Fiery theater critic John Simon ousted

Theater critic John Simon, famed and feared over four decades for his slashing pen, has been handed his walking papers by New York magazine -- three days shy of his 80th birthday -- amid a volley of kind words from the editor who let him go.

“Great admirer ... courage as a critic ... powerful prose ... will be missed,” said the statement of Adam Moss, New York magazine editor in chief since February 2004. (Simon’s successor will be Jeremy McCarter, currently of the New York Sun; his first piece for the magazine will run June 1.)

“It was time to do something new,” Moss explained in a phone interview. “I think you would be hard pressed to find a critic at any other publication or in any other art form who has had as long a run.”

Simon, who can be found in the May 9 issue heaping contempt upon a “degrading, detestable” production of “A Streetcar Named Desire” and warning of “rotary earthquakes” near the grave of Marlon Brando, brushed his employer’s praise aside. “I seem to be in possession of all my faculties. People tell me that my writing has not fallen off in any way. I’m physically un-disabled,” the critic said Tuesday. “But I am old, and no doubt I have a point of view that is not a point of view of young folks today. I can see what they’re up to, and I can’t say that I cannot understand it. I just didn’t think it would come at this time, and without any previous warning.”

Simon was born in Yugoslavia, came to the U.S. during World War II and was educated at Harvard. His cultural criticism has appeared in the Hudson Review, Commonweal and National Review, among others, and Applause Books has published collections of his theater and music reviews. But New York magazine has been his home for 37 years. He wrote his first review for the publication in October 1968, six months after its launch. By the mid-1970s, Time magazine called him “the most poisonous pen on Broadway.” He has compared Liza Minnelli’s face to a beagle’s, and Kathleen Turner to “a braying mantis.” In 1973, aggrieved actress Sylvia Miles dumped pasta on his head in a restaurant.

Simon, who got the heave-ho in a Monday afternoon meeting with Moss, said he’d found McCarter a cordial colleague but had only read two or three of his reviews. “I wasn’t bowled over by them, but maybe if I’d read more, I’d have a better opinion....”

Though some had claimed to detect a mellowing in recent years, his recent reviews included a March 28 mixed verdict on Monty Python’s “Spamalot” in which he suggested that “Sara Ramirez, as the Lady of the Lake, into which I’d rather have her go jump than emerge from, fails at everything: acting, singing, even looking right.” Ramirez was among Tuesday’s Tony Award nominees. And then there was this April 18 assessment of a “Julius Caesar” production at the Belasco Theatre featuring Denzel Washington: “Enacted by a cast part black, part white but scrupulously equally inadequate, it may be the funniest or most lamentable Shakespeare you’ll ever see.” Washington “plays Brutus as a naive sophomore in a college comedy; after that, like said sophomore on an overdose of Dexedrine.”

Yet Tuesday, when invited to say something unkind, Simon declined. “They can run [the magazine] any way they want to.... I can be sad or disappointed or financially strapped, but I can’t say that they don’t have the right to do this.”

“I appreciate that,” said Moss.