The first act's doubtful, but we say, it is the last commends the play.
I don't see that many plays, and for me, musicals are rarely pleasing. I feel the actors are being put through a kind of nightmarish labor. They're like animals being forced to pull heavy carts of vegetables at incredible speeds.
I have always been very fond of them (drama critics) . . . I think it is so frightfully clever of them to go night after night to the theatre and know so little about it.
My mother was a failed actress, but that was our bread and butter - what we loved most to do was to go to the theater and talk about it and dissect it and understand it.
We don't really need reviewers, just first-night reporters who will tell us faithfully whether or not the audience liked the show.
Don't be taken in by the guff that critics are killing the theater. Commonly they sin on the side of enthusiasm. Too often they give their blessing to trash.
The most reliable pleasure afforded by theater is the intermission.
The critic is the duenna in the passionate affair between playwrights, actors and audiences - a figure dreaded, and occasionally comic, but never welcome, never loved.
'Oh, Calcutta,' was one of the healthiest shows I've ever been in.
