‘Illinoise’ Broadway Review: What Teenagers and Moths Have in Common

For those theatergoers of a certain age, watching how the New York Times covers the theater is almost as interesting as going to the theater. Back in the 1970s, Clive Barnes (and later, Richard Eder) would review a show in the daily paper, then Walter Kerr reviewed the same show in the Sunday edition. I don’t recall many major disagreements. What I do remember is how these three critics put up a wall of downbeat reviews when it came to the musicals of Stephen Sondheim. (And for this, Kerr got a Broadway theater named after him?!)

One of the major critical disputes at the Times came much later, in 2005, when Ben Brantley dismissed “The Light in the Piazza,” calling it “discouragingly unfulfilled” and the music “very irritating.”