I am going to need to unsubscribe from this thread aren’t I? 
There is a large school of thought that says that the above is a feature not a bug. Not for every play, but for a lot of them.
“Television is too artificial for me. I’m too aware that it’s a little box in my living room. Etc. Etc.”
For me the fact that the actors are RIGHT THERE ramps up the emotional intensity of the moment. If the play and the acting are good I feel it in a much bigger way than I do in the cinema or at home watching television.
+1,000,000
I go to the theater occasionally, though not as often as I’d like, as it can be rough on the wallet. A few years ago I saw “The Graduate” with Lorraine Bracco in a large theater from the first balcony (I don’t have “connections” and don’t understand how anybody’s seats at an Elton John concert are in any way relevant here, but whatever), and managed to hear everything just fine (it was a very good, not great, show); saw David Schwimmer in “Our Town” in a very small and intimate theater-in-the-round, which was a very intense and moving experience; and most recently saw the Goodman Theater’s production of “Animal Crackers” from a side box in a medium-sized venue. That was a raucous good time.
The reason I mention these three is that they were three very different types of shows in three very different spaces, which of course has an effect on how the actors must perform. Having accepted the parameters of each show, I managed to enjoy each on its own merits.
Stage plays are not reality, nor are they meant to approximate same. You’re watching something stylized to fit the medium and make whatever points the playwright and director are going for. Sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s not – and some people just don’t get into it, which is fine. But to complain that stage performances are “unnatural” really is not a valid criticism, IMO.
Because **Stoid **is clearly better than the rest of us. She has lifetime connections and would never lower herself by sitting anywhere other than the best seat available. How dare we even make the assumption that she’s a regular person, why, she even partied with Elton John!
:rolleyes:
Nope. Stood around feeling really stupid and out of place with Elton John because his guitarist was my client (I was a bookeeper at the business management firm they and Elton used) and his wife decided to give me a big splurge so she got me a spa and hair and makeup treatment, threw me in the limo and dragged me along. She took me into Elton’s dressing room when he was the only person there and I felt like a complete idiot. But that was fun in its own way.
My best friend’s mother had an incredibly useful job: special services for the William Morris Agency. Special Services is the department that procures entertainment and travel for rich, spoiled celebrities and entertainment executives. That was the primary connection.
And I brought it up because I had fantastic seats. And I always have fantastic seats. And it’s one teensy weensy tiny little thing that I have been fortunate enough to have over the years that’s kinda cool and unusual and enviable. Maybe the only thing. The saddish part is that I have tapped into it so rarely… I generally don’t really care for live performances much, even of music and musicians I like. I only bother when it’s one of the few that really excites me, like Bowie.
You say stylized, I say unnatural/artificial. I understand it, I just don’t care for it.
No less natural than any movie you have seen. You are conditioned to feel that one style of acting is more realistic than others and it isn’t true. Mammet is more genuinely realistic than your average Hollywood script, but doesn’t feel that way because it is unusual in comparison to what is typical. The same is true of acting. Genuinely realistic acting isn’t viable as a storytelling tool. It’s been tried. The person who came closest was probably Casavettes (probably spelled that wrong) and his stuff is
also considered stylized by the average viewer.
The typical theater director these days* is embracing this artifice rather than running from it and some really interesting things are happening. Film is lagging behind for a variety of reasons but most people only see film and so they only accept filmic acting styles.
*by these days I mean since about 1940. Theater innovations move slowly. It’s evolutionary not revolutionary.
I work on the technical side of professional theatre and I hate it when a non musical uses mics. The only exception is when the mics are used to distort the voice in some way. The bottom line is that yes, mics can be small and discreet, but it will always sound like a voice coming from a speaker. Because, well that’s what it is. Directionality is a big thing for me. If a doorbell rings, I don’t want to hear that doorbell through the fill speakers, I want to hear that doorbell come from the direction of the door. So when an actors voice is coming from the speakers, it really bothers me.
I was working a show and the director wanted the sound of breaking glass. He really wanted it to be a live effect, so I built a smashbox and we broke glass for each show. Nobody past the second row could hear the live effect so we ended up amplifying it. At that point the live effect was projected through the speakers and sounded exactly like a prerecorded one. :smack:
The same goes for voices. Anything through the speakers loses all natural feeling.
The acoustics in a properly designed theatre should work in favor for the actor and projection should be sufficient. When you start throwing music into the mix it does become too much for an actor to compete with and mics are necessary. That’s why musicals get a pass. No matter how good a singer is, they can’t naturally overpower a band.
Another interesting tidbit is that if the scene is really dark, the audience tends to have difficulty hearing. I don’t know the mechanics behind it, but the darker the lighting, the more the actors have to project.
four people in the row directly in front of us were wearing headsets attached to little black boxes. Any idea what that was about?
I can’t answer the poll, since I live in a small college town with a thriving theater scene: You could see a different show every week, between the various college troupes, at least three semi-pro, the free Shakespeare company, the festivals, and the traveling Broadway shows. Now, on any given weekend, you’re likely to only have one or two options to choose from, but it’s still a far cry above “nothing but the high school drama club”.
I average 3 shows a month. Mostly that is off Broadway stuff, but there is a decent amount of Broadway and opera in there too. I love the live theater and it was a big reason why I chose NYC instead of several other locations when I moved here several years ago.
There is something spectacular about live theater. It has such an intimate feel to it no matter how big the show and IMO it just feels special somehow. I don’t know if there is a way to explain it, really, except that you either love it or you don’t. It is sort of like in Pretty Woman where Richard Gere tells Julia Roberts that you either really like the opera or you don’t and in the next scene you see her completely enthralled with the performance and being moved to tears. If you like live theater you generally will seek it out because it never ceases to enchant you. If you don’t you scratch your head and wonder why the hell other people spend so much time and money attending that kind of show.
Probably a hearing assist. We have headsets that we give to people with hearing issues. There are mics hung above the stage that pic up the actors voices and send it through that system. It’s not a perfect solution since the mics can’t pick up everything on all corners of the stage, but it helps some people.
So on Tuesday night my wife and 12 year old daughter went to see a touring production of 9 to 5. It just so happens that was the night Dallas was hit with a massive storm which produced baseball-sized hail. The storm hit the theatre in the middle of act 1, and the sound equipment was knocked out. The lights were still on, but the performers and orchestra mics went down. The venue is a massive barn of a place(~5k seats) and there’s just no way to do a show there without amplification. The performers on stage looked at each other a bit and then realized this wasn’t just a momentary interruption, so they started goofing off. One of the leads started doing various types of dances, and generally cutting up a bit. They called a break and the audience adjourned to the lobby where the refreshments were still flowing(this part of the city was under no tornado watch or warning, just getting a moderate amount of hail, we got it much worse at home) and once they restored power they resumed the show and finished it out as normal.
My wife and my daughter were highly amused at the way the performers handled the fourth wall coming down, and I was too when they told me about it.
Enjoy,
Steven
I live in NYC and work in theatre, so yes, I go as often as I can because that means I’ll get paid. 
I love the fact that if you see the same play three times you can see completely different takes each time. The way one actor interprets and or acts a character (or sings a song if it’s a musical) can make it an entirely new experience.
This is true to some extent even of different performances by the same cast and director-- Good actors are always reacting to their environment. One of my fondest theater memories was from when one of the actors at an outdoor Shakespeare show managed to seamlessly incorporate a couple of horny ducks that ran across the stage.
I sort of cheated and wrote that I lived in NYC (I don’t now, but I used to).
I had a minor in Theater, so I was in lots of productions and went to see every one at my school, and at neighboring schools, and was in a summer theater group. In NYC, I would go to see almost every show - standing room tickets were cheap back then - and then I could go to Marie’s Crisis - a great piano bar in Greenwich Village where you can hear the chorus boys belt out numbers from every musical in history.
I also worked part-time at a legit theater in Los Angeles and got to see lots and lots of shows with famous casts, and meet many of the actors while working with them.
Sadly, although Las Vegas has a few large theater productions here, and a few come and go, mostly they are few and far between so I don’t get to see as much as I used to. Ticket prices here are high as well, so it has to be a show I really want to see.
Nothing beats a live performance of a show - it can be great, it can be dreadful - but seldom is it boring. I saw a performance of Waiting for Godot that was hysterically funny - one of the actors forgot his lines and they kept flipping back to the same scene, over and over again - until the director had to come out and read the segment the actor forgot. But I also saw some great performances by then-unknowns who later became famous and successful. I wish I lived in NYC again, if for no other reason than to see those Broadway, Off-Broadway and way off-off Broadway shows!
None of the options for #1 accurately describe my situation, and I expect this is true for a lot of Dopers. I went with “If I want to see theater, I’m pretty much stuck with my local high school” because I live in a small town…but one with a fairly active local theater scene. I’ve seen a number of plays locally, but I haven’t been to one at the high school and probably will never go to one there. I can’t imagine going to a high school play unless I knew someone who was involved.
I used to live in a mid-sized college town that again had a fairly active theater scene (including shows put on my the university theater department) and was visited by the touring versions of some current, major shows. My sister was also involved in a sort of avant-guarde community theater group, and I saw several of the shows she was in…including a play based on the life of Alfred Kinsey in which the entire cast wore clown costumes.
I don’t really understand why you think film/TV acting is more natural, though. It can be different but in its own way it’s pretty unnatural. People in real life don’t pause between sentences and tend to run into each other’s dialogue, for example.