Bob Mondello

Art Critic for NPR’s All Things Considered
Headshot of a man.
Photo courtesy of Doby Photography/NPR
Music Credit: “Annibelle June” composed and performed by Abigail Washburn From the album, Appalachian Picking Society Bob Mondello: I regard it as my job to tell people about things that I think are worth seeing. At NPR, I have the enviable position of... <laughs> I guess, of not being able to cover everything. There’s a limit to the appetite of the shows for reviews. So, for the most part, my reviews are of things that I liked. Right? I mean, it’s a good starting point. Jo Reed: That’s Bob Mondello—he’s the art critic for the NPR show All Things Considered and this is Art Works, the weekly podcast produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed. These days we have many choices for entertainment. So many of us depend on critics to help us pick through the smorgasbord of new plays and films that are produced each year. We find critics we trust and we read or listen to them faithfully, and choose accordingly. And sometimes we find critics who are so good with their snark we read them even if we don’t trust them, At one time my small local paper had critics who were very funny, but so negative, I ended up calling it the bitter paper and never took their word about any film or play. Well, NPR’s art critic Bob Mondello is anything but bitter. Despite the 300 or so films he sees each year, he’s genuinely excited to share his finds and truly disappointed when a film doesn’t work. He’s not above a little snark here and there—but it’s never the point. Bob is not trying to be clever—he’s too smart for that and he loves art too much. Bob Mondello: What you’ll hear in my reviews are descriptions of scenes and how they work, and what the director is doing in them, to analyze the way something works, because I think that’s just more interesting, and also because it’s a way of letting an audience know what to look for when the audience goes. I took a test when I was in college. It was one of those aptitude test type things that tells you what you’re suited for in life. What it came up with was that I should be a teacher. When you’re in college, the one thing you don’t want to be is a teacher or a professor. It’s like, they’re the ones who are giving you grades and making you feel terrible. And I just really didn’t want that. But in retrospect, I’m aware that my theory of how criticism works-- and, I think, how criticism works in real life-- is that it is teaching. It is about explaining things, and about how-- explaining how things work, and getting people to understand how that piece of art came to be, and what it intends, and what the effect of it is on an audience. And all of that is educating an audience, so that the audience can have a better time at the event; can appreciate it in a better way. Jo Reed: I really want to begin with the nuts and bolts of how you got into the business of criticism. Bob Mondello: <laughs> My mom sent me a note in college-- I was lonely, and I went away to Clark University in Massachusetts. And my mother, being helpful, decided to suggest that I do something. And what she suggested was, “Bobby, you’ve always enjoyed reading reviews. Why don’t you try writing one?” And I-- it was true. I used to go to the library all the time to read Walter Kerr, in the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune, because I just thought he was a beautiful writer on theater. And so I tried writing a review. And I-- a year later, when I got into the University of Maryland, when I saw an advertisement saying that they were looking for somebody to review University Theater, who was not associated with university theater-- I was the only person who came in with a clip, so I got the gig. I very quickly discovered you get free tickets when you’re a critic, which is a great thing, and so I started going to theater all over Washington. Arena Stage would give me free tickets. You know they cost an ungodly amount back then; probably $7, or something. And I also started getting movie tickets. And by the time I left the university, I was kind of addicted to that, and really liked the idea. So I kept-- even though I had another job-- I was a publicist for a chain of movie theaters, which got me free movie tickets-- I kept— Jo Reed: I’m seeing a pattern here. Bob Mondello: Yeah. I kept writing about theater-- my joke is, for every small paper that ever folded in Washington. If it was going to be around for six more months, I was its critic for the last six months. Jo Reed: <laughs> Bob Mondello: And I finally-- I-- one of them folded, and I didn’t have another newspaper to jump to. There wasn’t another small paper. So I went to the local public radio station, because I’d been listening to them, and they were using different people every week. Jo Reed: And that’s WAMU? Bob Mondello: WAMU. And I said to them, “I would love to try out.” And-- because, by that time, I said earlier, I was a publicist for a chain of movie theaters. So I had been writing radio copy for other people’s voices, and I figured I could write it for mine. I took one of my reviews for the small newspaper, and I adapted it to radio, which meant shorter sentences and easier-to-say words than similarly, which is hard to say. So I started doing it for the local public radio station. What didn’t occur to me, when I was working for the local public radio station, was that all the people driving in to work, who worked on All Things Considered, were hearing my pieces in Morning Edition on the station, as they were driving in. And so when I asked if I could do a piece for All Things Considered, they said, “Oh, we like your work. Yeah, sure.” Jo Reed: They knew exactly who you were? Bob Mondello: They knew who I was. They thought my voice fitted in. It was just the easiest thing in the world. So I freelanced for 17 years for NPR, before they hired -- finally hired me. Jo Reed: I didn’t realize that. Seventeen years! Bob Mondello: Yeah, that’s a-- it’s a-- it was a long slog, but it was worth it. And I’m now a full-time critic there-- one of two. We also have a critic for television, Eric Deggans, who is wonderful. And for many years, I have been-- it’s over 30 years now-- I’ve been there, doing criticism of movies and occasionally the arts, and going to museums, and things like that, and generally becoming a cultural critic in the process, so that it’s not just about Meryl Streep’s latest performance, but it’s about the world, as interpreted through art. Jo Reed: Let me just backtrack for a second, and-- you said you grew up reading reviews. And I don’t think I’m taking a big leap to say, I would therefore assume you also grew up going to theater, going to museums, and that that was a part of your life. Bob Mondello: Well, again, it was the discovery that theater could get me out of school that did it. My mom asked me one day-- oh, actually, she didn’t even ask. She showed up at school. She and my father were supposed to go and see Oliver! at the National Theatre, at the Wednesday matinee. And... Jo Reed: And that’s here in D.C. Bob Mondello: That’s here in Washington, D.C., and... <laughs> I got called down to the office: “Would Bobby Mondello please come down to the office?” So I went down to the office, thinking something-- and there was Mom, and I was sure something terrible had happened. And she said-- she signed me out of school. And we got out to the car, and she said, “Now, don’t scream, but we’re going downtown. We’re going to the theater. Your father can’t get out of a meeting today.” So I got to go to the “theatah.” And Oliver! was just magical. I mean, for a kid, you can imagine. I was maybe 12. And there was this kid about my age onstage, and he was singing. We had upper-balcony seats, so they were-- you know, it was the cheap seats. It was so magical, and I just wanted to repeat that. And it was a couple of years later that I was old enough to take the bus downtown on my own, and I went to see other things. But I’ve been going to theater ever since. I just love it. Jo Reed: Can you talk about how the magic of theatre works on you? Can you give me an example of that? Bob Mondello: I have seen a lot of really miraculous theater in my day, and I just love it. I mean, you know, there’s nothing quite like watching-- I remember one time I was at the Kennedy Center, and we were sitting there-- my husband and I were sitting there and listening to Fiona Shaw play Medea at-- in the Terrace Theater. And she was magnificent. And there were some people behind us, who had brought their 16-year-old girls to see it, and they were kind of giddy when they were sitting down, and everything, and I was sort of nervous about how this was all going to go. And you get to the second act, and Medea’s about to kill her children, and she sort of announces that, and then goes into this room. And it was a modern staging. It had glass-paneled doors behind what looked like a patio. And she went into this back room, and there was this loud, siren-like noise, and then a bucket of something red was splashed onto these glass panels. And it was clear that it was blood, and that the kids were now dead. And these two girls sitting behind us let out this shriek. And it was like a horror-movie shriek, you know? And you know what follows that, at a horror movie, is a giggle, right? You always laugh right afterwards. And I was bracing for that. And instead, what I heard was sobs. They were just sobbing. I’m sorry. I’m choking up as I’m describing this. I am... the play, Medea, was working exactly as it had worked 2,400 years ago, on this audience that didn’t know the play. They had come in, they didn’t know what the story was, and they were sobbing at this moment. And I thought, “Oh, my God.” That’s the magic of theater when it works, of art when it works. That it can affect you the way that something did two millennia ago is magic. Jo Reed: What’s the difference between writing a review and writing criticism? Or is there one? Bob Mondello: No, they-- I-- well, I would-- okay. There are two kinds of criticism, all right? There is descriptive criticism, and there is prescriptive criticism. Prescriptive is... you should go or you should not. The-- it’s thumbs up, thumbs down; this is good, this is bad. I don’t find that very interesting, and that is essentially what a reviewer does in a daily newspaper, for the most part. And I basically-- I don’t really care whether a reviewer thinks this is worth seeing or not. I want to know what the event was. Descriptive criticism-- the kind that I have always admired, and that Walter Kerr practiced in the Times and the Herald Tribune-- is... is criticism that takes you into the moment of the-- of art; that he would describe to a fare-thee-well some essential moment in a musical, in a play, in a something, and you felt like you were there with him. And as a result of that, he didn’t really have to tell you if he had a good time at it. By the time you were finished reading him, you knew whether you would have a good time at it. That’s the kind of criticism that I think is worth doing. Jo Reed: Let me ask you this. I will bet that there are things that you see that you like, but you also know really aren’t that good. Bob Mondello: <laughs> Jo Reed: I mean, it’s true for me. I mean, there are things that I really like, and at the same time, I really know this is not terribly good. But for whatever reason, it’s-- it grabs me. Bob Mondello: You mean, that it works, in some way? Jo Reed: It works on me. But I also can see how I’m being worked on. Bob Mondello: Ah. Jo Reed: Do you see what I’m saying? Bob Mondello: Yes. Jo Reed: But at the same time, it’s still working. And then there are things that don’t speak to me, but I can get that they work and I’m curious about how you differentiate between these things. Bob Mondello: It is the artist’s job to make something work well. Cats, a musical that I’m not fond of, works well. Audiences love it. It is spectacle in the same sense that the Ziegfeld Follies was spectacle. It’s not something that I find as entertaining as audiences do. I mean, I’ve had to see it a bunch of times. I can tell you why it works the way it does. I can tell you what about it grabs audiences, without myself being grabbed, particularly. But, again, it... I don’t think it’s my job to discourage people from going to theater that I don’t like. Jo Reed: Right. Exactly. And that’s what I’m saying, of being able to differentiate between that. Bob Mondello: Right. I regard it as my job to tell people about things that I think are worth seeing. At NPR, I have the enviable position of... <laughs> I guess, of not being able to cover everything. There’s a limit to the appetite of the shows for reviews. So, as a practical matter, I’m only going to get 50 or 60 of them on every year. And there are-- I probably see 300 movies. So I can restrict what I do to things that I think have some interest for an audience. So, for the most part, my reviews are of things that I liked. Right? I mean, it’s a good starting point. Or that I at least think are... Jo Reed: Have merit. Bob Mondello: Yes, or are of interest; that an audience that’s spread out all over the country-- and I’m one of the few people who is talking to that kind of an audience. Ordinarily, a newspaper critic will be talking to a specific subset of the world. It’s the audience that is sitting within almost the range of his voice, right? I mean, the-- you’re just in a city. The Washington Post’s critic is talking to people who live in the Washington area. I’m talking to people all over the country, in 50 states, many of whom will not ever have the opportunity to see the movie that I’m talking about. So my piece of writing has to stand on its own, has to be interesting on its own, has to tell a story that is engaging for the audience members who are not going to be able to see it. Now, Netflix and Hulu and those things have changed the equation a little bit, and now it’s possible for people to see things that I’m talking about, that they might not have been able to before. I think it’s my job to make it easier for someone to appreciate what is going on in a work... not to discourage them from going to things that I don’t like. I mean, I’ve seen a lot of shows that I don’t like, that the audience does. And to some extent, I think, “Great.”, to take Cats as the example, if you went to Cats when you were 12, and thought it was just the most wonderful thing in the world, 20 years later, maybe on a lark, you’ll go to see Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Right? And I’m making a joke there, but as a practical matter, if it gets you to come back to the theater, that’s a good thing. And so if you see more art, that’s great. Jo Reed: I completely agree. I think encouraging people to see more art is a noble goal, and yet I cannot help but think as a critic you’ve must’ve panned a film or two. Bob Mondello: Sure... <laughs> there’s a thing about it. There’s a whole book of criticism, of critical quotes. Diana Rigg, the actress, put together this book by calling all of her friends, and finding the worst reviews ever written. And they are these incredible pans. They’re really kind of brilliant. And the thing about negative reviews is that you always remember the nasty crack. I think it was Dorothy Parker described Katharine Hepburn in a show: “You must rush to the Martin Beck Theatre to see Katharine Hepburn run the gamut of emotion, from A to B.” <laughs> Now, that’s a great nasty crack, right? it’s just really lovely. And even on the radio, every once in a while, my producers want to hear something like that. So they’ll send me to a terrible movie, and they’ll say, “Okay, we really want a review of this film.” And, great. I mean, I don’t mind doing those. If they are well-enough advertised that the world is going to show up at them anyway, then I’m kind of doing my audience a service by spending three minutes talking about <laughs> the silliness that’s up there onscreen. But I’m thinking, for instance, the Twilight movie Eclipse, which is, in its own way, kind of hilarious, and very effective, for what it is. I mean, the audience that wants to see the Twilight movies, about vampires and werewolves, is going to love that picture. That crowd is going to be happy. On the other hand, it was fun to analyze it as if it were a more serious work than it is, and to talk about it in those terms, because that allows me to have a little fun with it; but also, it allows people to see the framework into which the Twilight series fits. Jo Reed: Do you feel, in some ways, like you’re a bridge between the audience and the art? Bob Mondello: Yeah, I-- my fantasy about how all this was going to work, when I was in college, was, I would say something, the audience would react to it-- probably negatively, and think I was an idiot-- and that the artist might say some -- remember, I was going to start by reviewing university theater. So you’d have actors who could respond to what I said, and then the audience would respond, and there’d be this dialogue. This doesn’t actually happen in real life. The actors know that you’re going to be there to review them again, and so they don’t comment on it, and the-- unless they become very famous, at which point they don’t really care what you said. And the audience doesn’t get in touch with you in quite the way that I was hoping it would. Twitter and Facebook and things like that have changed that a little bit, and I do get responses to things, but they-- I pictured everybody writing letters, the way I did to critics I liked. Jo Reed: Who did you write to? Bob Mondello: I wrote to Walter Kerr, one time. I invited him to come and see a show at the University of Maryland, when I was there -- I’ve still got the letter he sent back. It was typewritten, and it was seven lines long, including his signature. And he said, “I’m terribly sorry, but I shan’t be able to come.” And I remember thinking, “Oh, my God, I want to be like this man: to use the word shan’t in a seven-line letter to a college student. Wow, he’s cool!” <laughs> So anyway, that’s who I wanted to be. And in fact, my style of writing is very much modeled on his. It’s very descriptive. It’s... I hope, evocative of the event, and it-- I actually do something in reverse that he always did. He was known for having the very best first sentences in all of theater criticism. I-- he reviewed I Am a Camera, the play on which... Cabaret is based. And his opening line was, “Me no Leica”-- L-E-I-C-A. Now, that’s a great pun, right? But it’s also so descriptive and wonderful, and makes you want to read the next line. And I realized that-- someone said to me, “Your last lines are always really good. It’s not so much your first lines that grab people, but it’s the last lines that are really good.” And I thought, “Well, I do consciously do that.” And then one day, I realized, “You know, it’s for the same reason.” If I read in a newspaper, “Me no Leica,” I look up one line, and there’s his name. I can see who wrote it. If I say something clever at the end of my review, the next line is, “I’m Bob Mondello,” so that somebody hears my name right after my cleverest bit. So I think there’s an ego thing there, to some extent, that I want people to know who it is that’s just said that clever line. Jo Reed: That makes me think about the actual writing of criticism and how it must differ in some ways structurally from journalism. Bob Mondello: Sure. In most of print journalism, there is an inverted pyramid style that the most important thing goes at the beginning, and then you get less and less important, because, as an editor is going through, if they have to cut, they’re going to cut from the end. So, what you say at the end isn’t supposed to matter. Well, in criticism, you do a last paragraph that wraps things up, and so you don’t cut from the end. And so it’s important to do something smart to leave people with. And so critics generally have good last lines. It’s not just me doing it, so that people will hear my byline. But I think there is some... <laughs> I’m chuckling at myself. I think there is some pleasure that I get out of getting in a good line, saying something that I think is graceful. You know, if you’re reviewing a play by Tom Stoppard-- one of the most brilliant writers in English, ever, you know, since Shakespeare-- and you haven’t expressed yourself well, you’re not doing a good job. Right? To be a critic, you have to be... not good at the thing that the playwright does, necessarily, or that the actor does, but you have to be good at your own craft. It has to stand on its own. Jo Reed: How do you keep your head screwed on straight, seeing all these movies? At a certain point... <laughs> I mean, I like film, I like theater, I love books. But at a certain point, does it all run together, or--? Bob Mondello: No, the only time it really does is at film festivals. I go to the Toronto Film Festival every year, and in the space of six days, I will see 30 pictures. Now, that’s a lot of movies, and I-- you know, I... it is-- it’s too many to absorb, in a realistic way; I mean, that you’re seeing them, and you’re making evaluations as to, “Okay, I should tell my editors about this, because this actor, or this director, will be worth interviewing about something.” Those kinds of things are what you’re thinking about. Some of those pictures, I need to see again. Jo Reed: That’s what I was going to ask you. Bob Mondello: By and large, when you’re seeing 300 movies in a year, you don’t have time to go back and see films a second time. So, for the most part, I try to keep my head screwed on straight. The advantage I have, I think, is that I’m at the mercy of clips. To do this on the radio, I have to do it using sound clips that the film studios provide. And so they’re going to give me five or six minutes of the film in video clips-- you see them on television, and things like that-- and then I can weave my own comments around those clips. That’ll refresh my memory about how the film played out, and things. Jo Reed: Do you take notes? Bob Mondello: I do take them at film festivals, because otherwise, at the end of a day, I wouldn’t be able to remember if that scene with the woman falling, with the baby in her arms, off the side of the ship was from Titanic or from... I don’t know... what was that Steven Spielberg movie about the slave ship? Jo Reed: Oh, Amistad. Bob Mondello: Amistad? The-- and, you know, you do need to remember those kinds of things later, so I scribble notes to myself for those. But I for the most part don’t take notes. There are weeks, just prior to Christmas, when all of the film companies are bringing out the pictures that they think are awards contenders, when we see so many films so quickly that, again, it’s like this rush of adrenaline as you’re watching the films, because most of them are kind of great. They’ve saved the big guns for the end of the year. And... you know, you’re going every night to the best thing... Jo Reed: Ever! Bob Mondello: And that can be a…exhilarating. January and February, not so much. The nice thing about January and February is, you get to talk about the things that get nominated for Oscars, from last year. But the films that are brought out during that period tend to be less interesting. And the rationale is, they don’t want to compete with all those pictures that are up for Oscars. If you’re a film producer, you save your big movie for a different time of year. The industry has gotten to the point-- it’s all about packaging. The early part of the year is about horror movies. The-- you go into a series of big, commercial comic-book movies, starting around Easter and going through most of the summer, and then you get more serious pictures in the fall, and then Oscar contenders in the last few weeks. And it’s a regular rhythm, now, of films that gets... upset, every once in a while. A movie will come in out of nowhere. Something like Saving Private Ryan opened in the summer, and was unorthodox in that it was aiming at an adult audience, and it was a serious movie, and it was surrounded by comic-book pictures. You know? And... <laughs> surprise, surprise, it did a lot of business, the logic being that there was an audience that was underserved. So I think that audiences let studios know that they want something, every once in a while, and that’ll make my job easier. Jo Reed: <laughs> Are you somebody who talks about it afterwards, after you see a film, or do you want to write first, and then discuss. Bob Mondello: Oh, no. I like talking about-- I mean, you know how... this is one of the reasons that-- people think that critics like to be negative, right? That it must be fun to write those snide remarks. And so the-- we’re all... poised with pens, to stab at whatever the work is. It actually couldn’t be further from the truth. You know how when you come out of a piece of theater that you just adore? You can’t wait to call people and tell them how wonderful it was. When you come out of something that is really bad, you kind of want to have a drink. You want to think about something else, because whatever it was just doesn’t ring any chimes for you. Well... theater and film, for critics, it’s the same thing. You know, you come out of something that you’re excited about, you can’t wait to write a review about it. You come out of something that is lame, and that just doesn’t do much for you, and sure, you can come up with clever things to say about it, but... there’s not the same kind of, “I’ve got to call people. I’ve got to tell people. I’ve got to-- I can’t way to say things.” When I saw that production of Medea, and those girls behind me started sobbing at the big moment, I could not wait to put that in print. I was so excited. I called my sister the next morning to tell her about it. It was something that I was excited about, and was anxious to convey to the world. And the world, in my case, is a big audience. I’m very lucky. I have 29 million listeners. But I would be just as excited if I were writing for a blog, or if I were writing for a local newspaper, the way I was 30 years ago.

Jo Reed: Finally, advice time. What advice do you have for an aspiring critic both as they’re in the theatre viewing a film or a play, but also when they come back to that desk and they have to start writing about it?

Bob Mondello: Keep your eyes open. I mean, it really isn’t any more complicated than that. A critic goes to the theater and experiences it, just like any other audience member. The trick is thinking about it... in a way, afterwards, so that you can describe it. The thing I tell students who want to become critics, when I’ve taught criticism, is that, if you’re ever wondering how to say something-- if you’re wondering how to construct a review-- call someone on the phone... and tell them about the thing you’ve just seen. Because the way to... the way to construct a piece of critical writing is very much the way that you would say it to someone. This is especially true in radio. One of the first lessons I learned in radio was had proposed a piece, and they said, “Great. We’d love you to do that. But first, we’ve got this news story that we have to do. Can you do it for today?” And I said, “Uh, sure.” But I’d never written news for radio. And this was at NPR, and it was going out to millions of people. And the story was that Frankie Hewitt, who was running Ford’s Theatre at the time, had commissioned a play about John Wilkes Booth; and then, after hiring a director and a cast, had suddenly realized, “You know, that’s in bad taste”-- You know, you’d been through a couple of presidential assassinations, and things like that, since then-- since the Lincoln assassination; the Lincoln assassination, it happened in Ford’s Theatre, and you’re doing a story about his assassin in Ford’s Theatre; that this was maybe not something she wanted to do. So she’d canceled the show. Well, because they’d hired a director and a cast, this was now a news story, and they wanted that on the radio. Well, I labored over this for a little while, trying to fit things into that inverted pyramid that I had learned in journalism classes for print, and it wasn’t working. And I finally went to a producer, and I said, “I’m sorry. I really don’t know how to construct this. I just don’t know what to do.” And he said, “Okay, well, tell me what the story is, and I’ll help you construct it.” And he then said the most important words that I ever heard in radio. I told him the story, just as I’ve just told you, and he said, “Did you hear what you just said?” And I thought, “Oh. I can do that!” <laughs> You know, that’s the trick. That is what you have to do: You have to tell the story.

Jo Reed: Okay. Bob Mondello, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Bob Mondello: It’s a real pleasure.

Jo Reed: That’s Bob Mondello—art critic for NPR’s All Things Considered—you can hear his thoughts about the films he sees at npr.org. You've been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out how art works in communities across the country, keep checking the Art Works blog, or follow us @NEAARTS on Twitter. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

Bringing a love of art to the craft of criticism.