Peter Marks, now the chief theater critic of The Washington Post, recalled being assigned to write a piece when he was working in The Times’s Long Island bureau in the early 1990s: “‘I’ll send you some suggestions for the story,’ she said, managing somehow to sound at once encouraging and deeply skeptical. I figured ‘suggestions’ meant a couple of contacts, maybe a paragraph about the theme. A few minutes later, Andrea’s fax started arriving. Nine pages of instructions. Single-spaced.”
Though she seldom attended opening nights or frequented the Broadway watering holes where schmoozing is an athletic competition, Andrea was a loved, revered and feared presence in the theater world. This was the woman who shepherded Al Hirschfeld’s immortal caricatures into the Sunday Times, who arranged the interviews with leading actors and playwrights that appeared in the newspaper. Press agents knew she could be reached late at night at the office, where she researched and revised articles long after the rest of the Culture staff had gone home.
Arthur Laurents, the acid-tongued librettist of “Gypsy” and “West Side Story,” wrote of her in his memoir “Original Story By”: “Andrea loves the theater like a woman who knows everything about her faithless lover but loves him anyway.”
Though she was adamant about never allowing personal affinities to sway professional decisions, she did befriend the occasional theater artist. That included Michael John LaChiusa (“Hello Again,” “Marie Christine”), who said: “She scolded me. She teased me. I think we ate at every Italian restaurant in NYC. Andrea got what I wanted to say but demanded that I say it better. I can hear her right now, ‘Oh, sheez.’”
I can hear her right now, too. Her speaking voice, which ranged from a lilting mezzo (for praise) to a low alto (to register disappointment), rises like music that’s been etched on your memory when you read her “epic emails, which were an art form in themselves,” a description from another Andreaphile, the Times film critic Manohla Dargis.
From an email she sent to Jason Zinoman in 2010, not long before she left The Times:“As the culture diffuses further, as distractions grow, as internet toys increase, it’s not going to be about taste,” she wrote. “It’s going to be about snap judgment: Do I love it? Do I hate it? And who’s in my camp? And who isn’t? We’re already in that world of the $5 word: manichean. The all or nothing at all world. It’s not a great prospect.”
That’s Andrea deploying her prophetic alto. The eminent theater publicist Adrian Bryan-Brown said Andrea “was never a pushover” and “could be bluntly dismissive to an idea she found uninteresting.” But she was always a heartfelt champion of the theater, and every so often she melted into something like sentimentality.
