30 September 2004
Lisa Hayes
Downsizing at the Buffalo News gets dramatic
The Buffalo News continues to downgrade its product. The News recently went to new presses which allow it to publish a great number of eye-candy color photographs, but at the cost of a significantly reduced amount of space for hard news stories and increased fees for advertisers, which make it ever more difficult for small business to get into the paper at all. It replaced Pulitzer-Prize winning editorial cartoonist Tom Toles with an intern who isn't very good and who knows little about politics, but who, now as a junior staffer, works for a good deal less money. The latest, according to Buffalo author, actor and director Lisa Hayes in this letter to News editor Margaret Sullivan, has a student intern doing drama criticism for which he is singularly unqualified. Executives at the News say doing it on the cheap is necessary because the paper's circulation has taken a huge nosedive the past few years, and if they're going to keep sending those big checks to Warren Buffett in Omaha, they have to cut costs. Old-time reporters at the news say if they keep cutting costs by degrading the paper they won't have a paper worth reading at all and that one key reason for the dip in circulation is the change in editorial standards. Here is Lisa Hayes’ September 21 letter to News editor Margaret Sullivan about UB student Benjamin Siegel’s September 20 review, followed by the review itself. BJ
September 21, 2004
Margaret Sullivan
Buffalo News
Dear Ms. Sullivan:
I am the director of the O'Connell & Company production of "We're Still Hot!". I have worked as an actress in New York and Los Angeles and toured internationally, and have a lot of experience with reviews. Both good and bad reviews come with a life in the theatre and you learn to accept them. However, what I cannot accept is the work of four well-respected actresses in this community being diminished and dismissed by a boy more intent on crafting a sarcastic play summary than in writing a real review.
I am shocked that the Buffalo News would send a college intern to review a professional production. I could understand the necessity to use "whomever you can get" if this were the Jamestown Post Journal or the Cody Enterprise, but the Buffalo News? I had Ben Siegel as a student in my Introduction to Theatre for Non Majors course three years ago. I wish now I had spent some time discussing the responsibilities of a critic. I happened to be sitting behind Ben and his friend during the performance. I was appalled that the two of them passed notes back and forth during the whole show, whispering and giggling like two teen-age boys looking at their first Playboy magazine. I completely support the idea of giving young people opportunities, but those opportunities should be thoughtfully selected and appropriately supervised.
London critic Benedict Nightingale explains that critics "clarify to the audience what the dramatist, director, performers and designers are trying to achieve while simultaneously representing the audience to the theater
professionals. To be effective, critics need thorough knowledge to understand and explain the results as well as place a performance within the context of tradition." We specifically requested that Ben Siegel not be sent to review this show, since we knew the subject matter required someone with more life experience than a college senior. His contemptuous,
sarcastic review may have entertained him and his buddies, but it was deeply insulting to the women in your readership who are coping with the changes that aging brings and with the trials and tribulations of life, and incredibly disrespectful to the women who gave sensitive, funny and beautiful performances. How anyone could reduce Mary Kate O'Connell's incredible performance of a song about child abuse to "The words 'Papa can you hear me' come to mind" is beyond me.
We ask that in the theatre listings you not include Siegel's review or star. We also ask that you send a real reviewer to see the show. If that is not possible, we would like to suggest that you do a feature article on the show. The Canadian playwright, J.J. McColl, is coming to town on Friday, and would be available to do an interview. Before becoming a celebrated playwright, McColl was a popular Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio and television broadcaster.
As you may or may not know, the show has enjoyed extraordinary success in Canada (under the title "Menopositive, the Musical") and has been picked up by New York producers for a national tour of the U.S. We were given special permission to do the U.S. premiere, and have been honored to be a part of the artistic journey of this wonderful show.
Sincerely yours,
Lisa Hayes
Musical finds new way for menopause to be painful By BENJAMIN SIEGEL News Contributing Reviewer 9/20/2004
What's worse than menopause? A musical about menopause.
"We're Still Hot! The Musical" is a show that probably, at one time, seemed like a great idea. Women in their mid-50s gather 'round to share their
deepest, darkest secrets about life in the middle ages. Toss in some songs for good measure, the obligatory hot-flash joke every few minutes, maybe a kick line, and you've got yourself a bona fide hit.
Where did it all go wrong?
O'Connell & Company, based in Snyder's Cabaret-in-the-Square, is no stranger to such nontraditional, girl - er, I mean - woman-power shows. Their popular "Diva by Diva!" is touted as being Western New York's longest-running musical. And with good reason. Women are great subjects for cabaret storytelling. They're the backbone of our civilization. Women create life. Men adore them and children worship them - they're our mothers, our wives, our sisters, our friends. They're also physiological beings, which is, presumably, where most of the
novelty in a show like "We're Still Hot! The Musical" - don't forget "The Musical" - comes from.
Hot flashes are funny. Why? Why not. Saggy breasts? Sure! Throw 'em in! They're funny, too! Mary Kate O'Connell (the O'Connell in O'Connell & Company) stars as Marnie Summers, a successful entrepreneur with a 21-year-old boy-toy back home and a lost childhood that still plagues her to this day. (The words "Papa can you hear me?" come to mind many times during Marnie's dramatic monologues.) Old pals Kate and Cynthia (Pamela Rose Mangus and Mary Moebius, respectively), each with their own storied pasts, meet up with Marnie for their 35th high school reunion, where they're preparing a musical revue for the weekend's big reception. (Because don't we all do that at our reunions? I know I do.) The three were drama club pals back in the day, and talk about "that production of "Oklahoma' " like it was yesterday. Only it wasn't. Kate and Cynthia have each had troubled lives since graduating. Kate, a playwright and director (she helms the group's musical-within-the-musical, called - drum roll please - "Menopause: The Musical"), can't seem to stabilize her 32-year-old son's love life and ward off an adulthood of failed career attempts. Oh, and she's an alcoholic. Cynthia, on the other hand, is still the prissy, well-to-do sorority girl who rolled Marnie's eyes even back in high school. Her problems are no less monumental. Her rich husband - Chahh-rels, as she calls him - is incapable of picking out his own work clothes, yet still manages to have time for a mistress. He's also the father of Kate's illegitimate son, whom she conceived the night of the big graduation party. (So that's where she was that night!)
Oh, there's more.
The fourth member of their group doesn't show up. "Where are we going to find a fourth woman who can sing?" they wonder. Enter Mary Craig, Buffalo musical theater extraordinaire. Just as her character, Zsuzsu (think Zha Zha), the school's cleaning woman, saves the threesome's menopausal musical, so does Craig attempt to resuscitate a show so painful I'm sure only a mammogram is more fun.
I won't get into the fact that Zsuzsu is Hungarian, or that she was once a star of the stage back in her home country but now resides to sweeping high school auditoriums, or that she, too, has a troubled past of loneliness and contempt.
Or, that there's a song called "Whirligig Glands," in which gyrating hips, pole dancing and silky negligee combine to make an all-star attack on the senses. Or, the scene that outlines, in horrific detail, what the women think of their own vaginas. "Mine's positively juicy," one says. "Mine's like a plucked capon," says another.
The problem with "We're Still Hot" isn't that it's about menopause. It's that it's not good. A 90-minute first act with too many songs; dialogue that's more formulaic than an episode of "Full House"; and an underlying theory that claims menopause is about more than receding hairlines and faulty parts. Apparently, it's about abortion and adoption and live-in children and dreams of the Hungarian hillside. Who knew? I'm glad I'm not a woman.
Copyright 2004 by Buffalo Report, Inc.