Me, for the latter two.
To continue this hijack,
I just finished a production of Beauty and the Beast last night. It is, IMHO, a pretty poor excuse for a musical. As you said, it very much is a Disney movie come to life directly on the stage, which is both good and bad.
It’s good because all the little kiddies (and mommies) who want to see their favorite movie live will be completely satisfied. Visually, thematically, and scriptwise it is a faithful reproduction.
However, much of what you can get away with on the screen fails on stage. One example off the top of my head is the scene in which the Beast is trying to get Belle to come down to dinner. In the movie there’s a door between them, and they cut from shots of Belle to those of the Beast. The Beast has some funny dialogue with his helpers in between yelling at Belle through the door. In real life the flow of the conversation just wouldn’t work; the Beast takes so much time between lines to Belle, and she would most likely be able to hear what he’s saying behind the door, though she doesn’t.
Well, when she and the Beast are up on stage together, the long extended asides, while faithful to the film, are just painful. Belle is a few feet away from the Beast on stage and is supposedly not hearing half of the words he’s saying? They kept it because it was a funny scene that worked in the movie, but just fails in a live production.
And, the score is one of Alan Menken’s worst, IMHO. Two or three great songs, fleshed out by a number of poor ones. And, the tunes that were added between the movie and the play deliver no interest or emotion.
Gah.
It could be a matter of taste. For example, I don’t like musical drama/comedy, whether its on stage or in a motion picture. But I can recognize that there is such thing as quality musical theatre and that there are reasons why some people might prefer it to straight drama/comedy.
However, it seems from you comments that you perceive live theatre to be inferior primarily because of “bad acting.” If this is the case, then it’s not coming down to a question of taste. The issue is that you’ve never really seen a good live theatre performance.
Stage acting is a completely different art from movie/television acting. And actors comment on this difference quite frequently. Stage acting is an art that involves staying in character for long stretches of uninterrupted time. No retakes, nothing. It’s the art of becoming another person in a live setting.
Movie and television acting is a completely different art. I understand that acting in movies consists mostly of waiting around for the technical people to get things done. Yes, good acting is an important component to movies, but unlike live theatre, it’s not the dominant component. In movies, technical activities – lighting, special effects, cinematography, and, primarily, editing and scoring – play a huge part in the experience that’s created.
Different arts are subject to completely different standards for measuring quality.
Why would you read a book when you can listen to an audio tape?
Why would you listen to the radio when you can watch television?
As you said yourself, you’ve seen live standup comedy and you have appreciated it. So you can see how live performances, in general, can bring something to the table and aren’t inherently inferior to recorded performances. So, yeah, go see a really good play and then decide whether you think that live theatre isn’t worth it.
A couple of years ago, I saw a live performance with Avery Brooks as Othello … wow, completely blew me away. In contrast, I found Laurence Fishburne and Kenneth Branagh’s Othello movie to be completely incomprehensible and boring.
Marshall McCluhan put movies in his cool media group while placing plays in the “hot” category. There was a reason for that. Play involve you. You should not remain outside when going to a play. You become part of it. The ancient Greeks called theater going a chathartic experiece. You felt interally clensed following a trip to a performance.
It can still be that way. To kill an afternoon a few years back, I took a friend who had never been to professional theater show to a relatively minor reprise of Picnic with Gregory Harrison and Rue McClanahan and a few other names and I enjoyed it. It was a solid performance. When we came out of the theater, though, my friend looked at me almost in awe and said, “Is it always like that?”
I knew what he was talking about. He had been, for lack of a better word, transported. Plays and musicals can do that. Movies on very, very rare occasions can too. But plays and musicals can regularly do it. That’s why people keep going back.
I am reminded of taking the woman who is now my wife to see the stage version of Peter Pan years ago and when the show reached the part where Peter asks the crowd to “Clap if you believe in fairies,” I looked around, children (and yes, momentarily adults too) believed. They had been transported. That’s why people go to theater productions. They wouldn’t have clapped like they did in that theater that evening if it were a movie with all the production values in the world. I truly believe it takes theater to do that.
I will preface this by stating that I work in the theatre industry so I am a bit bias. I have probably seen 15 shows in the past three months if you count me seeing the same show multiple times. If you are talking about fifteen different shows than it has probably been a year.
Having said that I should mention that on both the technical and acting side of theatre there are people who work in movies. Your card-board set idea is ridiculous. The person who builds sets for the theatre that I work for also builds for movies, and actually theatre construction can be better quality than movie since it has to last longer. In fact I prefer to work with theatre only carpentry as the style is a bit different and I prefer the theatre style.
Some of the set, lighting, and costume designers I work with also do work in film.
The crew that set up the technical aspects of the play also does film work.
All of these people are professionals who do film to pay the bills.
The actors do anything from commercials to movies to sitcoms, as well as theatre. I love watching movies that were filmed around where I live so I can point out the people that I know.
And I don’t work for a large theatre. My theatre seats 350 people when the largest in town seats over 1000. Unless you are going to community theatre your argument about professionalism is invalid.
Just a quick nannie-nanners — I saw The Producers with Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane when it was in previews in Chicago.
As to the OP: Why have sex with someone else when you can look at porn by yourself?
It’s a community experience, live theatre. The actors and audience feed off of one another.
What (most) everybody else said.
I’m a theater geek. I see a few dozen plays every year, and used to do them with some regularity.
I’m also a huge movie geek. I see a couple of hundred movies every year.
By pure numbers, you might think I prefer movies to theater. That’s not the case. The very best theatrical experience surpasses the very best movie experience by a fairly wide margin.
A year and a half ago, I went to New York with a friend to see the Broadway production of Grey Gardens. The first act was very good. The second act, though, was utterly transcendent; my mouth had fallen open in the first few minutes, and by the middle there were tears in my eyes. That’s how astonishing an experience it was.
On the other hand, the guy sitting next to me kept looking at his watch, so I can’t claim it works for everybody.
But that’s not where the OP is coming from. The OP implies that film is an inherently superior medium, that people who enjoy theater are somehow wrong. This is deeply, deeply offensive.
Another example: On the same trip to New York, I saw the musical adaptation of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead movies. Same plot, haunted house in the woods, demons, evil trees, chainsaw, etc, but live on stage, with songs and dancing. Plus, at intermission, they handed out free raincoats, because the gory mayhem during the second act was not confined to the stage. Yes, this was a show that actually spattered its audience with blood.
Try that in a movie theater.
Sure, it’s an over-the-top example, but consider this wrinkle:
At one point in the story, one of the women is possessed by a demon. Her cabinmates grab her and throw her down a trapdoor representing the cellar, thus confining her. For the next 20-30 minutes, until she escapes, she occasionally pops out of the partially chained trapdoor, grabbing people’s feet or making threats and sarcastic jokes.
My friend and I were in the front row, with the trapdoor directly in front of us, maybe four feet from the edge of the stage. At one point, the demon girl pops up, and another character shoots her with a shotgun. She slams a bloodpack, spraying blood everywhere, and then does this little jiggle-and-flick move to make sure the blood gets out into the audience. Some of it got on my friend; he flinched, looked down at himself, and then in a joking tone, he muttered, “Aw, fuck you, bitch.”
The demon girl turned to him, made eye contact, growled “I heard that,” and flipped him a double-handed bird while sinking back down into the “cellar.”
And then, the next time she came up, she made a point of bringing a paper cup brimming with blood, and leaned out of the trapdoor so she could splash the whole thing right into my friend’s lap.
It was great. And good luck getting an experience anywhere close to that in the cinema.
To be fair, not everybody’s looking for that. Some people prefer cinema because of the distance and the disconnect, i.e. because the medium allows them to sit back and passively consume an art form that does not demand their involvement, and that remains safely static so it can be consumed repeatedly without alteration. Some people find theater distasteful because it requires them to be emotionally and intellectually active (say what you will, telling yourself that that wooden cutout is a castle on the horizon does require a modicum of imaginative effort), and further because the form is dynamic, and the experience of one performance is not guaranteed to be replicated on any other night.
But to say that theater is simply bad because the dozen or so shows you’ve seen aren’t up to scratch? No. Bullshit. Sorry. I’ve seen countless thousands of movies and hundreds of plays, and good and bad of each, in roughly the same proportion. And all else being equal, ten times out of ten, I’d choose to sit through a bad play before I sat through a bad movie. The basic experience — the thousands-of-years-old ritual of sharing physical space with the storyteller — is utterly irreplaceable, and cannot be replicated by any other means.
Oh, and one more thing:
Do you mean you got up in the middle of the performance? While there were people on stage? And turned your backs on the show, in progress, to leave?
Because if so, that is just unspeakably, unconscionably, infuriatingly rude. If you think that’s acceptable behavior, then please, don’t ever go to the theater again.
Yeah, plus the people in the porn movies are much better looking than anyone who you’re likely to get to agree to have sex with you. 
Good example. The movie is surprisingly good, but the original off-Broadway production was transcendental. I don’t think I’ve ever had as much fun at a live performance of any kind.
But they are very different mediums, as many have been saying. A play has a different pacing than a movie, a different approach. The most obvious difference is the role of dialogue. In most movies today, dialogue is often a secondary element in the narrative. The story is told through the visuals, not so much through the dialogue. You can usually tell when a movie is an adapted play, like Glengarry Glen Ross, by the amount of dialogue and the few scene changes.
I also find a lot of older movies (like, say “His Girl Friday” or “The Shop Around the Corner”) are more play-like than current ones, and it makes sense as film was still a nascent art form and borrowing heavily from stage theatre. Today, not so much. I very much enjoy stories that are told almost completely through dialogue and interaction of characters, with few, if any, set changes, and the only decent outlet for that these days is live theatre.
Beyond that, there is also the whole live aspect of it. These are real people performing in front of you. Each performance is slightly different. Sometimes the audience becomes part of the performance. It’s like asking, why go to a Bruce Springsteen concert when there’s a perfect good concert DVD of him performing flawlessly, with cool camera angles, perfectly mixed sound, etc. Why? Because the experience is different. It’s energetic. You’re watching something real unfold before your eyes.
Every play , every concert, every performance is a new act of creation–it’s special and it happens exactly that way only once. You just don’t get that with movies. If you don’t care about that, fine. Some people don’t like concerts either. But many of us do care.
Those things cost money. A financially astute moviemaker will want to make back that money and more by creating a movie that will appeal to a lot of people. But what appeals to a lot of people might not be what appeals to me. A theater group can do plays that appeal to a narrower audience, because a play (particularly one without world-class paid actors) doesn’t have the costs that a movie does.
Plays can be performed outdoors in a beautiful natural setting, or as part of something fun like a Renaissance festival. A movie couldn’t be shown outdoors except at night, when you can’t see the scenery as well (and in some places like the San Francisco Bay Area it tends to be too cold to be comfortable). A movie theater at a Renaissance festival would have to be shown in an enclosed building (since Renaissance festivals are held during the day) and would feel much more separated from the rest of the festival than a play does. It would feel much less true to the spirit of the festival, as well.
I would also like to point out that there are tons of really A+ film actors who couldn’t do a C- stage performance if you put a gun to their heads. Even in this day of “stunt casting” there are film and TV people nobody would pay to be on Broadway, either because they couldn’t do it or because they are such big jerks that nobody could stand to work live with them through rehearsals and performances six days a week. I’m not going to name any names, but any stage actor who thinks they are bigger than the show is going to be on the street very quickly.
I saw that show in Toronto. Oh man was it was GREAT! I bought the sound track and play it at work to make all my coworkers jealous. And this is from someone who has her own preferred recipe for stage blood 
Your implied analogy only works if one gets to fuck cast members. (I’ve read stuff that intimates that early travelling theatrical productions did offer this option. Call it “Getting-off Broadway.”)
Hear, hear Cervaise! Brilliantly said.
Point Break Live! just came to San Francisco, in which the actor playing Johnny Utah (the Keanu role in the movie) is chosen from the audience each night and reads off cue cards.
Try that in a movie theater.
Sincerely,
garygnu, theater geek, movie geek, and fan of Marshall McLuhan.
I’ll name a name: Randy Quaid banned for life from stage actors’ union and heavily fined as a result of bad behavior in a pre-Broadway performance tryout.
You’re story is better than mine, but I have one along those same lines.
I had never gotten the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Yeah, Tim Curry was amazing, but the rest of the movie put me to sleep, even at a midnight showing with toast, water guns, and a shadow cast. The only reason I went to see the RHS revival on Broadway was to enjoy Terrence Mann in fishnets. (Well worth the price of admission.)
To my surprise, I loved it! I’ve been a huge Rocky fan ever since. My favorite moment in that performance:
Dr Scott: I knew he vas in with a bad crowd, but it was worse than I expected!
Audience: Actors!
As one, entire cast swiveled to face audience and flipped us off, then swiveled back in to the action.
Dr Scott: Aliens!
Threads like this make me want to cry. Well, no, first they make my head explode, and then they make me want to cry. It’s an uphill battle trying to work professionally in theater, and living in LA I get “but don’t you really want to work in film?” or, “You just couldn’t get a film job right?” No, I don’t and I could but choose not to. Theater is the art I make and it isn’t even close to the same as film.
People have made the analogy of live music vs. recorded music. I will say that isn’t even close. The difference is more along the lines of “why do people bother painting when there is so much good photography.”
Photography is a great artform, painting is a great artform. They have about as much in common (as artforms) as a television set has in common with a fish tank. IE you look at both of them.
The only thing that theater has in common with film, is that they both use actors. What the actors do and how they do it, are so different that most actors can’t perform in both mediums. And that is the MOST similar that theater and film get.
Bah, sorry that one just hit a very personal nerve.
The bellow is actually why I responded. Two parts:
I have a theory that I formed in school. It goes, people dislike theater because they don’t seen enough of it and don’t know what to look for when they go. I am going to use the second person, because it makes it a little easier to follow, but don’t take this as actually directed personally towards you.
90% of all art created in the world is total and utter shit. Maybe that number is a bit high, but it is somewhere around 90%. And this translates across the board. 90% of books written, 90% of movies made, 90% or painings painted etc. Shit.
With a bad book, it won’t ever get published, and of the books that ARE published, a lot of them are shit too. How many books do you read a year?
You won’t see 80% of the movies that get made is a given year. Most of them are never distributed outside of a few small film festivals. Of the ones that do get picked up a good number of these are still shit. How many movies do you see a year.
Theater has no means of mass distribution. You see what your neihborhood has, there is no way to filter the total shit from the not total shit. This can be great, but it also means a lot of shit is left out there to stink. If your play is lucky it will go to Broadway or the West end. Where, maybe some tourists will see it. And these playes aren’t picked up because they are good, they are picked up because someone think that tourists will go see them.
How many plays do you see a year? In comparison to the number of books you read and movies you see, do you see more plays or fewer?
Now add to that what you do know about theater vs. movies vs. books.
If I told you that Nicholas Martin was directing The House of Blue Leaves by John Guare at the Mark Taper in Los Angeles, would that mean anything to you? If I told you Paul Thomas Anderson was directing There Will Be Blood starring Daniel Day Lewis would that mean anything to you?
My guess is that you are more well informed about movies than theatre. When you go to a movie, even if you haven’t read a review, you know enough to make an educated guess as to what it will be like. My guess is that with theatre you have a much worse guess, because its harder to be educated about theater these days. Your guess would probably be not much better than picking at random.
So, what I propose is, if you could only go to see the same number of movies as you went to see plays, and you had to pick at random what movie you were going to go see you would probably feel the same way about film as theater.
Lack of exposure leads to a skewed perspective because, once again, 90% of everything is shit. So if you pick movies at total random, you are going to see a LOT of bad movies before you see a single good one. And you would probably give up before you found it.
I hope that makes a certain amount of sense. I had to write it over the course of about 2 hours.
This is crap, and I don’t blame you for not liking it. It isn’t part of our culture and it is a bad thing to do to the audience. I have worked on these types of “pass the hat” plays, and it is frankly embarassing. I am sorry.
I really think the OP just hasn’t been to the right kind of play. We have individual tastes; God knows Ibsen isn’t an exciting evening for everybody.
One day in the mid-1980s, I happened to see two plays the same day. One was Medea. The ticket cost six dollars, and Zoe Caldwell and Dame Judith Anderson were about ten feet from me on an almost bare stage. Pure magic.
Then that evening, we went to see the touring show of Annie. Tickets were about $25. Technically impressive, very professional – but it never touched me emotionally. Couldn’t wait for the last overblown meaningless number.
If Annie had been the first play I ever saw, I might not have tried again.
For the record, I agree with Opal.
Recorded music and movies can never match the heights of emotional involvement possible with live productions.