Show-Score Cuts Critics

[zainmax]

Posted: 7/1/19 at 2:19am

What are your thoughts on this? While Brantley and I seldom see eye to eye, I think its outrageous.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/marchershberg/2019/06/30/show-score-shrinks-critics-influence/

[UncleCharlie]

Posted: 7/1/19 at 2:38am

They've made themselves completely irrelevant, for me at least, as a source of information and critical evaluation on the merits of any particular show. 

[macnyc]

Posted: 7/1/19 at 6:18am

To say “Show Score Cuts Critics” is incorrect. The critics’ reviews will still appear on the site. They just won’t have a number assigned to them.

Someone on All That Chat is implying it’s a cost-cutting measure, as Show Score had been paying people, including freelancers, to read reviews and assign a number value to them. This article says that three staff members read each review. In any case, that is a lot of work.  I’m curious to see if anyone at Show Score has been laid off as a result of this. 

 

 

[AntV]

Posted: 7/1/19 at 6:54am

The site has clearly been struggling and cutting back. Higher fees, pushing memberships hard, more ads, less detailed show pages such as ticket prices and cast members. It's a shame because it's a great site.

[52889j]

Posted: 7/1/19 at 8:04am

Very disappointing. Comparing and contrasting critic and audience scores was the joy of the site. 

[ErmengardeStopSniveling]

Posted: 7/1/19 at 9:12am

It’s idiotic and it shows a complete lack of integrity, especially when the owner went around pitching the site as “Rotten Tomatoes for Broadway.” Now it’s hardly any different than BWW or Reddit.

At a time when professional critics’ jobs are being slashed, and when Stan culture seems to be an ever-growing pocket of the industry, this was an important site. I always thought their scoring skewed a little TOO high and took too much fan-power into consideration...the lowest-scored Bway show right now is King Kong at 71 which is still a good score. As the article says, they’re in the ticket-selling business, and as Broadway.com learned early on, you don’t sell tickets when you show bad reviews.

Not that the industry at large will care: if they had felt ShowScore was something of real value, they would have advertised scores alongside the NYT Critics Pick stamp, like the film biz does with RottenTomatoes.

[Theater3232]

Posted: 7/1/19 at 10:11am

We should be so thankful they allow user reviews like this one from today, scoring "Date Me" at the Westside Theater a score of 100:  "MUST SEE; absolutely fantastic; I've been to over 20 Broadway shows ... and this topped all (of them)".

[VotePeron]

Posted: 7/1/19 at 10:19am

God, I despise Show-Score. This is the opposite direction they should be moving in. Uninformed, uneducated audience opinions offer ZERO value to the community and other patrons. 

[Kad]

Posted: 7/1/19 at 10:29am

Show-Score, at the beginning, filled the aggregation niche left by StageGrade well, but has since just become a watered-down and useless quasi-social media site. The user reviews are, by and large, totally useless, since by design the site encourages just using a handful of adjectives as opposed to actually, y'know, writing a sentence. 

[zainmax]

Posted: 7/1/19 at 2:20pm

This whole thing reminds me of Broadway.Com.

[broadway86]

Posted: 7/1/19 at 2:22pm

Well, this sucks 

[Sauja]

Posted: 7/1/19 at 3:00pm

It really did take away about 90% of the site's worth for me. Sometimes it can be helpful to see what word of mouth is from folks during previews, but having a broader sense of what actual critics said gathered together was the actually useful part of the site. It's now worth less than didhelikeit.com which is a pitifully low bar. 

 

If they wanted to save time, maybe they could have just decided on ten or so publications to feature rather than IHaveATheatreBlog.com. Ah well. Hopefully something useful replaces it.

[HogansHero]

Posted: 7/1/19 at 3:04pm

The problem with all of these kinds of things is that there is a very limited market and it is hard to break in even to that. 

[zainmax]

Posted: 7/1/19 at 3:37pm

HogansHero said: "The problem with all of thesekinds of things is that there is a very limited market and it is hard to break in even to that."

SOO TRUE!

[OlBlueEyes]

Posted: 7/1/19 at 3:38pm

I follow the professional critics whom I have learned to trust over the years and are worth of the title, and not someone's brother in law. Ben Brantley I've found to be reasonable and pretty consistent over the years. He is rarely cruel to anyone in a show, and does not try to leave anyone who enjoyed a show that he disliked feeling like a moron. 

Ben is a good starting point for me. If he spends only a half of his review praising Kelli O'Hara in a show, then you know he thinks the show was at least pretty good. But if he spends two thirds of his review praising Kelly, as in Nice Work, then you know he's not very high on the show.

[ErmengardeStopSniveling]

Posted: 7/1/19 at 3:45pm

zainmax said: "This whole thing reminds me of Broadway.Com."

Yes, without the sky-high, should-be-illegal service fees. It seems like the primary ticketed revenue source is through the "socials" and member events, though perhaps they also get a little kickback from Telecharge.

[bwaylvsong]

Posted: 7/1/19 at 6:52pm

This is actually good news for low-profile shows. I was in a show a few months ago which received ONE “critic” review (which was essentially a blog post), which happened to be scathing and significantly lowered our score until we were able to get enough positive public reviews to balance it out.

[macnyc]

Posted: 7/2/19 at 7:24am

Speaking of Show Score: I went to two shows recently using member discount tickets. At one show, the box office personnel told me that Show Score hadn’t given them a list of names. They handed over my tickets just based on my showing up and saying I had purchased them. The show I saw last night seemed also unprepared. I’m hoping nothing is amiss. Has anyone else noticed this?

Updated On: 7/2/19 at 07:24 AM

[zainmax]

Posted: 7/2/19 at 10:14am

bwaylvsong said: "This is actually good news for low-profile shows. I was in a show a few months ago which received ONE “critic” review (which was essentially a blog post), which happened to be scathing and significantly lowered our score until we were able to get enough positive public reviews to balance it out."

Maybe, the solution is to establish better criteria for critics?

[HogansHero]

Posted: 7/2/19 at 10:45am

zainmax said: "bwaylvsong said: "This is actually good news for low-profile shows. I was in a show a few months ago which received ONE “critic” review (which was essentially a blog post), which happened to be scathing and significantly lowered our score until we were able to get enough positive public reviews to balance it out."

Maybe, the solution is to establish better criteria for critics?"

That may be though it seems to be a separate issue. 

The comment about low profile shows is instructive. Who/what is the audience for a low profile show? My guess is that 90% of it consists of friends and family. And my guess is that those who post reviews of what they saw skews even higher, especially when the production was "able to get enough positive public reviews to balance it out." So while quasi-official looking scores, when positive, may be good news for the production, it seems like lousy news for folks wanting an honest assessment. Sorry but I'm not impressed. 

 

[zainmax]

Posted: 7/2/19 at 11:02am

HogansHero said: "zainmax said: "bwaylvsong said: "This is actually good news for low-profile shows. I was in a show a few months ago which received ONE “critic” review (which was essentially a blog post), which happened to be scathing and significantly lowered our score until we were able to get enough positive public reviews to balance it out."

Maybe, the solution is to establish better criteria for critics?"

That may be though it seems to be a separate issue.

The comment about low profile shows is instructive. Who/what is the audience for a low profile show? My guess is that 90% of it consists of friends and family. And my guess is that those who post reviews of what they saw skews even higher, especially when the production was "able to get enough positive public reviews to balance it out."So while quasi-official looking scores, when positive, may be good news for the production, it seems like lousy news for folks wanting an honest assessment. Sorry but I'm not impressed.

"

Good points, as always...

Generally, though, I think no one person should be a taste-maker... Sort of conflicted whether or not critics should be representative of theatergoers, but the opinions of 5+ is better than the opinion of one.

[HogansHero]

Posted: 7/2/19 at 1:32pm

There is another huge difference, I think. We come to "know" critics, so we know how likely it is that what they say might align with our own tastes. (The same can be said for folks posting opinions here.) These critics have integrity (or not) and reading a review of that sort is not susceptible to manipulation the way a "score" is, particularly when it is self-reported with no science behind it.

[bwaylvsong]

Posted: 7/2/19 at 6:32pm

HogansHero said: "zainmax said: "bwaylvsong said: "This is actually good news for low-profile shows. I was in a show a few months ago which received ONE “critic” review (which was essentially a blog post), which happened to be scathing and significantly lowered our score until we were able to get enough positive public reviews to balance it out."

Maybe, the solution is to establish better criteria for critics?"

That may be though it seems to be a separate issue.

The comment about low profile shows is instructive. Who/what is the audience for a low profile show? My guess is that 90% of it consists of friends and family. And my guess is that those who post reviews of what they saw skews even higher, especially when the production was "able to get enough positive public reviews to balance it out."So while quasi-official looking scores, when positive, may be good news for the production, it seems like lousy news for folks wanting an honest assessment. Sorry but I'm not impressed.

"

I was actually surprised by the number of mixed reviews we received, and the majority of our reviews were NOT from friends/family.  It was a holiday-themed play geared towards young children and families and was advertised as such.  My point is that the ONE “critic” review happened to be truly scathing and could have been detrimental to the success of the run.

[VintageSnarker]

Posted: 7/2/19 at 9:52pm

HogansHero said: "There is another huge difference, I think. We come to "know" critics, so we know how likely it is that what they say might align with our own tastes. (The same can be said for folks posting opinions here.) These critics have integrity (or not) and reading a review of that sort is not susceptible to manipulation the way a "score" is, particularly when it is self-reported with no science behind it."

I think the idea of a site that aggregates audience reviews is a good one. I approach it the same way as reviews on clothing sites or amazon.com or yelp. The score matters less to me except as a way to organize the responses (lowest to highest, etc.). With a big enough sample size and a critical eye for hyperbole and that sort of tell, even a random sampling of users I don't know can yield useful results. Also, apart from looking for a consensus you can learn random little details like seeing the show means sitting on benches for 4 hours with one intermission. Or that something possibly triggering happens in act 2. I find that audience reviews tend to mention these little details more though it could just be that everyone notices different things and if you have a larger sample size, it'll include more details. That said, could there be better sites hosting these opinions? Sure.

[HogansHero]

Posted: 7/2/19 at 10:44pm

VintageSnarker said: "I think the idea of a site that aggregates audience reviews is a good one. I approach it the same way as reviews on clothing sites or amazon.com or yelp. The score matters less to me except as a way to organize the responses (lowest to highest, etc.). With a big enough sample size and a criticaleye for hyperbole and that sort of tell, even a random sampling of users I don't know can yield useful results. Also, apart from looking for a consensus you can learn random little details like seeing the show means sitting on benches for 4 hours with one intermission. Or that something possiblytriggering happens in act 2. I find that audience reviews tend to mention these little details more though it could just be that everyone notices different things and if you have a larger sample size, it'll include more details. That said, could there be better sites hosting these opinions? Sure."

That's all well and good, but Have you looked at what's written there? It's shorter than a tweet, and generally structured like a telegram from the 1930s. And there is no check on honesty etc. 

Look, if people want it, fine. I don't think many do, and I don't have a use for what remains of what once was.