Feb 2, 2009

About Time (Out)

Amid the news that critic Elisabeth Vincentelli (her fascinating, contrarian blog is here) will leave Time Out's arts dept. to become Clive Barnes' replacement at the NY Post, this fact was unknown to me until Adam Feldman's brief tribute:
But we’re excited to see what this Corsican spark plug—who will be the first woman ever to serve as first-string critic for one of the three Manhattan dailies—can bring to the Post, whose theater coverage is currently a mix of dullish reviews and jauntily fictionalized gossip.

(Bold type mine.) I mean, I guess technically Linda Winer at Newsday doesn't count as one of the big three. If so, this is a milestone so long overdue, I'm not even sure it qualifies as a milestone. More like a shamestone—which just got rolled away.

UPDATE: As Adam fesses up in the comment below, Elisabeth is not in fact the first woman first-stringers for one of the big three--records show that Wilella Waldorf served as the first-string critic the Post in the early 1940s while the menfolk were off a-warrin'. Still, six decades is a long time between lady reviewers.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Ugh. Sorry, Rob, this was entirely my mistake. Elisabeth is not in fact the first woman to serve etc. As I wrote in a correction to my blog post today:

"CORRECTION: In an earlier version of this post, I rather too hastily noted that that Vincentelli was to be "the first woman ever to serve as first-string critic for one of the three Manhattan dailies." As president and unofficial archivist of the New York Drama Critics' Circle, I ought to have checked my records before yapping. In fact, the marvelously named Wilella Waldorf served as the first-string critics at, yes, New York Post for several years in the early 1940s. Mea culpa."

Apologies for the error.