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Show-Score is giving critics two thumbs down.
Last Friday, the popular theatre review-aggregation website announced that it will no longer incorporate reviews from professional critics into its overall scores for each show. Scores for each show will only reflect the views of its users.
"We made this decision for a number of reasons, primarily driven by the fact that we now have 400,000 member reviews on Show-Score," explained its founder, Tom Melcher. "Members are consistently telling us that they can make decisions earlier and more easily based on what other theater fans think about a show," he stated.
Previously, three Show-Score staffers would read and assign a score to each critic's review for a show. If the staffers assigned different scores to the same critic's review, then a consensus would need to be reached, and then the average score of all the critics' reviews would be mixed with the average score of all its users' reviews to create an overall score for the show.
Critics could also submit their own scores and review excerpts to Show-Score.
"As we explained from the beginning," Melcher continued, "we would much prefer that the critics score their own reviews, since they are writing their response to the work that they have experienced." "However, while some critics have been sending us their scores and excerpts, we have not been able to get complete buy-in, which is necessary for a uniform scoring system to work," he said.
While the process of grading each critic's review might have been time-consuming, Broadway insiders suspect that that it might also have hurt Show-Score's bottom-line.
One of the main sources of revenue for the website is selling tickets, and including negative critics' reviews dragged down the overall scores for several shows, making their tickets less appealing to customers. For example, whereas the average critics' score for the musical Gettin' the Band Back Together was 55, the average users' score is 74.
Providing a platform for theatre enthusiasts to share their opinions, more than 58 percent of Show-Score users gave shows scores greater than 90 out of 100 in its first year. Only two-percent of users' scores were less than 49, and less than one percent of the users' reviews for Wicked and Hamilton are negative.
"Show-Score is just turning itself into a third-rate Reddit for theater geeks," commented David Cote, who served as the chief drama critic at Time Out New York for 14 years, and now writes reviews for Observer.
"I find it deeply disappointing that Show-Score, which built an online community of avid theatergoers who are interested in shows as much as the critical discourse around shows, would cut us out of the equation," he complained. Removing critics' reviews from the overall scores contributes to "the narrowing of voices and extinction of varied, useful theatre criticism," he said.
"Looking at [the decision] from a more pessimistic point of view, one may find that Show-Score is essentially saying that professional reviews are no longer necessary, and have been displaced by anonymous user comments," added Matt Windman, the theatre critic at amNew York and the author of a book about theatre criticism.
"Tom Melcher wants to monetize a fan base of hardcore theatergoers, and creating a site where professional criticism can be read alongside fan notes was never going to achieve that goal," commented Cote. "If the world wanted a Rotten Tomatoes for the performing arts, then someone would have done it by now," he stated, referring to the influential review-aggregation website for film.
Ironically, Rotten Tomatoes tweaked its website several months ago to limit the influence of its users. After thousands of users tried to manipulate the audience ratings for Captain Marvel and Black Panther, the popular website decided to block users from reviewing films before their official release dates, and now verifies when users purchased tickets to films. “We’re doing it to more accurately and authentically represent the voice of fans, while protecting our data and public forums from bad actors," stated a representative of Rotten Tomatoes.
In an era where critics are being shown the door at newspapers around the world, some individuals fear that further limiting their influence might affect the caliber of the Broadway shows.
"It may be true that everyone is a critic, but not everyone can form an intelligent, informed, contextualized response to art that, ideally, speaks to audiences, artists, and producers with authority and vision," Cote said. Broadway producers and creative teams often make changes to their shows based on critics' reviews during out-of-town tryouts.
"[I]t is wonderful that people now have an opportunity to express their feelings about a work of art," stated arts administrator Michael Kaiser. But, he warned, "great art must not be measured by a popularity contest." "Otherwise, the art that appeals to the lowest common denominator will always be deemed the best," he said.
