(Okay, before anyone accuses me of being pompous for the ‘theatre’ spelling, I only spell it that way to differentiate between musical theatre and a movie theater…).
I just returned from a wonderful weekend in NYC with a friend. Since moving from the city a year ago, I’m always happy to go back and see my ‘family’ again. And having a friend who’s a travel agent and wins a free trip with theatre tickets is also pretty wonderful - my trip was completely paid for except for food. As this was a bit of a spur of the moment trip, we had no idea we were going until a week ago. Luckily, we were able to grab tickets to a Saturday matinee of “Gypsy” with Bernadette Peters, and the Saturday evening performance of “Fiddler on the Roof” with Alfred Molina and Randy Graff. Woohoo for me! Bernadette Peters is my favorite Broadway performer - and the last time I saw her perform live in a show (Annie Get Your Gun), she got sick halfway through and the role of Annie was completed by her standby. So I was looking forward to seeing her for an entire show:D. And Fiddler - well, I’ve never seen the show on stage, although I love the film and I love the music. Both shows were well worth it - Fiddler was incredibly powerful and moving, and Gypsy was a great, well-rounded performance.
However, I’d like to take a few minutes to lay down a few simple polite rules for going to the theatre.
If you will be late to a performance, don’t allow the ushers to wait for a suitable period in the show so that you’re not disturbing other patrons. Just go ahead and sit whenever you want. Because, you know, most of them probably won’t mind if you’re rattling around the seats and whispering to the ushers while Bernadette Peters is singing “Some People”…because you know, the other people who’ve come to the show probably don’t really want to hear her sing the song.
When there’s a set change, please feel free to talk as much as you want, even if there’s music playing at the same time. The orchestra deserves no respect - all they do is play instruments. So go ahead and just talk right through them.
Same goes for the quiet dialogue. It’s probably not important to the story, so go ahead and chit-chat about what you did on Thursday night with your girlfriend.
By all means, leave your cell phones on. Everyone knows you’re a big important person who can’t be unreachable for an entire three hours. No, we won’t mind if your phone goes off during a turning point in the show. Never mind that Tevye’s turning his back on his daughter. Actors don’t deserve any respect. Your call is more important.
Oh, yes, and everyone around you just LOVES to see serious public displays of affection, especially when the show is so depressing. Just for the record, the PERFECT time to start making out and make loud, smacking kissing noises is right when the Russian soldiers begin ripping apart the wedding gifts at Tzeitel and Motel’s wedding - a pogrom isn’t serious enough to care about, especially if it’s not real.
And the most important rule of all - YOU are the most important person in the theatre. All that matters is that YOU want to do something. So go ahead - talk, let your cell phone stay on, come to the show late, make out, do whatever you want to do. No one else in the theatre matters EXCEPT for you. If that girl behind you says “Shhh!”, give her a dirty look and maybe the finger. She doesn’t need to hear the show.
Oh, yeah. Apparently, someone taped these rules to the theatres before the shows. These were the WORST two audiences I have EVER been a part of - I have NEVER been in a show that’s had such horrible people in the audience! The first twenty minutes of Gypsy was nothing but people coming in and being as loud as possible. Fiddler on the Roof had no less than FOUR fucking cell phones go off DURING the show! And everyone around us was talking constantly! I’m a constant theatre-goer, in NYC, Chicago, DC, and Toronto, and I have NEVER been in an audience as horrible as these two. And of course, it was in the two shows that I have been waiting to see for months. And I will admit that I take my theatre much more seriously than casual goers, but that still doesn’t excuse the behavior.
If all people who go see a show would follow ONE simple rule, things would be much better.
Oh, yeah, the shows were absolutely brilliant - I highly recommend them both:). Fiddler was just…I don’t even have the words. During the finale of the first act when the Russian soldiers were executing the pogrom (is that the right way to say that?), it was absolutely silent in the theatre (that was the ONLY time it was absolutely silent). And then, all you heard were muffled sobs all over the audience - it was so moving.
But yes, the audiences were hideous. I was able to tune as much out as possible, but I seriously have never been so stunned at theatre behavior. I was in Chicago several weeks ago to see a new show (A Light in the Piazza, also highly recommended), and you could have heard a pin drop throughout the whole show. Maybe it’s just that New York audiences think the theatre is like the movies because it’s so accessible?
The person who plays the “bad guy” role in the play is obviously an inferior performer, so when he comes out for his curtain call, instead of appreciating the fine acting job that he did and clap enthusiasticly, you should boo him instead.
This happened to me when I went to see Beauty and the Beast in NYC…at least half of the audience booed Gaston. I was appalled. Idiots.
I’m in a play right now. I second the OP wholeheartedly.
A few years ago, I heard about Laurence Fishburne acting onstage when a cell phone went off in the house. Apparently he stopped the performance and cursed out the asshole. Right on, sez I.
There’s also a story, probably apocryphal, about some prominent English actor — Alan Bates, John Gielgud, somebody like that — doing Shakespeare for a high-school audience. The kids kept whispering and chattering, so twenty minutes into it, he interrupted his own performance to announce that if the talking didn’t cease, the play would be started over from the beginning, and would continue to be restarted until they got to the end in silence. Result, instant quiet.
Really, what the fuck is wrong with people? Are they so stupid that they don’t know the difference between a movie (in which this sort of disruption is rude to the audience but doesn’t affect the performers) and a play (where the performers are right fucking there)?
Man, I’d LOVE to see a performance where one of the great shining stars of the theatre stopped COLD… turned to the audience… and lambasted the hell out of some inconsiderate jackass who couldn’t be bothered to turn his cell phone off.
I have yet to see a live theatre venue that did not have signs TELLING you to turn your damn phone off.
If I spent way too much on a theatre ticket, and was witness to Theodore Bikel or Patrick Stewart or someone violently chastising someone for their lack of consideration, I’d consider it money well spent.
And take your damn crying screaming infant the hell into the lobby, while you’re at it. I paid to be here. Baby did not.
The play was The Lion in Winter and it happened. He was asked about it on Jon Stewart and admitted it. If you know the play (or the movie, which follows the play scene for scene), it’s during a dramatic highpoint when Henry II (Fishburne) is kissing his young mistress as Queen Eleanor (Stockard Channing) watches, and it wasn’t the first time during the run of the play or that night he’d heard a cell phone. He knew the play’s run was going to be up soon (it only ran three months) and he lost it, broke character, and yelled “Man would you turn that mthr fckng thing off!” He was mortified that he did that, but the theater broke into what he said was a full minute of applause, laughter and cheers.
I attended a performance of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival (which may sound chuckle-inducing, but it’s actually a huge state of the art complex when several high school classes attended. Several of the students, with their teachers nowhere to be found, were talking loudly and actually started tossing things onto the stage. The play was Othello and the actors finally broke character and refused to proceed until all of the kids were cleared. It was a very nasty incident for several days in the Alabama news, with lots of parents p.o.d that there kids had to pay for the acts of the “bad chirren”.
It may not be, I was just thinking about the thread on here a few days ago talking about pompous spellings. I’ve always used theatre, simply because I think it’s a better way to differentiate.
Brian Dennehy also stopped during a show to yell at a guy whose cell phone went off during his play. I can’t remember what show he was in at the time, but it was fairly well publicized. When I was at A Moon For the Misbegotten with Gabriel Byrne several years ago, I thought he was about to scream at someone when their phone went off.
I’m all for blocking signals in theatres. That’s the first place those signal-blockers should be used.
And reading all of your stories, I’m just stunned at the absolute rudeness out there. It seems like people don’t view theatre with the same sort of respect as they used to. And what’s funny is that mr. avabeth and I have discussed how much we can’t wait to start taking our (future) children to the theatre so that they can grow up around it, but the first thing we’ll do is make sure they understand how to behave while in a show. And if they aren’t old enough to behave, they aren’t old enough to go.
This doesn’t apply to everyone? What the hell happened to manners? Are they just obsolete now?
I ALWAYS turn off my phone when I enter a theater, or theatre. Once, at the beginning of the show when I heard the reminder to shut off my phone, I automatically grabbed the phone and hit the on/off toggle.
Fortunately, I keep my phone on vibrate, so only my nearest neighbors wondered why I found that line of dialouge so stimulating …
Oh, MAN! If I’d actually had a chance to see Peters in Gypsy and the audience was acting like an auditorium full of high-school freshmen, I’d be so incredibly pissed off!
Nobody messes with my obsession with Mama Rose! Nobody!
On the other hand, I would be the person who sings along under his breath, just because it’s impossible for me to hear that show without joining in…
LOL! And I’d be the girl next to you shooting you the look of death:). I have a friend who does the same thing and while she has a beautiful voice, I’m sorry, but I want to hear BERNADETTE sing, no one else!
And she was AMAZING!! I am a huge fan of hers, and have always had something happen at her performances (i.e. her getting sick in the middle of Annie, or her Rodgers and Hammerstein concert where I thought I had amazing front row seats ended up being a seat way to the side of the theatre where I had to strain even to see her at all. I was dying to see her live without a serious interruption or issue.
(And I’m such a major fan, I will admit that I burst into tears when she started singing “Some People”…it was the fact that I was seeing her in the role of her lifetime…she made a perfect Mama Rose - and it was just overwhelming. I used to make fun of people who cried when they saw their favorite singers. Now I’ve become one of them.:D).
Don’t sweat it… My fiance works at Beauty, they absolutely count on the audience booing Gaston. He knows it’s coming, and plays up to it during the bows.
We went to see Fiddler on Wednesday, very nice show, I’d recommend it. Not the strongest singing around (though we did see it in preview) but it’s a good show.
That’s just incredible. When I went to see Jesus Christ Superstar last week, I had a cold (still do) and was simply mortified every time I couldn’t keep a cough from escaping. I tried to time it with the louder parts of the show, but even then I hated the thought I’d be distracting anyone from the show, as excellent as it was.
I have to wonder, though, and this is purely musing…is it possible that the disrespectful crowd is because it was composed of New Yorkers and other East Coasters? I don’t mean to generalize New Yorkers as disrespectful, believe me, but being a West Coaster it sometimes seems like New Yorkers tend to have a stronger sense of self-entitlement. Couple that with the greater number of plays that occur in New York compared to elsewhere, and it may be that many New Yorkers think of Broadway shows as most people think of run-of-the-mill movies.
Here in Tucson, 99% of our theatre-goers are ecstatic to simply be seeing a show, whereas quite a few of the utter psychos that hold me personally responsible for not being able to get them a front-row seat when they call a week before the show is scheduled tell me quite imperiously that this sort of thing never happens in New York.
I admit this is conjecture based on personal experience, but it does point to a possible pattern.
