Critics: End of One-Man’s-Opinion

“The one thing I want to do is break the power of the New York Times drama critic,” said the man who was appointed the Times drama critic last week. And that was why Dance Critic Clive Barnes, 39, got the job. Ever since the New York Herald Tribune folded last summer, the Times has fretted about the power of its critic to make or break shows. One answer, believes Managing Editor Clifton Daniel, might be to have two theater critics. So, starting next fall, incumbent Critic Walter Kerr, 53, will write a more leisurely Sunday column. Barnes will take over daily reviewing.

Kerr and Barnes should certainly differ. Meticulous and didactic, Kerr writes a tightly organized review, though lately he has been uncharacteristically diffident and even ambivalent—as if he, too, were rather worried about expressing too firm an opinion of a show. Clive Barnes, on the other hand, is a superenthusiastic Englishman who turns out sprawling, effusive copy with heavy injections of his own personality. He has expanded his jurisdiction beyond that of any previous dance critic by reviewing dance halls and discothèques, films and the opening of the Mets. Baseball players, he concluded, are no match, in grace and strength, for male ballet dancers.

Though he once reviewed the London theater for the Daily Express, Barnes resisted taking the Times drama job for a long time. For one thing, he is devoted to the dance and thinks that the greatest figures in the American theater are George Balanchine and Martha Graham. “Many Broadway plays are simply stage visualizations of TV dramas,” he says. “I wonder whether Broadway can ever build a viable theater on a lower common-denominator taste.”

Barnes finally said yes, partly because he will still be allowed to review the dance—a formidable double assignment for a critic of even Barnes’s energy. But he is fast boning up on the U.S. theater and has become reasonably enthusiastic about his new job. “This season has been so bad,” he says, “that it can only get better.”