I’m currently working at Cleveland Play House, on the stage crew for Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. All this week (and next week) we’re doing student matinees, so school kids can see the play. On Thursday, we had the worst audience I’ve ever seen. They talked, jeered, were very disrespectful at first. Then they started throwing things! Now comes the good part:
When someone threw a gumball at an actress, Andrew (Jekyll/Hyde) finally got fed up. The actress tried to continue, but he said “Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.” He walked to the front of the stage, and Said how disappointed he was in the audience. The he said “I want whichever teacher is responsible for these kids to get them the hall out of my theater” and walked off stage!! It was great! An actor breaks character and leaves in the middle of a scene! The perpetrators were removed, and they started the scene over shortly thereafter.
The audience was much better behaved after this.
Anyone else have some bad audience stories?
I’ve heard, Vanyel, a story, I don’t know if it’s an urban legend or not, about a drunk mercilessly heckling a famous Shakespearean actor during a performance of Richard III. Finally, the actor changed one famous piece a bit: “A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse, but yon braying ass in the audience will do.”
I don’t know if it’s true or not, but it should be.
When I was in middleschool, we were taken to see some highlights from Man of La Mancha at the civic center. We got seats up in the balcony and everything. But halfway through, an usher comes up and throws all of us out for throwing things at the actors and audience in the regular seats. The manager came out a gave us a Stern Talking To. Our teacher was mortified, and read us all the riot act. We all had to take notes home to our parents. It was an incredible shitstorm, and a lot of us ended up in tears over it.
About a week later, the school got a call from the civic center: Turned out, the plaster on the ceiling was being shaken loose from the bass in the songs and falling on the stage and lower seats. My class had been perfectly behaved (as we had maintained all along), and the manager came in personally to apologize and invite us back for another show.
There’s a story that an especially mediocre actress was playing Anne Frank, badly enough that when the Nazis were searching the hourse, the audience all yelled “She’s in the attic!”
Not true according to snopes, but still funny: http://www.snopes.com/movies/actors/zadora.htm
Besides sitting next to a person in the audience who chatted on a cell phone during the majority of the show, no horrible audience stories here.
It may be an UL, but some actor in a Broadway play supposedly took away the cell phone from a patron and told the caller to call back later, they were at a play.
City Council in NY is trying to pass a law outlawing cell phone use at movies and plays. - NOT an UL.
He was performing “The Lion in Winter” onstage with Stockard Channing, when some jerk took a call on his cel phone. Laurence broke character, crossed down center, and said: “Hang up the f*cking phone.”
Morpheus rules!
We were doing “Arsenic and Old Lace” and we were doing a special performance for a high school, since the play was on the English curriculum that year. Well the teachers decided independantly that they would give all the kids bags of chips before the play…nothing like hearing the crunch of chips, the rustle of bags and the occasional pop as some boys squished their bags (of chips…get your minds out of the gutter puhleeze…) to help your concentration.
I recently co-produced a production of Godspell. We had a special matinee performance for some local high school students. The idea was that afterwards, there would be a Q&A with the cast, crew and production team.
Highschool boys will be boys, and as such, there were some inappropriate comments made from the audience, and some talking throughout.
After the performance, the classes stayed in their seats ready for the Q&A, but the other producer, without consulting with me, or the director, harshly told everyone to go home.
He kinda ended up making things worse himself.
Regardless, we still sold out our regular evening shows.
Haven’t been to the theater for ages, but why do companies go to schools? Is it some sadistic trial of fire for the actors, where the audience consist of bored cynical clockwatchers who have no vested interest in watching the show?
Cripes, it makes me cringe to think about how we treated visiting companies in high school back in days gone by.
I was watching a performance of Dancing at Lughnasa at The Abbey in Dublin. There was a woman sitting in the middle of the theatre whose cell phone rang off three times. They not only was she bad about answering the phone before it rang loudly three or four times, but she held a full voice conversation each time. I was sitting on the far side of the theatre and could hear what she was saying. By the last time the audience all yelled at her and the actor playing Michael stopped in the middle of his final monologue to look at her until she hung up.
I cannot believe that people do this. Tickets to the theatre are not cheap. If you don’t want to be there, than leave. Don’t ruin it for everyone else.
Yeah, I went to a high school production of “Much Ado About Nothing”, and the school had decided to sell sodas and chips, which was not very conducive to the atmosphere.
The production was also so bad that we left at intermission. Even the kids I talked to later at the school admitted that the actor kids had blown off really caring to the point that it just stunk.
This wasn’t a bad audience, but it’s vaugely appropriate;
I went to see The Foreigner, an off-Broadway comedy about a man who pretends to be from another country in order to get a room in a house.
And midway through the second act, the actress playing the love interest stood up and said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m normally not like this, but I can’t go on! They have dogs playing poker out there!”
In fact, they did have paintings of dogs playing poker in the lobby. I never understood that, but I have not forgotten it to this day.
I was at a John Williams (the classical guitarist) concert and, half way through, he stopped playing to announce that (paraphrased) “all those people hacking and coughing between songs cut it out. Either hold it in or leave the room. It’s incredibly distracting and disrespectful.”
I wish movies had some sort of similier watchdog like live entertainment has.
This American Life had a piece called “Peter Pan” about a disintegrating performance of the aforementioned play & how the audience got completely out of hand - very funny & available on their “Greatest Hits” album.
I was in the audience of a play at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. A couple of people in the first or second row were chatting so incessantly during the performance that one of the lead actors stopped in the middle of a speech, pointed at them with a withering glare, and then went on with the scene.