Chris Rawson's OnStage: The Tony Awards unwisely disenfranchise the critics, and great is the wailing thereat

If you've recently heard wailings and gnashing of teeth in the small community of New York theater critics, noisy enough to register in the larger world, it's because the Tony Awards have announced they're cutting critics out of the electorate.

There are about 800 electors, mainly made up of producers (including presenters of Broadway productions on tour, such as the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust) and representatives of the main theater unions (actors, choreographers, designers, press agents, etc.). But roughly 100 of the 800 are members of the "first night press list," which is made up of the most influential critics (more about that later) plus arts editors and others (more about that, too), and all these have just been exiled from the kingdom.

On the face of it, it's foolish, especially given the half-hearted reason obliquely cited, which is that voting creates a conflict of interest for the critics. In this, as in so much else, the Tony people have been bedazzled by the New York Times, which prohibits (dissuades? doesn't like?) its critics' voting on awards they also report on. But the Times is pretty much alone on this, and anyway, this position is insulting to critics. Should no political reporter be allowed to vote for mayor or president? Should no sports writer be allowed to vote for the baseball Hall of Fame?

Obviously conflict of interest can't be the real reason, because conflict (i.e. partisanship) is much greater for those theatrical craftsmen whose paychecks are affected by the awards, which have real commercial value. For a critic, the only conflict I can imagine is in voting for a show in order to validate the critic's published opinion -- but how is that a conflict, rather than simply expressing judgment, which any voter ought to do?

This is why most critics in their predictions columns give their own preference but also predict a more likely winner -- they can see the difference, even if the Tony people can't. Having an opinion about what's good isn't a conflict of interest, it's the basis of an informed vote. Or maybe it is a conflict for industry insiders, who want to vote for their own shows, excellence be damned, so they assume others have similar conflicts.

Cutting out the critics is mainly foolish because they're generally the best informed part of the electorate. That's why in many cities that have their own versions of the Tonys, the critics are the major or even only voters -- who else but the critics have had the time to see most of the shows, even before the nominations come out? No one is supposed to vote for the Tonys who hasn't seen all the nominees, but surely critics meet this requirement more often than others.

Once the Tony nominations do come out, all 800 voters are supposed to see all the nominated plays still running, and they get free tickets, two per person. So this is probably the real reason to cut out the first night list -- so producers can save on the free tickets that these 100 voters scarf up.

Of course, the critics have already seen most of the shows, so you might wonder, where's the saving? Two places. First, there are those 100 names on the favored first night list. Not so many of them are critics as you might think. The New York Drama Critics Circle, which polices its rolls carefully, has about 20 members. There may be some other major suburban or out-of-town critics on the first night list, but the bulk of it isn't critics at all, but influential editors and publishers and columnists. In fact, the New York Times is said to have a half-dozen or more names on the list. They dissuade their critics from voting, but apparently other staffers are free to accept the producers' largesse.

So the Tony committee could disenfranchise all these non-critics and keep the critics onboard. But the word is that they fear making those distinctions, since they'd be offending some powerful journalists. It's easier just to throw the baby out with the bathwater -- the critics with the freeloaders.

The second saving is this. The recent furor has revealed that when the nominations come out, Tony voters can ask for free tickets even if (as with the critics) they've already seen a show. You can see why no producer wants to turn down a ticket request when a single vote might be the difference in winning a Tony. The cost in free tickets is huge. So why not simply declare, Broadway-wide, that no one of the 800 Tony voters gets a second pair of free tickets, not just the 100 first nighters? That would save plenty of money and be even-handed, as well.

The main area in which I do feel for the producers is in the increasing difficulty of determining who, in a welter of print columnists and web columnists and bloggers and twitterers, is really a critic. Throw in the historic tension between producers and critics, and I'm sure it's tempting just to diss them all. Maybe that's what happened. But that's dereliction of duty. Producers (actually, press agents, whom they hire to do this work) already have to sort out the more important critics when they hand out reviewers' tickets, so why is it so impossible to make those distinctions when creating a Tony voter list?

Bottom Line: The worst part of all this, to my mind, is that it further marginalizes critics, just at a time when this important part of the theater ecosystem is under financial siege, with newspapers at risk. Critics help define and celebrate the theatrical community. Don't deprive them of this traditional involvement. The theater will be the loser for it.

Chris Rawson is current chair of the American Theatre Critics Association. Although ATCA is making its own protest against this new Tony policy, this column represents Rawson's own opinions, not ATCA's.