Film and theater reviewer biases and politics have always been a blight on the field: the late, absurdly worshiped New Yorker reviewer Pauline Kael would pan terrific John Wayne movies just because he had supported Barry Goldwater. It’s hard to watch a revival of “Hair” (or the stunningly bad film version) without wondering, “What were those reviewers raving about, with that faux rock music and the trite book?” Why, peace, pot and love, baby! ” Hair” was against the war in Vietnam, so it had to be at least as good as “Oklahoma!”

Now, of course, in the era of the Great Stupid, explaining what Big Brother’s tastes in the arts require is a job requirement for film and theater reviewer who are paid in real money rather than free passes. In a New York Times column about how “outdated” classic musicals (that is, insufficiently woke) can be salvaged by appropriately sensitive directors, for example, readers were informed by an “expert” that only gay actors can convincingly play gay characters.

Before I go into that silliness, I have to mention that in the article Jesse Green discusses three professional revivals of old musicals (directong these used to be one of my jobs not that long ago, so I’m arguably an “expert” too). He excoriates the original “Cats,” but finds a revival brilliantly transformative, because it turns the cats into…blacks. Get it? So now it’s good! “Relocating the largely unaltered text to the world of Harlem drag balls, in which contestants compete in glamorous displays of transcendence over poverty and racism, brings the entire story, for the first time, to meaningful, joyful life,” Green gushes.

Uh, but Jesse, “Cats” is about cats. It’s based on a children’s poem by T.S. Eliot about cats. If you do a production of “Cats” that has no cats in it, then it isn’t “Cats” (but it still has the annoying lyrics and music). Oh, I get it, I really do: if it’s an all black cast, it’s good because it’s diverse.

Wait a minute...but I digress. The real target here is Green’s claim that earlier versions of the musical “La Cage Aux Folles,” including the original Broadway hit that featured a gay adapter and lyricist, composer and director, just didn’t work because the stars playing the gay couple at the center of the tale weren’t gay off stage. The critic writes in part,

When “La Cage” opened on Broadway, Georges and Albin were played by straight men — Georges by Gene Barry, best known as the TV marshal Bat Masterson. But that sop to expected heterosexual resistance weakened the show’s emotional core. At the final curtain, with the farcical plot resolved and one of those hummable tunes surging in the strings, the couple walked into the sunset with their arms intertwined; that was about the extent of their intimacy…If the production that closed earlier this month at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Mass., got closer to the complexities of gayness and drag, it may be because Albin was played by an actual drag performer: Alex Michaels, known to fans of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” as Alexis Michelle. Exquisitely decorative but not merely so, he seemed equally real in each part of his role, and when he and Georges (Tom Story) kissed with convincing passion it was the first time in 40 years I believed those characters loved each other.

Oh. This takes one more step toward hypocritical LGBTQ chauvinism even beyond Tom Hanks’ virtue signalling proclamation that he shouldn’t have been cast as the closeted gay lawyer dying of AIDS in “Philadelphia,” though he won an Oscar for his portrayal. A gay actor should have been cast, see. (Why not go all the way, Tom, and insist that a only gay lawyer dying of AIDS should be cast in that role?) Tom is smarter than this, but he has to work with the Woke, so I’ll kind of forgive him. Maybe.

Green, however, is in perilous territory. If straight actors can’t be convincingly gay in a play, musical or film—of course they can—the position that gay actors can be convincingly straight becomes bigoted, discriminatory and idiotic. I’d calculate that gay actors have played more heterosexual lovers on stage and screen professionally than straight actors (I will use “cis-” when they threaten to put the cage of hungry rats over my face and not before); we just don’t know who they were or are in most cases. My diagnosis is that Green’s perceptions are warped by confirmation bias. Would he have found the original “La Cage” more convincing if he believed that the stars were gay? I’d say its likely.

Interestingly, Green, the Times’ chief critic, includes a “Journalistic Ethics” section in his bio. He writes, “I do not review productions in which anyone I know well or consider a friend has any significant role. I also do not write feature articles about people whose work I will soon be reviewing. In keeping with the standards of integrity outlined in our Ethical Journalism Handbook, which all Times journalists are committed to upholding, I do not serve on prize juries, attend galas, donate to theater companies, write blurbs for books in my field or offer even casual guidance to people who ask me to criticize their work privately. I am basically no use to anyone.”

Green is, however, gay (though he doesn’t mention that in his bio) and presumably interested in promoting gay causes as well as the prospects of gay performers, not that there’s anything wrong with that. He is obligated to be transparent about that interest and bias when it is relevant to his commentary.

As we all know by now, or should, the Times “Ethical Journalism Handbook” is window dressing.