Frank Rich - Interview

Interview, Dec, 2000 by Maer Roshan

MR: Basically the power of critics at this point is keeping deserving shows alive?

FR: Basically, yes. Whereas with big, heavily promoted musicals reviews don't make any difference. You can't kill them as hard as you try. A show like Kiss Me Kate, which received great reviews, is doing roughly the same business as Annie Get Your Gun, which got lousy reviews, and they're both revivals of 1940's musicals.

MR: One starred Bernadette Peters.

FR: That's true, maybe that helps a bit. But I bet you the audience at both of those shows couldn't tell you which one got the better reviews.

MR: Who's the main audience for theater now?

FR: I don't know. When it comes to things like polling and audience surveying, Broadway is still in the dark ages, so there's not a lot of hard information. I think twenty years ago the Broadway audience was 2/3 New Yorkers and 1/3 tourist. Now the ratio has probably flipped.

MR: Your colleague John Simon has noted a bit ruefully that every play these days is either Jewish or gay.

FR: Yeah, well that's his shtick, you know--the truth is, theater has always served up what its audience wants to see. At one point when I was doing research, I discovered that almost every year in the fifties and sixties, there was a Broadway play that was set in the garment industry. And the reason for that is audience back then was made up of out-of-town buyers being taken out by manufacturers on Seventh Avenue. Theater is now aimed at tourists who want to see the same kind of entertainment they get at theme parks or in Vegas.

MR: Why do you think Jews and homosexuals are so over-represented not only in theater, but in American culture?

FR: A lot of people have thought about this--especially about the Jewish aspect of it--and I suspect many of the same principles apply to gays as well. When I was growing up in the '50s, I watched television incessantly, but only in retrospect did I realize that almost every bit of entertainment I saw was written by Jews, or starred Jews. And yet they were never expressly Jewish. I think back to sitcoms I loved as a kid, like Sergeant Bilko or the Jack Benny show. These shows weren't just popular with Jewish audiences; they were the number one shows in the country. The same with Hollywood. The impact of Jews on Hollywood is well documented, but we now know that many gay artists also played big roles, although they were all closeted, just like the Jack Bennys and Neil Simons were closeted about their Jewishness.

MR: You're notable among mainstream journalists because you wrote about, and championed, gay culture long before it was fashionable. You write eloquently in your book about a friend, Clayton, who was presumably gay and a great mentor to you. Did your friendship with him color your later politics?

FR: Not really. At the time I knew Clayton, I didn't know any open homosexuals; I certainly didn't think he was gay--to me he was just theatrical. The real reason I started writing about gay issues was because I was covering the theater at a time when an epidemic broke out that was literally killing many people on my beat. AIDS began to shape the actual art I was reviewing, producing shows like Falsettos. It opened my eyes. You know, even long after we lost touch I thought about Clayton a lot. One day, two or three years after my mother died, my wife Alex Witchel decided that as a surprise for me she would find this guy who had had such an influence on me. She eventually found out that he had died a decade earlier.