From: Alex Honzen
Subject: First Bad Review
To: vocalist-at-lists.oulu.fi
Send reply to: VOCALIST <vocalist>

Sara Clout wrote:
< how to deal with bad reviews? (I don't want to imply
that you are all bad singers, I hope you realise
that!!)>>

Bad reviews are no fun for anybody who is connected
with the material in question, but that being said...

It usually helps to mentally separate yourself from
the performance and figure out whether the reviewer is
actually criticizing the part of it that you yourself
are directly responsible for. A lot of times (in the
cases of opera or spoken theatre) they are critical of
direction or production ideas that the performers have
little or no part in deciding.

Then there are pointless, non-constructive,
non-informative comments like saying the performer
"vomited all over two songs." You basically can't
cull any information from that statement. (In some
artistic circles, that wouldn't even be considered an
insult...)

Lastly, of course, reviews are the opinion of just one
person. Sounds like sour grapes, but its astoundingly
true - I can even cite examples from my as yet limited
experience. Sometimes it sounds like the papers are
reviewing two entirely different shows. Probably a
good rule of thumb is that if more than one reviewer
makes a comment about a particular technical or
stylistic problem, it warrants some looking into.
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