Critics

I see that Clive Barnes the influential critic has died. He and Frank Rich were both New York critics and they were influential in the way that they could, with a bad review, close a Broadway show practically overnight. One show that one of them was influential in closing was "Under Milk Wood", a production that here in Britain had had a good run but there in New York ran for about a month. It had Glyn Houston as the narrator and I believe he was most distressed by its reception in the States.
Clive Barnes, shortly after he became New York Times drama and dance critic had a telegram from David Merrick, a top Broadway producer saying "The honeymoon's over." Barnes replied "Didn't know we were married. Didn't know you were that kind of boy."
I was never actually threatened as Clive Barnes once was by Joe Papp but I was banned once from reviewing at a well known Cardiff theatre, and I received some quite angry phone calls from some disappointed performers. Then there was the letter I received from someone who didn't like the things I was writing: the letter was a picture of a plate of sausage and mash and across it were written the words "get stuffed."
You don't realise when you are writing reviews how hurtful they can be; artists love praise but some of them can't take criticism. There's a film with Vincent Price in which he plays a crazy ex-actor who takes his brutal revenge on all those theatre critics who reviewed him badly by getting rid of them one by one. I sat through it with mixed feelings wondering if, sometimes, I had gone too far.