Some years ago, I applied for a job opening as a reporter at the Riverside Press-Enterprise. It was larger than the daily I was at, yet wouldn’t require moving my kids out of the schools they were in.
I thought the interview went well, but after a few weeks the editor who’d interviewed me called and said they’d decided to hire someone else ... but was I interested in reviewing San Diego theater for them on a freelance basis?
It turned out that most of their subscribers in the southern part of their distribution area worked in San Diego, and so if they were going to go see live theater it was likely to be at the Old Globe, the La Jolla Playhouse or San Diego REP.
Riverside had no theater companies that could rival the Globe and Playhouse — both of which regularly sent their world premieres on to Broadway.
I knew nothing about theater, mind you. I don’t believe I’d even gone to see a play. I even explained all this to the editor, because he was a good guy and I didn’t want to think I’d pulled one over on him.
But he wasn’t deterred in the least.
His readers weren’t theater experts, by and large — they were just looking for some guidance on which plays to see, on how to spend their hard-earned dollars.
So I said yes.
I guess over the next four or five years, I reviewed dozens of plays. Some, like the Playhouse’s world premiere of “Jersey Boys” or Jack O’Brien’s musical re-imagining of the comedy film “The Full Monty,” were fantastic, and went on to long successful runs on Broadway after leaving San Diego.
And the Globe’s annual Shakespeare festival was usually pretty good — except when they tried to modernize the Bard. That tended not to work out.
It generally went better when they played Shakespeare straight.
While I was in the minority among local critics, I enjoyed Hal Holbrook’s take on Lear in 1993 at the Globe. And a few years later, John Goodman was an utterly convincing Falstaff.
But it is the disasters, of course, that most stick in the mind, and I don’t know that there was a bigger disaster in San Diego theater annals than an animal-rights interpretation of Orwell’s “Animal Farm” I was sent to review.
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