{"id":2360,"date":"2005-02-03T17:49:33","date_gmt":"2005-02-03T22:49:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=2360"},"modified":"2022-10-09T15:51:15","modified_gmt":"2022-10-09T19:51:15","slug":"speaking-of-bad-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=2360","title":{"rendered":"Speaking of Bad Reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the worst plays I have ever been in (described here in excruciating detail<\/a>) was a musical version of Three Men in a Boat<\/i> … Never have had I had such shame onstage. My friend Jackie refers to such shame as “white-hot shame<\/i>“. Very different from your ordinary run-of-the-mill shame when you spill a drink in public, or trip in front of a group of people. Being in a bomb of a show has its SPECIAL brand of shame, which is “white-hot”. I would openly laugh at the play and my fellow actors WHILE I WAS IN IT, WHILE I WAS UP THERE. I did not care. All I cared about was cooling off that white-hot shame. It was ba-a-a-a-ad.<\/p>\n

And the first sentence of one of the reviews was: “Not since the Titanic has there been such a nautical disaster.”<\/p>\n

Now. It SUCKS to be in a bomb. But still. There’s something weirdly cool about being in such a bomb, and having such a TERRIBLE review.<\/p>\n

All of this was brought on by the following quote, sent to me by my dad. It’s a doozy. Here’s the setup:<\/p>\n

British actor Ralph Richardson was performing in Graham Greene’s play Carving a Statue<\/i>. Graham Greene saw the performance. And then wrote Richardson a letter. In the letter was the following sentence:<\/p>\n

Alas, you fancy yourself as a literary man, and as I have as little faith in your literary ability as in your capacity to judge a play, I have found you–not for the first time–incapable of understanding even your own part.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the worst plays I have ever been in (described here in excruciating detail) was a musical version of Three Men in a Boat … Never have had I had such shame onstage. My friend Jackie refers to such … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[16],"tags":[831],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2360"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2360"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2360\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":178261,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2360\/revisions\/178261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}