It’s Time for a Love Song

When New Year’s Day rolls around, I smile contentedly and not just because the holiday madness is over — the shopping, the visits, and the overeating. I’m also glad that I won’t be seeing any more Top Ten Worst lists of 2003.

How did these hateful things start, anyway? Who was Patient Zero in initiating Top Ten Worst lists? Maybe it was the bunch of smart-ass college kids who, in 1939, decided to name in the Harvard Lampoon the worst movies that Hollywood had offered in that calendar year. Those kids picked as “Most Colossal Flop” a picture known as The Wizard of Oz.

That has to head any Top Ten Worst list of erroneous opinions, wouldn’t you say? It’s also the ultimate comment on how valid these lists are. Of course, every opinion is subjective, and many of the “Top Ten Worst of 2003” lists that I just saw in December included many a highly regarded show — even an occasional Tony-winner. That might be because those shows just couldn’t live up to the hype to which the theatergoer was subjected in advance, but every person has encountered a show he hated that most everyone else has liked. This, too, stresses the fact that one man’s meat is another man’s poisson.

I’m sure that if I were to consult the ever-burgeoning blue notebook in which I write down each show I see, when and where I see it, and what I think of it, I could ever-so-easily come up with my own Top Ten Worst list for 2003. But that’s not how I want to spend my time. As Noah asks of God at the end of Act I of Two by Two, “Must it be?” Why should every late December — when we’re constantly hearing that ’tis the season to be jolly and it’s the most wonderful time of the year — bring forth un-jolly and un-wonderful lists made by people who are simply out to ridicule others?

I know that the standard statute of limitations on a crime is seven years but, as far as I’m concerned, presenting a bad show in January or giving bad direction in February or even performing atrociously in a March show should be forgiven and forgotten by year’s end. Why must those involved in failures be reminded once again of the painful experiences they went through? Haven’t they suffered enough?

Of course, some of the shows that made the Top Ten Worst lists for 2003 opened much more recently than that, but they too were reviewed and rebuked. In the real world, once a condemned prisoner has been executed, he’s not again shot or electrocuted or hanged or guillotined or lethal-injected. He’s buried, and everyone forgets about him. Can’t we do the same with the corpses of our calamities? Many of the shows mentioned on those lists of the year’s worst closed quickly. They can no longer hurt those who saw them, so why must people continue to trash them?

Imagine if your boss at work made up a list of Top Ten Worst Employees. How would you feel if you were on it, even if you had to admit that you technically deserved to be there for some terrible thing you did? Wouldn’t you think that the boss was holding a grudge? You’d likely go home, call up each of your dearest friends and relatives, and yell, “You’re not going to believe what he (or she) did today!” You’d certainly question your boss’s management skills, and you’d be right to do so.

Nevertheless, some people who would chafe at such treatment feel the need to blithely knock people who, when all is said and done, probably know more about theater than they do. Lord knows, there are some incompetents working on Broadway and beyond, but this doesn’t mean that you’d do any better if you were thrust into the field of theatrical battle and had to make a show work. I daresay that you might even do worse.

As Hal Hackady wrote in Goodtime Charley, “Why can’t we all be nice?”

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[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@aol.com]