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Come. Come closer. I’m gonna tell you a secret, but I gotta whisper: I think putting star ratings on reviews is dumb. Zero out of five stars. Do not recommend.
And yet, award stars I must. I work for an arts section that puts stars on many of its reviews, fringe and otherwise. And, I mean, I get it. They are an easy shorthand — five stars is a rave, one star is a pan — and you can put them on a poster. Many publications the world over use a five-star system to rate music, plays, movies and restaurants.
I did a little deep-dive to figure out who to blame for this practice in newspapers, and it looks like it’s Irene Thirer, the film critic at the New York Daily News, who started using a star system in 1928. Thanks buckets, Irene!
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Here’s my thing: there is no agreed-upon universal Free Press rubric among critics by which we rate stuff.
There can’t be. We all have different tastes, senses of humour, thresholds for discomfort/experimentation/weirdness, knowledge bases from which to draw.
That’s why instead of objectivity, we’re pursuing fairness. And even still, my two-star show might be someone else’s three-star show, etc.
But what do stars, on their own, actually tell you?
I’d much rather people read the actual review and, ideally, read enough of that writer’s reviews to get a feel for what they like and don’t and why. Free Press critic Alison Gillmor, whose reviews I trust implicitly, put it best in a roundtable discussion:
“But really, a three-star review can mean so many different things. Some three-star movies are valiant, ambitious failures. Some are guilty pleasures, maybe a bit idiotic but still irresistible. Others are merely average — competent and serviceable but immediately forgettable.”
Not everyone on the team we deploy to review the entirety of the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival — a herculean amount of work I can’t believe we pull off every year — is a theatre critic, it’s true, but all are writers well-versed in offering their thoughtful opinions in print.
Our expertise comes from putting in the reps. We’ve collectively seen a lot of shows, fringe or otherwise. Over time, you get to know what works and what doesn’t.
Did the thing billed as a comedy make you laugh out loud or did it merely make you smile? Did the drama make you feel something? Was the script sharp and snappy or was it a shaggy dog? Were you engaged, or did you check your watch? Could you see the potential in a mediocre show? Was there someone in the ensemble your eyes never left?
All of these qualities separate “good” from “bad,” though we don’t use those words. Criticism requires precision. Not “good,” but “compelling” or “exciting” or “hilarious” or “smart.” Not “bad,” but “cringe-worthy” or “rambly” or “boring” or “unfocused.”
Three-star reviews are the hardest to write for all the reasons Alison gave. Serviceable competence is real and tricky to handle; for my part, what bumps me to a four or five-star rating is whether or not I would recommend it and, in the case of five stars, would I see it again.
But let’s say you see a show this week that we gave 2.5 stars to but you leave the theatre thinking, “I dunno, I kinda liked it?” or “WTF is the paper talking about, that was the best thing I have ever seen!”
Good! No one is wrong! I gave five stars to a truly affecting dance work called The Evolution of a Broken Heart (sadly only on during week one) and I saw a post on Facebook written by someone who hated it. Life’s rich pageant!
Cultural criticism is meant to be a conversation. And it’s impossible to put a star rating on the value of that.
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