Ben Brantley Quotations

It's nowhere near as intense as what I imagine an actor experiences backstage, but I feel a fluttering nervousness before a curtain goes up on a play. I mean, any play, anywhere - on Broadway or the Bowery or in a church basement.

If you agree with a critic, you admire him or her. If you disagree, you despise them. We all feel a great need to be confirmed in our opinions.

I have received hostile voice mail messages and e-mails. They are often anonymous, I'm sad to say, as anonymous messages are delivered only by very low forms of human life, in my opinion.

The cliche was always that 'everybody's a critic,' but it becomes truer every day. Long before reviews appear in the traditional outlets, you can now usually discover - somewhere in the thickets of the Internet - reactions to shows from people who've seen them in previews.

I've seen plays that are, objectively, total messes that move me in ways that their tidier brethren do not. That's the romantic mystery of great theater. Translating this ineffability into printable prose is a challenge that can never be fully met.

The power of the print reviewer is one of those urban myths. There have always been shows that slipped under the critical radar to become popular successes: 'Tobacco Road', 'Abie's Irish Rose' and our old friend 'Spider-Man', which got the worst reviews in theatre history and is still apparently going strong.

Cyndi Lauper knows how to work a crowd.

I personally read criticism - at least by writers I enjoy - to stimulate a conversation in my own mind, and I like to think that's the function I serve for others.

I write the occasional entry for the 'Times' Theatre blog, especially when I'm in London and seeing two shows a day, but I don't tweet. I don't want to have to express my opinion in 140 characters. That's like writing haiku. You need a certain amount of legroom to review a play properly.

Theater criticism should be visceral, at least on some level, an articulation of that fierceness and passion. I usually do a fair amount of research before I see a show - on the history of previous productions (if it's a revival) and the creative team.

Whether you like it or not, a performance's triumphs and belly flops come to seem excruciatingly intimate, as if you were somehow partly responsible for them.

Rage properly channeled can definitely give birth to good even great theater. Disgust, a more passive and distancing emotion, is far less likely to. Would you rush to a play called Look Back in Queasiness?

The eternal ambiguity of human motives and memory.

What Mr. Kaufman and his team are after is less a portrait of any one person than one of the ethos of a place. In the deliberate, simple staging ... in which eight radiantly clean-scrubbed performers embody 60 different people against a bare-bones set, 'Laramie' often brings to mind 'Our Town,' the beloved Thornton Wilder study of life, love and death in parochial New Hampshire.

EVERY SINGLE DANCER, SINGER and BAND MEMBER is a BRILLIANT SOLO ARTIST

THE HOT (AND SERIOUSLY COOL) ENERGY that comes from the musical gospel preached by the title character of FELA! feels as if it could stretch easily to the borders of Manhattan and then across a river or two. There should be dancing in the streets!

Be prepared to have the breath knocked out of you.

While the world may love a love story, it seems safe to say that Lennon ultimately will be remembered less as the husband of Ms Ono than as a member of the group that changed the face of popular music.

Con's climactic metamorphosis into the man behind the aristocrat's pose is embodied with shattering, scary violence and precision.

Everyone and everything winds up lost in this ... adaptation of Tolkien 's cult-inspiring trilogy of fantasy novels. That includes plot, character and the patience of most ordinary theatergoers.

You will gasp again and again at the inventive visual majesty.

The man in black turns sunshine yellow in 'Ring of Fire,' the show that strings songs associated with Johnny Cash into an artificially sweetened candy necklace.