Dorothy Parker's 1920s theatre reviews

[ChrisSingleton2]

Posted: 11/15/19 at 8:00pm

I'm reading the excellent "Dorothy Parker: Complete Broadway," edited by Kevin C. Fitzpatrick. Parker was Vanity Fair's resident theatre critic between 1918 and 1920, and the book is a collection of the often scathing reviews she wrote of Broadway shows.

Does anyone know how influential her reviews were at the time? Did she definitively cause any shows to prematurely shut down?

[joevitus]

Posted: 11/16/19 at 1:30pm

She was an abysmal theater critic. Her review of plays like The Skin of Our Teeth and A Streetcar Named Desire illustrate this--the former is supposedly about "why those people in Ancient Greece were just like us except they wore togas," while for her the latter mistakenly tried to make great drama of its subject when it should have be a lighthearted comedy about "the war to regain the bathroom!" Parker was a gifted satirist and imminently quotable, but as a theater critic, she was staggeringly idiotic.

Updated On: 11/17/19 at 01:30 PM

[GavestonPS]

Posted: 11/16/19 at 9:37pm

Case in point: it was the Romans who wore togas; the Ancient Greeks wore chitons.

But I have to admit Parker's review of Katharine Hepburn--"She ran the gamut of emotions, from A to B."--still makes me chuckle every time I encounter it. (I agree, however, that Parker's remark is the epitome of bad critics who write to attract attention to themselves, not to seriously describe the work of art they witnessed.)

[NoName3]

Posted: 11/17/19 at 1:04am

GavestonPS said: "But I have to admit Parker's review of Katharine Hepburn--"She ran the gamut of emotions, from A to B."--still makes me chuckle every time I encounter it. (I agree, however, that Parker's remark is the epitome of bad critics who write to attract attention to themselves, not to seriously describe the work of art they witnessed.)"

I've quoted that line myself for years, Gaveston, so I was very surprised to find out recently that she never wrote it.  She never reviewed 1933's The Lake (although she did see it) in which Hepburn gave the allegedly offending performance and Parker scholars have never found it in any of her published works.  But it is so widely attributed to her they suspect she probably made the remark to friends in conversation.

She Runs the Gamut of Human Emotion from A to B. Dorothy Parker? Katharine Hepburn? Apocryphal?

 

 

 

[Springstead]

Posted: 3/2/20 at 6:45am

Joevitus:  You’re confusing Dorothy Parker with Mary McCarthy (both New Yorker writers).  It was Mary McCarthy in a review (“Oh, Sweet Mystery of Life: A Streetcar Named Desire” in the Partisan Review, March 1948) that said Williams would have been better off writing “a wonderful little comic epic, The Struggle for the Bathroom”.