CURTAIN CALL FOR CRITICS - BROADWAY WORLD

The video was emphatic. Arms waving. A breathless verdict delivered to the camera in a single take from the sidewalk outside the theater, the marquee glowing behind the reviewer's head like a halo: "Oh my God, you guys, you have to see this."

That was the review. Fifteen seconds. No context, no comparison, no engagement with the craft of the production. Just enthusiasm, and, for the young woman beside me, apparently more persuasive than anything I or anyone like me might write.

I don't tell this story to be dismissive. I tell it because it crystallizes something that anyone who writes about theater in 2026 has to reckon with: the ground has shifted beneath us, and it isn't shifting back.

Theatre criticism is in crisis. That sentence has been written so many times, in so many publications, by so many critics over so many years that it has become its own cliché, a genre of self-elegy that the essayist Andrea Long Chu has called "the self-aggrandising existential crisis that criticism is always going through." And yet the material facts have never been starker. Newspapers are eliminating critic positions at an accelerating rate. Entire cities, even entire countries, have lost their full-time theatre reviewers. Social media has redrawn the map of how audiences discover, evaluate, and decide to see a show. And the institutions that depend on critical coverage find themselves in the strange position of mourning the disappearing critic while often doing little to support the ecosystem that sustains one.

This is a story I can tell from the inside. I am a working theatre reviewer, writing for BroadwayWorld, sitting in those seats, filing those reviews on deadline. I am part of the very system that is under strain. And over the past several months, I have been talking to the people caught in this crisis, fellow critics, artistic directors, producers, and audiences, trying to understand what we are losing, what is replacing it, and whether the thing we call theatre criticism can survive the forces arrayed against it.

The numbers are blunt. In July 2025, The New York Times, the single most influential outlet in American theatre criticism, the paper whose reviews have been described for decades as capable of making or breaking a Broadway show, reassigned its chief theatre critic Jesse Green to a new role as culture correspondent. It was part of a broader reorganization that also moved the paper's television, pop music, and classical music critics into new positions. In a memo to staff, culture editor Sia Michel praised the departing critics as "best in class" while explaining that the paper's readers were "hungry for trusted guides to help them make sense of this complicated landscape, not only through traditional reviews but also with essays, new story forms, videos and experimentation with other platforms."

The subtext was unmistakable: the traditional review, as a form, was no longer sufficient. The Times wanted something else, something more multiplatform, more algorithmically friendly, more in step with how people actually consume culture in 2026.

By December, the paper had hired Helen Shaw, previously the theatre critic at The New Yorker, as its new chief theatre critic, the first woman to hold the position in the newspaper's history. Shaw's appointment was greeted with relief and optimism by the theatre community, as was the simultaneous announcement that Pulitzer-winning TV critic Emily Nussbaum would take over the theatre beat at The New Yorker. Two major outlets, recommitting to the form. It felt like a reprieve.

But the Times and The New Yorker are the exception. They are the top of the pyramid. Below them, the erosion has been devastating.

Peter Marks, the longtime theatre critic of The Washington Post, the most influential voice in one of America's most active regional theatre markets, accepted a buyout and left the paper in December 2023. The Post eventually named a replacement, Naveen Kumar, but as a New York-based "frequent visitor to D.C.," a decision that provoked outrage among the city's theatre community. Artistic directors from nearly three dozen theaters signed a statement acknowledging that no single outlet could replace the reach and regional perspective the Post had historically provided.

In Canada, the situation is even more dire. At the end of 2024, the Globe and Mail quietly reassigned its theatre critic, J. Kelly Nestruck, to the TV beat. With that move, English-speaking Canada, a country with a robust and internationally respected theatre scene, lost its last full-time, staff theatre critic at a national newspaper. The Toronto Sun had already stopped covering theatre entirely. The Toronto Star had split its critic position into two freelance roles years earlier. The National Post had let its internationally respected freelance critic go, citing the cost of his reviews.

In the United States, the pattern is the same, city by city. As the Columbia Journalism Review reported, critics at newspapers are disappearing even faster than print journalism itself. Theatre critics, film reviewers, and arts editors have been stripped from dailies and weeklies around the country. In many American cities and even entire states, there is not a single full-time theatre critic. The media industry slashed over 21,000 full-time jobs in 2023 alone, and arts coverage, which doesn't generate the clicks of politics or celebrity gossip, is almost always the first to go.

What remains, increasingly, is a patchwork. Freelancers paid modest rates. Substacks. Blogs. Passionate volunteers. Sites like BroadwayWorld, where I write, which covers an enormous volume of productions with a network of contributors across the country. And, of course, the platforms that have effectively replaced the critic in many audiences' decision-making processes: TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

The rise of social media as a force in Broadway ticket-buying is not a vague trend. It is quantifiable.

ROMEO+JULIET, starring Rachel Zegler and Kit Connor, achieved the youngest ticket-buying audience in Broadway history: fourteen percent of purchasers were between eighteen and twenty-four, compared to an industry average of three percent. The show's producer credited TikTok directly, calling it "one of our driving sales forces throughout our campaign." The show used TikTok's Search Ads format to target users who were actively searching for show-related content but hadn't yet purchased tickets.

TikTok star Charli D'Amelio, formerly the most-followed person on any social platform, joined the ensemble of &Juliet on an open-ended contract and was part of the show's highest-grossing week. Before that, YouTube creator Colleen Ballinger had driven Waitress's weekly grosses from $600,000 to over $900,000 during a four-week stint. More recently, TikTok personality Trisha Paytas, with over ten million followers, joined the cast of Beetlejuice. Among adults who use social media, fifty-three percent have reported purchasing a product after an influencer posted about it.

The implications for criticism are profound. For a growing segment of the theatre-going public, particularly younger audiences, who are Broadway's future, the path to a ticket purchase no longer runs through a written review. It runs through an algorithm. A thirty-second curtain call video that goes viral. A reaction filmed on the sidewalk outside the theater. A comment thread. An influencer's endorsement.

None of this is inherently bad. Social media democratizes access to theatre conversation. It lowers the barrier between audience and stage. It creates excitement and community in ways that a 900-word review in a newspaper cannot. But it also replaces analysis with enthusiasm, context with reaction, and informed perspective with volume. A TikTok reaction video does not tell you whether the show's second act falters, whether the direction obscures the playwright's intentions, or how this production compares to the last major revival. It tells you whether someone had a good time. And for many ticket buyers, that is now enough.

I asked three audience members, chosen at random in the TKTS line in Times Square, what influenced their decision about which show to see tonight. The first, a man in his fifties from Connecticut, said he had read a review in The New York Times. The second, a woman in her thirties visiting from Chicago, said she had asked for recommendations on a Facebook group for theatre fans. The third, a college student from New Jersey, looked at me like the question was slightly absurd. "TikTok," she said. "I saw a video of the opening number. That was it. I didn't need to read anything."

Three people. Three entirely different information ecosystems. The generation gap in how audiences discover and evaluate theatre is not narrowing. It is widening.

If audiences are drifting away from traditional reviews, the artists themselves have a more tangled relationship with criticism, one marked by dependence, resentment, gratitude, and, increasingly, ambivalence.

Theatre is uniquely vulnerable to the critic in ways that film and television are not. A movie opens simultaneously in thousands of theaters; a bad review in one city is diluted by marketing, word of mouth, and sheer distribution scale. A Broadway show opens once, in one theater, in one city. For decades, the opening night review in The New York Times functioned as a verdict, not just on the quality of the work, but on its commercial viability. A "Critic's Pick" could sustain a show for months. A pan could accelerate a closing. The Times' influence was so outsized that the paper's critics were given nicknames by the industry: Frank Rich was "the Butcher of Broadway." Ben Brantley's reviews were parsed for nuance the way Wall Street analysts parse Federal Reserve statements.

That power has diminished, but it has not disappeared. Helen Shaw, in her first weeks as the Times' new chief theatre critic, acknowledged the weight of the position while gently pushing back on its mythology. "I think sometimes we over-index this idea that critics can make or break shows," she said in a public interview. "We have a lot of examples in the very recent past of a New York Times review being either positive in a show collapsing or being negative in a show going on to stupendous financial success." She's right: Oh, Mary! became one of the breakout hits of the 2024-2025 season driven by word of mouth and social virality as much as by any review. But the exceptions prove how unusual they still are. For most shows, especially those without a built-in audience or celebrity draw, critical coverage remains a lifeline.
I spoke with a prominent artistic director at a mid-size regional theater, the kind of institution that produces four to six shows a season, depends on subscriptions and single-ticket sales, and doesn't have the marketing budget of a Broadway blockbuster. His relationship with criticism, he told me, is essentially asymmetric.

"When we get a great review, we use it everywhere, in ads, on social media, in fundraising letters," he said. "When we get a bad one, we pretend it doesn't exist and hope nobody reads it. That's the reality for most theaters our size. We can't afford to be philosophical about criticism. We need it to sell tickets."

I asked whether the decline of newspaper coverage worried him.

"It terrifies me," he said. "Not because I loved every review we ever got, I didn't. But because when the paper covered us, people knew we existed. A review, even a mixed one, put us in front of readers who might never have heard of us otherwise. Without that, we're shouting into the void. Social media helps, but it's not the same. A review from a credentialed critic carries a kind of authority that a Facebook post doesn't. When that goes away, we lose something we can't replace."

His view was shared, with variations, by every artistic director I spoke with. The word that came up most often was not "review." It was "coverage." The crisis of criticism is not just a crisis of opinion. It is a crisis of visibility. When newspapers cut their critics, they don't just lose a voice of evaluation. They lose the only person whose job it was to pay attention.

There is a question buried inside the crisis that deserves to be asked directly: what is theatre criticism actually for?

The most common answer, the one that producers and marketing departments care about, is consumer guidance. The review tells you whether the show is worth your money. Thumbs up, thumbs down, three stars out of five. Buy a ticket or don't. In this model, the critic is a kind of Consumer Reports for the stage, and TikTok is a perfectly adequate replacement: if what you want is a recommendation, a fifteen-second reaction video will do.

But criticism, at its best, does something different. It creates a record. It places a production in context, within the artist's body of work, within the theatrical tradition, within the cultural moment. It articulates what a production is attempting and evaluates whether it succeeds on its own terms. It gives language to the experience of watching live performance, an art form that, unlike film or recorded music, exists only in the moment and vanishes when the lights come up.

Wesley Morris, the Pulitzer-winning critic at The New York Times, put it this way: "Criticism champions, condemns, X-rays, and roots out. It explains and appraises and contextualizes. It also dreams and marvels and mourns. You need some kind of knowledge to do it, sure, and maybe some humor, but really, truly, you need feeling."

Helen Shaw, in the statement announcing her appointment, described reading critics as her education, reading Mel Gussow on Edward Albee, Frank Rich on Stephen Sondheim, Walter Kerr on shows that had been closed for twenty years by the time she encountered the reviews. The shows were gone. The criticism remained. It was, she said, her entry into "the long conversation about the theatre."

That conversation, the ongoing, accumulating, historically informed dialogue about what we make and why it matters, is what is at stake. TikTok cannot have it. Instagram cannot sustain it. Not because those platforms are without value, but because they are structurally incapable of the depth, continuity, and institutional memory that criticism requires. A reaction video has no archive. A comment thread has no through line. An algorithm has no memory.

I put this to a fellow critic, a veteran reviewer who has written for multiple publications over three decades, watched the landscape contract around her, and now writes primarily for an online outlet at a fraction of what she once earned.

"The thing nobody says out loud," she told me, "is that the business model for criticism is gone. The newspapers that employed us are dying. The digital outlets that replaced them pay a tenth of what papers did, if they pay at all. And the theater industry, which depends on us, has never figured out how to support us. They want reviews. They need reviews. But they won't fund reviews. It's this strange orphan position, everyone agrees criticism matters, but nobody wants to pay for it."

She paused. "I keep doing it because I believe in the form. I believe that someone needs to watch carefully and write honestly about what they see. But I'm not going to lie to you, it's harder to believe that every year."

And yet. For all the erosion, something is also being built.
The landscape of theatre criticism in 2026 is not a wasteland. It is a patchwork, uneven, under-resourced, and precarious, but alive. BroadwayWorld, the outlet I write for, is one of the largest theatre publications in the world, covering productions from Broadway to community theater with a vast network of contributors. Sites like New York Stage Review were founded specifically to fill the gap left by shrinking newspaper coverage, staffed by veteran critics with decades of experience who banded together rather than retire quietly. The American Theatre Critics Association continues to advocate for the profession and its practitioners. Substacks and independent blogs have given individual voices platforms they control.

In Washington, D.C., where Peter Marks's departure from the Post left a gaping hole, outlets like Washington City Paper, DC Theater Arts, Metro Weekly, MD Theatre Guide, and BroadwayWorld have collectively absorbed much of the coverage, though, as Washington City Paper has reported, theaters often extract blurb-worthy quotes from these outlets without linking back to the original reviews, depriving them of the traffic and revenue they need to survive. It is a small, telling detail: the industry uses criticism as marketing material while undermining the economic model that produces it.

At the top of the pyramid, the news is guardedly encouraging. The Times' hiring of Helen Shaw and The New Yorker's appointment of Emily Nussbaum represent investments in the form at exactly the moment when such investments felt uncertain. Shaw's appointment, in particular, is symbolically potent: the first woman to hold the chief theatre critic position at the Times, a critic who grew up reading reviews of shows she couldn't see, in a state far from Broadway, and who came to New York because those reviews made her feel the theater was worth traveling for. Her mission statement, to continue "the long conversation about the theatre, with as many people as possible," articulates something essential about what criticism is for, and why it matters that it survives.

But Shaw and Nussbaum are two people at two elite publications. The crisis is not at the top. It is in the middle and the bottom, in the regional papers that no longer employ a critic, in the mid-size cities where a freelancer is paid $75 for a review that takes four hours of viewing and four hours of writing, in the entire states that have no one whose job it is to watch the plays and write about them.

I return to the young woman in the mezzanine, her phone glowing below sight line, watching TikTok while the overture played.

She is not the enemy of theatre criticism. She is its future audience, or she could be, if the form can find a way to reach her. The challenge is not that she doesn't care about theater. She bought a ticket. She's sitting in the seat. The challenge is that the ecosystem that might connect her to deeper engagement, that might turn a one-time ticket buyer into a subscriber, a casual viewer into an informed audience member, a consumer of fifteen-second reactions into a reader of thousand-word reviews, is disappearing just as she's arriving.

The solutions, to the extent they exist, are not glamorous. They involve funding models that most people would rather not think about: foundation support for arts journalism, institutional subscriptions from theaters to the outlets that cover them, cooperative models that link independent critics across markets, and, perhaps most uncomfortably, a willingness by the theater industry itself to invest in the critical infrastructure it depends on. If theaters need reviews to sell tickets, and they do, then theaters have a stake in making sure reviewers can afford to keep reviewing.

There is also the question of form. The traditional review, 800 to 1,200 words, filed on deadline, published the morning after opening, is not the only way to practice criticism. Video essays, podcasts, social media threads that combine accessibility with analysis, long-form features that contextualize a production within a season or an artist's career, all of these are acts of criticism, and all of them can coexist with, rather than replace, the written review. The Times' job listing for its new critic explicitly mentioned "alternate story formats and multimedia," podcasts, and criticism "on camera." Whether this represents the evolution of the form or its dilution depends on who does it and how well.

What cannot be replaced is the function. Someone needs to watch. Someone needs to pay attention, professionally, consistently, with knowledge and context and feeling. Someone needs to write it down, not because the audience demands it, increasingly, parts of the audience don't, but because the art deserves it. Because a production that opens on a Friday and closes three weeks later still happened, still mattered to the people who made it and the people who saw it, and deserves to be recorded with more care than a fifteen-second video allows.

I think about Helen Shaw, growing up in Kansas, reading reviews of Broadway shows she had never seen and might never see, and falling in love with theater through the words of critics who didn't know she existed. That is what criticism does at its best: it reaches beyond the room, beyond the moment, beyond the immediate question of whether to buy a ticket, and makes the case that this fragile, ephemeral, profoundly human art form is worth taking seriously.

The ghost light, as I wrote in a recent piece on Broadway's understudy economy, burns on an empty stage between performances. It holds the space. Criticism, at its best, does the same thing. It holds the space between the performance and the future, between what happened on stage tonight and what someone, years from now, might want to know about it.

That space is shrinking. But it has not gone dark. Not yet. The curtain is still up. The question is whether anyone will be left to write about what happens next.