Experts without expertise? Findings of a comparative study of American, British and German-language reviews of musicals by Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber

Abstract

This essay sums up the findings of a content analysis of 1,824 theatre reviews of musicals by Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber that were published between 1957 and 2002 in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Austria. The study examined the criteria reviewers used and what they were looking for in a musical. The results suggest that instead of reviewing each work on its own terms based on its own aims and merits theatre critics in all countries are clearly influenced by three chief factors when it comes to what aspects of a show are described, interpreted and judged: their own expectations, the journalistic tradition of reviewing in each respective country and the reputation of the artists involved with the production. In addition, in spite of the text-oriented training of most theatre critics, they tend to focus in their articles on the composer and her/his music, although this is not their area of expertise or a field that they are likely to describe with eloquence or precision.