ABOUT

Bitter Lemons is designed to help shape the conversation between artist and reviewer into a constructive, respectful, and meaningful dialogue that informs the audience-goer, gives voice to the community, and creates accountability to the critics who evaluate works.

We are scoring your shows using The Lemon Meter Rating System as they get reviewed.

We use an aggregate scoring system here, much like what they use at the Film Reviewer site Rotten Tomatoes. The percentage you see posted is the OVERALL percentage of positive or SWEET reviews that a show earned. We’ve set a cut off point of 60% for an overall SWEET Lemon Meter Rating. 59% and under for the overall Lemon Meter Rating would merit a BITTER. So it would go 67% Sweet and 59% Bitter.

Now we’ve made a few caveats to that simple system to balance the fact that most shows don’t get a lot of reviews. First of all we judge some reviews to be BITTERSWEET. You know the kind, the reviewer didn’t hate it, didn’t love it, kind of a neutral overall judging by the particular reviewer. Those Bittersweet reviews don’t count on the overall, they basically cancel themselves out. Also we don’t post a Lemon Meter rating for a show unless it receives at LEAST three reviews. So let’s say a show gets one Bitter review and two Sweet reviews – the overall Lemon Meter would then be 67% Sweet. If it got two Bitter and one Sweet, the overall Lemon Meter rating would be 33% Bitter (it falls below the 60% cutoff – so BITTER). Now if there were three reviews, a Bitter Review a Bittersweet Review and a Sweet Review – the Lemon Meter rating would be 50% Bitter (as the Bittersweet cancels itself out).

Now a few more caveats: if a show gets 6 or more reviews and gets an overall Lemon Meter rating between 50 and 59% we will give it an overall Bittersweet rating. It seems fair that a show that gets more reviews and kind of hits a middling percentage should get a little love – hence, the 59% Bittersweet.

Now the final caveat: if a review gets more Bittersweet reviews than Sweet or Bitter reviews and it falls above the 60% plateau (or above the 50% plateau if 6 or more reviews) we will give the overall rating a Bittersweet rating – EVEN if it’s 100% Sweet. Like this: a show gets two Bittersweet ratings and one Sweet rating – it would get an overall Lemon Meter rating of 100% Bittersweet. This seemed fair as the majority of the reviewers found the show to be just okay, but there weren’t any Bitter reviews. There needed to be some way to display that a show did not get raves even though it did not get any classically “negative” reviews.

So that’s basically it. We are always trying to improve and may at some point add USER REVIEWS to the mix – just to screw things up even more, but until then, keep coming back, subscribe, tell your friends, send your comments and suggestions, get your theatre listed, say hello!