion-speak: the “big sweep” of shawls and the “Sir Tom Jones look.” Is there more of a connection than we might suppose between what you covered there and the shows you started covering in 1993, when you joined The Times?īEN BRANTLEY Ah, I’m glad you brought that up, Jesse, as that misquotation still rankles. JESSE GREEN As far as I can tell, Ben, you made your first appearance in The Times in 1981, long before you became a theater critic here.
These are excerpts from our final conversation as colleagues. So before Ben Brantley put down his pen, I wanted to ask him (as I hadn’t had time to in the three years we’ve worked together) what his 27 years as a Times critic looked like in the rearview mirror - and what he saw ahead. Critics look back for a living that’s what it means to “review.” But healthy ones, focusing on each new play they see, don’t spend a lot of time on the old stuff.