Last month Windy City Times theater critic Rick Reed logged on to the Internet to do some background reading on Black Comedy, a play he’d soon be reviewing. Among the sites he visited was nytheatre.com, where he read that “Black Comedy takes more than an hour to tell its standard-issue story of a young artist.” A week or so later, after he’d filed his review of the local Speaking Ring Theatre Company production, Reed logged on again to take a look at what his fellow Chicago critics had said about the show. At chicagocritic.com he saw something that gave him pause. The review, by the site’s owner, Tom Williams, read: “Black Comedy takes more than an hour to tell its standard-issue story of a young artist.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Williams’s review of Peter Shaffer’s Equus, for example, opined that “Shaffer combines psychological realism with expressionistic theatrical techniques, employing such devices as masks, mime, and dance”–exactly the observation made by bookrags.com, an Internet study-guide source, in an identical paragraph. Another section of the chicagocritic.com review explained that “audiences, face a bewildering range of explanations for Alan’s mental state”–the errant comma a holdover from its apparent source, a twin paragraph at penguinputnam.com. The major distinction between these two was the names of local cast members, which had been added in parentheses when their characters were mentioned in Williams’s piece. Local cast names had also been popped into two paragraphs of a chicagocritic.com review of The Petrified Forest that otherwise were identical to an introduction at enotes.com. And chicagocritic.com’s review of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? included a six-paragraph plot summary that matched one at another Internet study-guide source, pinkmonkey.com.
Tom Williams (no relation to Reader theater critic Albert Williams) launched chicagocritic.com three years ago and remains its only reviewer. The site carries banners and links, but he says it’s not a moneymaker: he’s collected a total of about $600 in advertising fees. A former salesman, Williams says he’s a lifelong theater fan who got into reviewing when the publisher of the now defunct Wicker Park Voice asked if he knew anyone who wanted to do it. By his count, Williams reviewed about 240 shows last year, and he’s also working on getting chicagostagetalk.com, a radio show about theater that he used to broadcast on the Internet, back up. “I’ve never had any training in criticism or journalism, and I like most of what I see,” he says. “I view myself as a promoter; I try to write from the point of view of looking for a reason to get people into shows.”
