Its a staple of stories and movies - but did audiences ever really throw tomatoes or vegetables or other items, at stage performances that were…below expectations???
If “Yes”, do they still anywhere?
I don’t see how it could be true. Would people actually carry rotten tomatoes with them to a show just in case it was bad? What if it wasn’t? Now you’re stuck sitting through a decent show with smelly tomatoes under your seat. Also, you’re presumably dressed up to go to a show. Are you really gonna lug around some rotten tomatoes all evening (or fresh ones for that matter?) Just seems like a whole lotta trouble 
I always assumed it was based on crowds at Music Hall/Vaudeville. With a number of acts on the bill one was bound to stink and throwing stuff would be all part of the entertainment for a rowdy crowd.
I assumed it was from the era of travelling theater. Peasants would bring stuff with them to throw. I was also under the impression that it was originally thrown at the evil guy, not a bad actor.
Well, if we use Mark Twain as an example…
I know, Huckleberry Finn was fiction. But remember when the two grifters, The Duke and the King put on a bad show to part the audience with their money?
The first night they got away with it. The next night the audience came loaded with ammo.
Exactly! The NEXT night! As in, they knew what to expect and they were ready. They weren’t just hanging on to the rotten stuff that first night!
There’s a story here (PDF) from the NY Times of 28 October, 1883.
An actor making his stage debut on Long Island experienced a minor setback in his budding career when the audience began to aerially distribute a fusillade of rotten tomatoes in his general direction.
Remind me never to play that theatre.
On the other hand, if you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere. . .
True, but I wouldn’t be prepared to jeopardise my carefully nurtured sense of self-esteem.
The aspect of the story that strikes me the most is the accuracy of the audience:
Of course I am unaware of the theatre’s design and configuration, but anyone who can hit a trapeze artiste between the eyes from the average gallery seat surely deserves our appreciation, if not our attendance.
When’s the next show?
If you’re interested in this sort of thing, i highly recommend the historian Lawrence Levine’s book Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Much of Levine’s fascinating work is devoted to tracing the changes in the behavior of audiences in America in the nineteenth century, and he spends plenty of time on the unruliness of theater audiences.
And it was not just at vaudeville and other “lowbrow” entertainment that audiences tended to be unruly. Levine’s first long chapter looks at the performance of Shakespeare plays in America, and discusses the way that early American audiences for these works did not treat the plays or the performances with the sort of deference that theater audiences give them in the twentieth century.
Here’s a description of one incident from Levine’s book:
There was an incident in New York involving the English actor William Charles Macready, who had become involved in something of a professional battle with popular American actor Edwin Forrest. The American crowds took sides:
As you might glean from these snippets, Levine argues that audience unruliness was often an outlet for class conflict, with those in the cheap seats of the gallery and the pit often taking their feelings out not only on the actors, but on the wealthier folks in the boxes.
The book also contains tales of theater troupes being run out of towns by men with guns for poor performances or some other insult. Levine finishes by describing the taming of the audience in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the decline of the sort of loud, participatory crowds that had characterized the earlier period.
It’s really a fascinating read.