Reviews: Who do you trust the most?

Me.

Don't read them before I see a show and afterwards the only opinion that matters to me is mine, I'll read reviews afterwards to see if I agree with them.

If afterwards I see hyperbolic nonsense for bog average stuff like Hamilton or tedious tosh like Jerusalem then I just sit back and remember that the only important thing to any theatregoer should be whether or not they enjoyed it and not what the London Standard, Time Out or Libby f***ing Purvis thought of it.

….and that should be the same for everyone.

I read reviews on here and in the media, but at the end of the day will generally only see something if I think it will appeal to me.

Only occasionally will I buy in to hype and see something purely because it has been well reviewed or created a lot of excitement. That said, sometimes that pays off - I wouldn't have seen Hamilton otherwise as I hated it when I first saw an excerpt from it, and now it is one of my favourite shows!

For me, it's a matter of working out whose tastes largely line up with my own so that if I'm wavering on booking something, their reaction to it will clue me in as to how much it's likely to be worth my time. And it sort of doesn't matter who that is or whether they can back up their opinions with great critical thinking, it's just how reliable they are to me personally as a barometer. So to a degree, professional critics and the keener bloggers are more useful than social media or discussion boards, because they tend to go early enough in the run that they can help with my decision making process, whereas we might be 11 weeks into a 12 week run before my like-minded laymen see a show, and then I either have to squeeze it into a potentially packed schedule, or be sad about missing out forever.

Though that said, my MO is to book shows when booking opens to the public, so it's only on fairly rare occasions that I need people's opinions to help me make my decisions. So option 5 most accurately represents my booking process, though is a slightly separate question from whose opinions I trust most.