During Mirvish's 2010 production of Rock of Ages, police were called most weeks, usually owing to drunk fans standing up and singing along to the 1980s hits as if they were at a concert.Mirvish
Have theatre audiences forgotten how to behave?
It’s a subject much muttered about of late in stage circles – and one that made international headlines over the long weekend after police had to be called to a performance of The Bodyguard in Manchester, England.
The last 10 minutes of the Whitney Houston jukebox musical, based on the movie of the same name, were called off after audience members refused to sit down and stop singing along to I Will Always Love You.
This is not being seen as an isolated incident. The Guardian published a follow-up on Monday about “the ugly new side of theatre audiences,” rehashing some other anecdotes about recent antisocial behaviour at British venues. It also noted that a new survey has found “90 per cent of theatre venue employees had experienced or witnessed unacceptable behaviour from audiences – including assaults, vandalism and racist language – and 70 per cent said things were worse than prepandemic.”
There have been similar complaints floating around Broadway. In February, Playbill published an online article headlined “Physical Assault, Vomit in the Aisles, Stalking in the Streets: Why Audience Misbehavior Has Gotten Out of Hand” – though it disappeared from the site shortly thereafter. The publication’s chief executive officer, Philip Birsh, told the Daily Beast he had it deleted: “We want people to go to the theatre. This piece exaggerated the issue in my opinion.”
Is it exaggerated? This conversation certainly hasn’t been happening to the same degree in Canada. I put a call out on social media to take the pulse, and mainly received responses about mildly annoying but, frankly, not unusual audience behaviour such as chatting too much, using cellphones and the crinkling of candy wrappers.
But Canadians aren’t entirely conforming to polite stereotype. “There is no doubt audience behaviour has changed,” writes John Karastamatis, director of sales and marketing at Mirvish Productions, in an e-mail. “People are ruder, less tolerant and generally grumpy. Front-of-house staff have had to endure a lot.”
I don’t want to diminish any harassment of theatre’s front-line workers. I do think it’s worth putting all this in perspective, however. Most societies have been through a tough period that remains tough for many, but, personally, I’m seeing a rise in antisocial behaviour in the streets rather than in the seats in Toronto.
And the fact is the incidents at jukebox musicals relating to singalongs, such as what happened at The Bodyguard, are in no way new – or limited to – the British aisles. “Fights in the audience have happened at our theatres,” Karastamatis writes. “I’m sorry to say this, but in every case it was at a musical that used well-known songs.”
The examples that Karastamatis provided were all from Mirvish shows in the prepandemic era. During the company’s 2010 production of Rock of Ages, for instance, police were called most weeks, usually owing to drunk fans standing up and singing along to the 1980s hits as if they were at a concert. “Others in the audience would then become involved and tell them to shut up and sit down,” Karastamatis recalls. “It would escalate from there.”
I don’t want to blame the victim here, but commercial theatre producers have backed jukebox musicals for a simple reason: They bring in music fans as well as musical-theatre fans, concertgoers as well as theatregoers, and make money because of those two pools of potential ticket buyers – who have different ideas around live-show etiquette.
Since the massive success of Mamma Mia!, based on ABBA hits, the idea that you might end up singing and dancing like you were at concert has actually been part of the marketing of musicals based around songs to which you already know the words.
Indeed, check out this vintage Mirvish television ad from 2000 for the Toronto production of Mamma Mia! “This is the reception it gets every night!” says an excited announcer, as singing, clapping and dancing audience members are shown on screen.
Now it’s proving hard to put that genie back into the bottle even at musicals where singalongs are not appropriate, or at least not appropriate until the curtain call. Though, speaking of the bottle, it’s pretty obvious what the easiest fix for misbehaviour at British and Broadway productions actually is. But things will have to get a lot worse before commercial producers shut down their bars.
And speaking of Rock of Ages, upstart Toronto commercial producers More Entertainment’s new production of that jukebox musical, which opened last month, does not seem to be filling all 1,539 seats at the Elgin Theatre. Indeed, all Tuesday performances of the show have been cancelled in its run scheduled to May 20, and the balcony appears to have been taken off sale on many other weeknights, based on Ticketmaster seating maps.
There are deals to be had, too: Facebook keeps showing me an ad for two-for-one tickets (you can use the code EASTER for performances up to April 16).
None of this is surprising: Rock of Ages is a jukebox musical that first opened in a 1,069-seat house on Broadway and later transferred to a 597-seat house. I don’t know what metrics More Entertainment is using for success; as per this newsletter’s previous item, this is a show that famously does well in terms of bar sales, so it could be making money for all I know. But this seems to me to reinforce what I wrote recently about Toronto’s need for more 400- to 800-seat theatres for commercial productions. (More Entertainment did not respond to an offer to comment by deadline.)
Reviews you can reuse
The Last Stone opens at Great Canadian Theatre Company in Ottawa tonight and runs to April 23. I reviewed Yvette Nolan’s production of Donna-Michelle St. Bernard’s moving show about forgiving the unforgivable when it played in Toronto earlier this season.
Stupid F*cking Bird, Aaron Posner’s popular, profane riff on Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, is getting its Vancouver premiere from the award-winning theatre company the Search Party from April 12 to 23 at the Cultch. If you’re curious to read more about Posner’s adaptation, I reviewed a totally different production in Toronto back in 2017.
What The Globe and Mail is reviewing this week
Honestly, we’re still figuring it out because of a post-Easter pileup in Toronto.
Never the Last, a play about sex and violins which I wrote about in last week’s newsletter, opens at Theatre Passe Muraille on Wednesday.
Then, there are three opening nights on Thursday: Vierge, a new play by Rachel Mutombo, at Factory Theatre (to April 30); Body So Fluorescent, a show co-written by Amanda Cordner and David di Giovanni and starring Cordner (of Sort Of fame), at Buddies in Bad Times (to April 23); and The Seagull, in director Daniel Brooks’s long-delayed production, at Soulpepper (to April 30).
On Friday, Canadian Stage opens Maanomaa, My Brother, co-created by Tawiah M’Carthy and Brad Cook (to April 30); and Native Earth Performing Arts opens Niizh, a coming-of-age comedy by Joelle Peters (to April 30); and Cirque du Soleil lets reviewers into the big top for its touring show Kooza (running to June 18).
Look for my reviews of Body So Fluorescent and The Seagull online by the weekend.
J. Kelly Nestruck