I’d be surprised if I haven’t posted on this before, but a recent advice column article about the issue made me realize that the common conflict almost all of us with friends in the performing arts face routinely is as perfect example of the phenomenon I have termed “ethics zugzwang” as there is.
A theater reporter in the New York Times wrote a column titled, “My Friend’s Show Was Kind of Terrible. What Do I Say When I See Them? (You can always consider telling the truth, but it may not be advisable in this case.) [Gift link!] He breaks down the options as,
- “Tell the truth, as a form of tough love.
- Find something to say that is appreciative but also incomplete.
- Lie.”
After reporting on interviews with performers and others in show biz, the reporter concludes that the most ethical option is “Lie.” He concludes, “So what to do? The consensus among those I spoke with is that the best way to be a friend is to be supportive. Leave the critical feedback to other people and other settings. ‘I think the move is always to lie,’ said the musical theater composer Joe Iconis . ‘Whether you enjoyed the show or not, if you’re actually a friend to the person who is part of the production, your job is to say ‘great job, fantastic show.’ I have never once appreciated a friend who came to a show of mine and offered unsolicited negative comments.’”
I agree that #2, the tactic of using some deceitful comment that confirmation bias will lead the recipient to take as positive when your true meaning is anything but (“That was amazing!”…”Well, you’ve done it again!”…”I’ll never forget this show!”…”You couldn’t have been better!”…”I’ve never seen anything like it!”, etc.) is both slimy and too transparent. I agree also that cognitive dissonance makes brutal truth-telling truly risky: is showing critical integrity really worth alienating are crushing someone you care about?
Nevertheless, I regularly face an especially unpleasant version of this conflict. I am a professional stage director who was the artistic guide for a professional theater company for two decades, and my friends in the business often invite me to performances saying they want my honest opinion. I have my own credibility to protect: if the show is garbage and people spread the word around that I loved it or even liked it, my judgment (or sanity) will be called into question. I’m also an ethicist, which means that endorsing lying and worse, doing so myself because its easier that telling the truth is professionally unpalatable.
The question ultimately comes down to “Am I here as a friend, a coach, or as a critic?” Even as a friend, however, lying is a problem. Friends don’t let friends make fools of themselves. Friends don’t encourage friends to waste their time, or to inflict their inadequate talents on paying customers. I have told some friends that they need to take singing lessons, or learn what to do with their hands, or take an improv class…or, in many cases, find better directors.
The most difficult cases arrive when friends send me their plays or musicals and ask for my honest assessment. Too often, my assessment is “okay, regard this as a learning experience, and write another play, because this one isn’t fixable.” But I don’t have the time to be a play-writing teacher, and if the issue is writing song lyrics, my experience tells me that if someone doesn’t know how to write them by the time they are 21, they aren’t going to learn. I once told an enthusiastic aspiring Sondheim wannabe that his manuscript was hopeless, and I very much doubted that it was worth his time and effort to write another one. He had actually hired me to critique his work, but he got furious and never sent the check.
And yet…I hate having to do that, and for the most part, I think ever telling an aspiring artist of any kind that they have no talent is wrong. There are too many stories about performers and artists in other fields who have gone on to prove an arrogant, judgmental critic not just wrong, but spectacularly wrong. A legendary example was a talent evaluator’s assessment of Fred Astaire’s first screen test for RKO Radio Pictures. The report was said to have stated: “Can’t sing, can’t act, balding, can dance a little.”
There is no rule for finding an ethical resolution of the “Friend in a Lousy Show” problem, or its close cousin, the “Friend Who Is Lousy in an Otherwise Good Show” problem. The truth will hurt, but so will a lie.
Zugzwang!
Ethics Alarms 
Don’t answer. Ask questions. They’ll eventually get to it.
“What’d you think of the show?”
“Well, you know me, I’m always reading the deeper story behind the story. I’m still debating the deeper meaning of what was being communicated. What do you think?”
Boom. Conversation now and the eventually answer their own questions.
Wow, that’s a toughie. I heard an actor once explain that, when you are asked how a performance went, there’s only one thing to say. Anything more is pretentious; anything less is unkind: “Darling, you were fabulous.”
But when business mixes with pleasure (or not pleasure), it’s a little more difficult. Does the person really want your honest assessment or does the person just want to be validated?
In the case of the friend who didn’t pay you, he was clearly looking for the latter.
That guy was no friend, just a deluded, untalented hack.
There was a humorous treatment of this subject on How I Met Your Mother:
https://how-i-met-your-mother.fandom.com/wiki/Stuff
-Jut
For me, I try to find something positive. There is always something positive. Just don’t ask me what I thought of The Last Jedi.
Don’t get me started…
I was conned by my girlfriend-du-jour into going to a theater (read: paying money) to watch the Star Wars episode with Jar Jar Binks (episode 1 maybe?). That movie was barfalicious…and I told her so. I’m pretty sure my opinions led to one of the numerous arguments we had.
The greatest thing the Disney sequels did was to make the prequels become good Star Wars movies.
I have learned the hard way that in the midst of any major endeavor, people want praise, not the truth, even if the truth is not exactly negative, just not a superlative. “Wasn’t this event produced by my sister, whom you supervise, the best ever?!” “Well, maybe not the best ever but an excellent job” is not the response they want. Ask me how I know.
The important thing is…now you know. And as cartoon GI Joe always says, “Knowing is half the battle.”
Stay strong!
How do you know?
I am reminded of the scene in “Good Bye Girl” where Eliot, the actor knew his performane was lousy, and Marsha and Lucy tied to assuage his emotions. IHe wantd the truth, that noone was fearless enugh togive him.
Now in THAT situation, there really was a positive critique and one I’ve used. “You did the best anyone could with the director’s idiotic concept. Bravo. I was proud of you. You had no chance, but you fought anyway.”
In most situations like this golden rule applies, and that means that in an amateur setting validating the performance is the often best course of action.
In a professional setting this is different. The movie Sunset Boulevard shows such a scenario, where an aged film star Norma Desmond from the silent movie era has written a script for a movie (Salome) in which she wants to play the title role. She presents the script to Cecil B De Mille, who treats he with great deference but tactically evades all questions about the script. As nobody wants to tell Norma Desmond the honest truth and pop her delusions of fame and grandeur, the movie ends tragically.
Still, as a professional you need to meet people where they are at. If you a a choir director who normally works with professionals at Eastman School of Music, and you also direct a choir at a small church, the way you teach should recognize that the amateur church choir operates a lower level, and that means that the bar should be set lower for praise and validation, and that criticism should be more moderate.
Art is so subjective though, how do you determine what is objectively bad and what you just don’t like? I don’t like the Lord of the Rings books. They are wordy and boring, but they are regarded as classic, iconic, and groundbreaking. Then there’s its so bad it’s good such as the Producers.
I do beta reading as part of an online community. I always start with, “I will tell you what I think of the book and why, but that is no indication of its overall performance.” Most are appreciated, but I’ve had some pushback saying I’m the only one saying negative things about it, even when I get specific.
Sometimes, it’s just a lose/lose situation.
There is still a pretty clear line in theater between really bad and “a matter of taste.” Also in acting. Especially in scripts.
I struggle with this conflict with my kids. They were in a children’s choir that, quite frankly, stunk. The choir director had all kinds of accolades, but didn’t teach the kids to read music (or even just rhythm), harmonize, or basic diction. The “choir” sang single parts, usually off key, rarely on rhythm, with horrendous diction, but the choir director and the supporting people always emphasized that since kids were singing, it didn’t matter if it sucked. My kids would run to me looking for affirmation after their performances, and being someone who believes that outside truly exceptional circumstances, lying is always wrong, I would find myself having to say something like, “[Song Title] is one of my favorite songs, so I’m glad you had a chance to perform it” or “you were significantly better than the high school choir” which was always true as they did far worse with the same director.
I, as an amateur musician, hate it when people compliment me on a horrible performance. I have always said that I prefer honest people to nice people, usually to the confusion of those around me. I would rather someone tell me, “well, on that first piece, you were flat on the high A, and sharp on the high G# on the second, you missed most of the left hand accidentals in the accompaniment on the third piece, and your harmony with the tenor sucked in the fifth piece.” If they then say, “but that fourth and sixth pieces were excellent” I actually think that there is a chance we did well on those pieces. On the other hand, when someone says, “that sounded great”, I have no chance to improve, and half of the time, I know I made way too many mistakes, and so know they are lying, which destroys my trust in them.
I don’t know if my preference for constructive criticism (I do hate comments to the effect of “it all sucked” because I have no sense of what I can do to improve) is unusual among performers, amateur or professional, but lying always seems to me to be the wrong choice. I prefer choice 1, and in some circumstances, such as with my kids when the timing is wrong for constructive criticism, choice 2, but never choice 3.
I don’t know. As a lifelong church musician/choir director/soloist/sometime G&S chorus member/lead, I am my own toughest critic and I always know my performance — bad and good. I never ask for praise or criticism because for me it’s the doing of the thing, whatever it is, that makes me happy. When either praise or criticism is offered, I make it a point to be grateful either way, although I must admit that anyone with a criticism better have an informed criticism, because otherwise what do they know? And anyone with praise is just as likely to be expressing friendly remarks about something they enjoyed that didn’t just suck.
But if you must ask, and if you really want the truth, you gotta ask someone you can trust to be honest. Learn from it if you can but never let it get to you — EITHER WAY.
You’re a professional. That’s the correct professional attitude.
although I must admit that anyone with a criticism better have an informed criticism, because otherwise what do they know?
What does this mean?
In matters of art, I’m not a good painter but Jackson Pollock art is wretched. I don’t have to be “informed” to see that. Nor do I have to be “informed” to know that Yoko Ono’s cacophonous additions to John Lennon’s efforts, also, are horrible.
Now, if I venture into criticizing the exact mechanics of the singing voice and saying “here’s how you could have done better”, I’d be uninformed. But that doesn’t mean the average lay person can’t tell when something is awful.