So in case you haven't been reading about the latest Drama Club Drama—here's the quick and dirty. Portland Center Stage pulled their advertising from the Mercury (no big whoop, we've got ducats rolling out of our ass), but they also disinvited the Mercury from reviewing any future shows (because in their words, Merc reviewer Alison Hallett is "dismissive" and ignores their productions—not true of course... in the last year, we reviewed 80 percent of their shows, and of these, they got just about 50/50 positive and negative reviews). Anyway, they're buttsore, which got us buttsore, which got commenters buttsore, and everybody's buttsore! (Except for those laughing about how the Drama Club is so buttsore.) HOWEVER! There was this comment:
Now this is something we've been wrangling with since yesterday, and have been giving a lot of thought to. Because... ON THE ONE HAND:
Yeah, we should probably take the high road, ignore these buttsore babies, laugh about their huge marketing fail, and go about our business of reviewing PCS productions that YOU might be interested in. After all, you're the reason we offer our honest opinions—so you'll have the most information possible when spending your hard-earned money on something as historically dicey as attending theater.
ON THE OTHER HAND:
Fuck those guys. Because a) There are soooooo many other theaters in town that are doing exemplary work, and we have only so much space to review them, and only so much money and time to put into it. And if PCS doesn't have any respect for Alison's opinion, how do you think they feel about YOU (the audience member) and what you think? And b) Honestly, it's getting kind of hard to take the high road every single time when the high road is the one that gets shit on constantly. We're critics, and yep, you get to criticize us, too—that's the deal, and we happily accept that as part of the bargain. We sincerely want to be better at what we do. BUT SERIOUSLY? The terrible things some people say about Alison's honest, unbiased work makes me want to take an ax to someone's head. (I've been watching a lot of The Walking Dead lately.)
Anyway, after fully considering both options and talking about it, we've decided to go with (sigh) option one, the high road. AGAIN. We'll happily buy our tickets to see and review PCS productions that you might be interested in seeing (even though they don't want us there), and continue giving you our honest opinion about them. 'Cuz... well, that's what we do.
This meeting of DRAMA CLUB is hereby concluded. (Now, let's all give each other back massages!)
