That offer asking theaters to pony up $150 for pay-to-play reviews falls flat in L.A.

A Los Angeles theater website’s controversial but novel bid to prop up one of the 21st century’s dwindling occupations – professional theater criticism – has failed to take hold, with few theater artists or producers leaping at an offer in which the reviewee pays the reviewer.

Bitter Lemons, previously known mainly for aggregating other publications’ reviews and boiling them down for a numerical consumer advisory it calls the “Lemonmeter,” launched the pay-to-review-your-play initiative in June.

Producers or individual artists could book a review for $150. The money would buy a reviewer’s attention, but not his or her favor, Bitter Lemons insisted. The reviews would be honest, and Bitter Lemons would decide which critic to assign.

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Since an an initial burst of summer activity from shows in the Hollywood Fringe Festival abated (festival reviews were discounted to $75), Bitter Lemons has posted just 12 paid reviews over the past 11 1/2 weeks.

The fall theater season is now well underway, but Colin Mitchell, Bitter Lemons’ founder, said Wednesday that there were no additional reviews in the pipeline.

“I expected it to be kind of slow,” he said, given what he feels is reflexive resistance to his approach. But Mitchell said the offer still stands – and that it has made at least some headway toward putting money in freelance theater critics’ pockets. The split is $125 for the writer and $25 for Bitter Lemons.

“The writers have been quite happy, they appreciate the work,” Mitchell said. “If they do two or three a month, that’s $250 or $375 extra.”

Despite the slack demand for the paid reviews, “it’s open for business and it’s not going to close any time soon,” Mitchell said.

He said he’s been busy on other fronts, including trying to expand Bitter Lemons to other cities, so he hasn’t put much time into marketing the paid reviews.

The website owner started what he calls the “Bitter Lemons Imperative” as a pragmatic response to what he sees as a crisis for the theater community: an increasingly harsh media environment in which many established outlets have cut budgets for arts coverage in the face of dwindling advertising revenue.

But the idea of pay-to-play reviews was met by volleys of criticism, including a warning from the American Theatre Critics Assn. that allowing a review to be bought “undermines the crucial credibility of not only Bitter Lemons’ critics, but all critics.”

The national group said that the Bitter Lemons system also threatens to erode the ideal of editors serving as knowledgeable independent gatekeepers who decide what’s worth covering.

Most of the clients for Bitter Lemons reviews, Mitchell acknowledged, have been “outliers” -- new or lesser-known producers who otherwise might not command publications’ attention. “That’s a good thing,” he said. “It lets people who aren’t promoted get their [shows] out” to a wider public.

Bitter Lemons reviewers did get gigs reviewing shows coproduced by two established L.A. companies, Theatre West in Hollywood and Latino Theater Company downtown.

A representative of the Latino Theater Company, which joined the theater collective Artists at Play in co-producing “In Love and Warcraft,” currently running at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, did not respond immediately to a request for comment. The show got a solid thumbs up from Bitter Lemons’ reviewer, Joel Beers, who found it “funny, engaging and sharply written.”

John Gallogly, executive director of Theatre West, said he was against buying a review of the summer production, “Without Annette,” but bowed to the wishes of the show’s independent coproducer, Juber Productions.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea at all,” Gallogly said. “I understand the need to have publicity, but I think it’s dangerous for us as an organization. It’s something the other producers wanted to do, so we did.”

“Nobody’s accusing [Bitter Lemons] of having a bad motive, or questioning the individual reviewers’” integrity, Gallogly said. But he thinks paid reviews put theater criticism on a “slippery slope” toward losing its value and credibility.

Jason Rohrer, the critic Bitter Lemons sent to “Without Annette,” had a mainly chilly response to Hope Juber and Jeff Doucette’s play about an improvisational comedy class. He praised some aspects of the play but complained about “the lack of taste common to the production generally, from script to direction to performance.”

mike.boehm@latimes.com

Follow @boehmm of the LA Times for arts news and features

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