Arts Reporter

Audience Reviews

With all the other things that I hope to achieve with Arts Reporter, one of the things I won’t be doing are reviews.  But that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to have reviews on the site.  You, gentle reader, will provide the reviews.  Just go to the forum, which will be set up in a day or two, and look for the venue or producing company for the show you went to see.  Each venue or producing company will have a board dedicated to them in the forum, and each show will have its own thread.  Of course you can always run a search for the show title, and if it isn’t there, make a new thread and start it. Just jump in with your review and begin the dialogue with whoever else comes along afterwards and agrees or disagrees or just wants to ask if the show is worth seeing or not.  And if someone from the show wants to jump in to debate your opinion or explain why you didn’t “get it”, then I say the more the merrier. 

Text, Video, Whatever

This particular software that I’m using will also allow you to post pictures so if you want to take your camera to the show and post pictures of you and your friends hobnobbing with the cast before or after, that’s fine. Try to keep track of who’s who in your pictures if you can.  You can even set up your own video review taking issue with the pros (or if no pros covered it, which happens a lot) and upload it to the forum as well.  It’s the Web 2.0; I say go for it.  Now of course the forum will be open to other kinds of discussions, it’s just that I’m anticipating patron reviews in the initial set up.  And there will also be a chat room which I would expect will get most of its use from Thursday through Sunday night as people come back from seeing whatever show and want talk about it with whoever is out there. So be out there. Now you have that community through the forum.

If you have trouble posting media, don’t fret, it is new technology. Just send it to me in an email and I’ll take care of it.

Additional Benefits

The other thing about the forum is that it’s going to give a lot of useful feedback to the producers of the shows.  Only rarely do shows have talk backs after the curtain where the audience can talk and ask questions. Even when they do, it’s not after every show.  The forum and chat are going to be a 24-hour talkback and we can only hope that the producers will be listening.  I think they should. They’ll have a lot of very good information if they do. You owe it to the benefit of your own theater going experience to give it to them - frequently and in large doses