Chicago Newspaper Theater Critics of the Early 20th Century

In the early years of the twentieth century, when live theater dominated the entertainment world and print media led public discourse, each without competition from electronic forms, the daily newspaper theater critic mediated ideas and values quite differently than today’s critics, whose main function has been reduced to that of a consumer guide. This article examines the corps of theater critics who served ten Chicago newspapers about 100 years ago. At a time when news editors were reluctant to cover new ideas and social movements, such as the push for women’s suffrage, theater critics were encountering radical new social ideas from European playwrights. Whether they approved or disapproved—and they did both, vehemently—their open debate with each other provided a level of public conversation of incalculable value in their own time, and largely missing today

A letter to the editor

The goal of this letter is to point out that the fastest way to weaken any society and its business model, including the IEEE and its reader-pays stance, is to lose your professional integrity

Newspaper Critic Shapes Chicago Style of Theater

This study of coverage of the local theater scene from 1975–85 in three Chicago dailies found that one critic, Richard Christiansen, had the strongest influence on the development of the Chicago Style that flourished in the off-Loop theaters. </jats:p

The engineers that time forgot

You and I, dear reader of IEEE Microwave Magazine, are set to become more valuable day by day. Let me see if I can paint a picture of why

From discussion leader to consumer guide: A century of theater criticism in Chicago newspapers

This article completes a three-part examination of theater critics working for Chicago newspapers during the twentieth century. The first article in the series covered the boomtown period leading up to World War I, and the second article addressed Chicago\u27s rise after 1960 as a regional center for theater covered by fewer newspapers and fewer critics. This article reviews those periods but emphasizes the middle, road town period, which saw a gradually dwindling band of critics functioning as quality control experts, passing judgment on New York road shows. After examining that period, this article uses commodification to consider the changing role of the critic over the entire century. It concludes that while commodification is a useful concept to understand vast changes in the critical landscape, it is neither an irresistible nor an inevitable force