YOU ALWAYS HURT THE ONE YOU LOVE:
Ghost Light: A Memoir

Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee,
And love thee after.
-- Othello, Act V, Scene II

It seems hard to believe today, when critic-proof revivals and family-friendly Disney movie-musicals flourish in a renovated Times Square, that during his reign as theatre critic at The New York Times during the 1980s and early 90s, Frank Rich was known as the "Butcher of Broadway."

A negative review from Rich was the equivalent of a death sentence for any Broadway or wannabe Broadway production. And good reviews from any other critic simply made no difference. The Gay White Way was darkening, empty theatres were being demolished for high-rise construction, AIDS ravaged the ranks of performers, and frightened audiences stayed away in droves from a violent and drug-ridden neighborhood.

Into this ominous environment, replacing the legendary Clive Barnes (exiled like art critic Hilton Kramer to the New York Post) came a young Harvard graduate with a few years of TV reviewing experience at Time Magazine under his belt. Perhaps he would understand the new, serious theatre that had developed off-Broadway in experimental venues like Joe Papp's Public Theatre and in the commercial sector with the dark-themed musical theatre of Stephen Sondheim and Hal Prince that seemed to be the only relics of a once vibrant civic culture.

As Rich notes on the first page of his book, a "ghost light" is "a single light left burning in the center stage when the theatre is empty." And this book conveys the bittersweet sensation of being the last one in the theatre after the show has closed and the sets have been struck.

Cerebral, opinionated, and as cutting as a production of Sweeney Todd, Frank Rich carved a wide swath through the New York theatrical establishment in his thirteen years. So hostile were producers to his reviews -- collected in Hot Seat: Theatre Criticism for the New York Times, 1980-1993 -- that more than one asked for Rich to be removed from his job (and at least one reportedly joked about hiring a 'hit man' to take care of him).

Although to this day he modestly maintains he did not have the influence others attributed to him (he says that bad shows were the problem, not his reviews) the fact remains that the reputation of Frank Rich, the critic, will be as one of the most-feared and most powerful journalistic voices in the history of New York. Today's reviewers don't have even the shadow of the impact Frank Rich could command.

Now comes Ghost Light a riveting volume in the tradition of Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus or Portnoy's Complaint, in which Rich reveals the inner family melodrama that undergirded his trenchant theatre criticism.

The predominantly Jewish Washington, DC neighborhood in which Rich grew up might have been Anatevka, the Russian shtetl in "Fiddler on the Roof." To Rich and his childhood friends, it was known as "Channukah Heights," inhabited by small merchants and professionals a world away from the political intrigue of Capitol Hill. Intriguingly, the altar at his synagogue was designed by Broadway set designer Boris Aronson, who did the sets for Fiddler -- and about whom Rich wrote his first book, The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson.

Indeed, to young Rich, Washington, DC seemed like a very small-town, albeit with a Southern accent (Washington remained segregated until the 1960s). Rich's father, also named Frank Rich, managed Rich's Shoes, a downtown Washington landmark that went out of business in the aftermath of the 1968 riots. (After his store closed, Rich senior went to work for Washington, DC Mayor Marion Barry.) Rich's grandfather and grandmother would go into the neighborhoods to personally collect overdue bills from their customers. Frank worked in the store during summers, and the book provides a strangely evocative image of the future terror of Broadway fitting customers with the right size shoes.

His beloved mother represented a wider world -- the Big City of New York loomed large in her universe as an escape from small-town DC -- and her love of Broadway musicals as a form of escape no doubt influenced the young Rich, as he makes clear.

Broadway musicals also provided Rich a haven from his troubled home life. His mother's second husband was the glamorous Washington super-lawyer and World War II hero Joel H. Fisher, legendary as the young American naval commander who helped track down and seize the Nazi Gold from the vaults of the Third Reich for the Allies. Working as an airline lawyer, Fisher was a jet-setter and an intimate of President Lyndon Johnson, and unlike Rich's birth father, a practicing Unitarian.

He was also a tyrant.

The Unitarian home life of Joel H. Fisher was marked by violence and abuse, including beatings and drugs. Increasingly miserable, young Rich found a Walter Mitty-like refuge in the theatre -- first in Washington DC, where as a Wilson High School student he acted in "A Thurber Carnival" and worked at a downtown theatre as an usher , later in Chicago before going off to college at Harvard, and finally in New York, as drama critic of the New York Times.

Eventually Rich's increasingly unstable step-father killed his mother in a car accident. Shortly after that, Rich (who had himself divorced the mother of his children) stopped writing theatre criticism to become an op-ed columnist for the Times -- and then took leave to write this book.

In writing his memoir, Rich displays a singular insight into theatre history and America of the 1950s. Many of the Broadway shows he loved so dearly were not happy-go-lucky escapist fare after all. Instead, a close reading reveals they were about the themes of divorce, and loss, and unhappy families. That is the reason they spoke to Rich as a miserable and abused child from a broken home -- and why they speak to audiences still.

And that is one reason why Frank Rich had to kill so many bad shows during his tenure as theatre critic -- because he so loved the magical theatre experiences of his childood, that he could not bear to see them compromised.

Frank Rich's memoir is more than a powerful and moving personal reminiscence, it is an epitaph for a dead art form, the Broadway musical, and the lost innocence of childhood.