Grades-head Revisited

Dear Critic-O-Meter readers (and by the way, do you pronounce it "critic-AW-mitter" or "CRITic-oh-meeter"?), a few things worth noting: We're continually adding reviews to the posts, and grades can change accordingly. Case in point: The Third Story started out with a B average, and now it's plunged to a C+; Architecting suffered a similar fate. This tends to happen more with Off- and off-Off-Broadway shows because those reviews tend to come in a trickle, or in a series of clumps, over a period of weeks, while Broadway shows tend to get more than half of all the reviews they'll get by the next day (but even those can wobble noticeably over time, as they did with Pal Joey). Non-Broadway shows may also be subject to wider grade fluctuations because they tend to have a smaller total pool of reviews to average, so each new dissenting opinion registers disproportionately. In any case, this is all just a way to say it behooves you to check in regularly if you care to see how a show is faring.

But on the other hand, I should also say that the grades aren't the be-all, end-all here. We encourage you to use the site the way Jason Grote says he does: Browse the review summaries to see how your favorite, or least-favorite, critic skews (or doesn't) the consensus. One day we hope to offer a minus-one feature--i.e., a way for you to click and see what the average grade would be minus the one critic you'd prefer to ignore.

And finally, I'd like to welcome a new co-blogger who's helping Isaac and me, Linda Buchwald, a budding arts journalist who's written for The Sondheim Review, PopMatters, The Syracuse New Times, Making Music Magazine, International Musician, and gURL.com, and currently works as assistant editor for Scholastic MATH. She started out by doing some back-filling for us--Broadway's Disney shows are now rated and included in the sidebar--and we look forward to more of her fine work.

Read on, and tell us what you think!