ARTS AT LARGE / JACK MATHEWS : Beast of Broadway Can Be a Lamb

John Guinn, the classical music critic for the Detroit Free Press when I was there (for the ’78 and ’79 model years), kept a sign over his desk that said, “Critics can’t even make music with their hind legs.”

I love that line. It manages to be funny, clever and mean-spirited all at the same time, sort of a bumper sticker for had-it-up-to-here eggheads. It also summarizes, in 10 words or less, the venerable argument that a critic should have firsthand experience in an art form before discounting the efforts of real artists.

In other words, you ought to know something about the intricacies of percussion before you write if off as “a bunch of pounding away in the back.”

As it happens, most classical music critics I’ve met are also musicians who have experienced, firsthand, the naked horror of hitting sour notes before savvy witnesses. But whether those experiences enrich their judgment I don’t know. If it were me, I would be inclined to filter out the sour notes of others with an empathic, “It can happen to anyone.”

Critics generally are not known for their easy magnanimity--at least not in print. They may be sweeter than Liza Doolittle on their own time, but a critic who risks being called “soft” in reviews risks everything. If you really want to hurt a critic’s feelings, if you want to put the dagger in and twist it all about, all you have to do is say, “He/she is the Will Rogers of (film/music/theater/art) criticism. He/she has never met a (movie/concert/performance/acrylic) he/she didn’t like.”

No one has ever dared to compare John Simon with Will Rogers. Simon is the Beast of Broadway, the Toxic Avenger of American theater, New York magazine’s answer to the Heimlich maneuver. He is not a handsome man--his teeth, for instance, might have gnawed through a few too many femurs--but that has not discouraged him from reviewing the physical shortcomings of actors and actresses.

Unlike most theatergoers, who are aware that the players and props on a stage require the assistance of audience imagination, Simon cannot seem to immerse himself in characters if the actors playing them are not, to his tastes, physically correct. He wants verisimilitude in all things, and pity the actress who isn’t as pretty as he thinks her character is supposed to be.

When he was writing about movies for the New Leader, Simon often devoted a high percentage of his reviews of Barbra Streisand movies to the way her nose careened across, descended upon or otherwise eclipsed the big screen. In his review of “Hello, Dolly!,” he called Streisand repulsive and “pronouncedly ugly,” and described her close-ups as “truly terrifying” experiences.

Admitting his befuddlement over her stardom, Simon speculated that Streisand’s success “hinges on the number of homely women who can identify themselves with her.”

I am not a big Streisand fan (it’s more the size of her ego than her schnozzle that bothers me), but, if an actress has to endure rhinoplasty just to have a chance of getting a good notice from Simon, it’s probably not worth it.

Simon visited San Diego recently, if you were wondering what that odor was. He spoke at a gathering of the Assn. for Theater in Higher Education, railing against the notion of cross-cultural casting (using actors whose ethnicity does not match the character as originally written) and the practice of updating classics.

Conferees at the San Diego session heard Simon say he wouldn’t be surprised to see wheelchair-bound actors playing Romeo some day.

It’s not a bad idea. Most theaters today do have wheelchair access.

While he was here, Simon took in a few local productions, then scampered home to regurgitate the experiences in subsequent issues of New York magazine. His first piece started out like a love letter to the San Diego Chamber of Commerce: “Four days in greater San Diego conveyed to me the variety and liveliness of theater in that most enticing of cities.”

He then destroyed, in succession, the Old Globe production of “Coriolanus,” the La Jolla Playhouse’s “Lulu” and the San Diego Rep’s “Six Women With Brain Death or Expiring Minds Want to Know.”

Some sample Simon invective:

“Coriolanus”: “Even though San Diego theatergoers may lack sophistication, there is no excuse for talking down to an audience--certainly not to this disastrous extent.”

“Lulu”: “(Elizabeth) Berridge struts, sulks, strikes poses, shuttles vocally between cradle burblings and barroom growls, and turns an irresistible child of nature into a narcissistic noodge. At her most feral, she is no more than a dime-store harpy.”

“Six Women”: “(The) very title takes up more space than the piece is worth. . . . In still patriarchal regions, even mindless bits of feminism can stir up long-repressed orgies of empathic frenzy. But why do men go to it?”

By Simon standards, however, San Diego did well by him. His fourth review of a San Diego production was a barely qualified rave for the Rep’s “Red Noses.” Simon called it a “delectable production” and concluded that it had been a “a soul-satisfying and thought-provoking evening.”

So, you see, not even critics who are all bad are all bad. Simon may have a mean streak as wide as Arkansas, but, by his own admission, he has a soul that can be satisfied. In the final analysis, John Simon is a bright, knowledgeable, tough but fair-minded arbiter of theatrical tastes.

And I’m pretty sure he can play music with his hind legs.