Front of House: Observations from a Decade on the Aisle (3 page)

Apparently, even being a very casual acquaintance of a performer can be a hazardous occupation. It pisses off the superfans.

Denise:
Ladies and gentlemen, we have three exits. If you’re waiting over here, please exit through the box.

Patron:
I’m going this way.

Denise:
Yes, but your wait will be twice as long. And these two different staircases actually meet at the lobby…

Patron:
I’m staying here, young lady!

Denise:
(sigh)
Fine.

There are those who claim that humanity has a herd mentality. Everyone mindlessly follows the person in front of them without stopping to consider where they’re going. If you ever want to see this concept in action, watch the crowd at the end of a Broadway show.

Here’s the basic rule when you’re trying to leave after a performance: if a door is open and the ushers are freely allowing patrons to walk through, it’s safe to say that it’s an exit you can use. If the curtain or door is closed, or if an usher is standing in front of it, presume that you can’t go that way. The ushers aren’t trying to obstruct your access to those exits because they’re evil bitches; they just don’t want you ending up on a fire escape instead of the street.

There are usually more ways to get out of a theater than there were to go in, however. After the final curtain you might discover that all the doors across the orchestra level are flung wide open, or you might be directed to exit through a staircase by the boxes. The ushers and managers try to ensure that everyone has safe, fast paths for egress.

Here’s the curious thing, though: most people don’t try to find the quickest or easiest way out. They zero in on one particular exit, even if it’s not the closest one, and huddle with the thousand other patrons who are trying to leave that way. They just follow the person in front of them and don’t bother to look around. Consequently, there will often be two exits that are completely empty, while twenty feet away, scores of people are jostling to leave via the third.

I always tried to combat this by directing people to use all the exits, to take the stairs they hadn’t noticed, or to walk across the rows of seats to bypass the crowds and make use of all the open orchestra doors. I tended to be somewhat zealous about it, and as a result, my sections usually tended to clear out quickly. At one theater, the chief called me “the sweeper.”

Let’s be honest: it was somewhat self-serving, because I wanted to go home. I couldn’t leave until my section was clear. The faster that happened, the faster I could get out of there. However, I also really
was
trying to deliver good customer service. I figured that the patrons might be happier if they only spent five minutes exiting as opposed to fifteen. I don’t know anyone who really enjoys trudging along through a slow-moving crowd, and there’s no reason to wait for Exit A when Exits B and C are totally open.

What was always surprising to me was the way some people reacted to being told there was an alternative exit available. They’d fix me with icy stares and coldly inform me, “I’m going this way.” This happened even when I tried to explain that the two staircases actually went to the exact same place in the lobby, so they didn’t have to wait for the one that was overcrowded. It was as though they thought I was trying to deliberately mislead them. That sounds melodramatic, perhaps, but judging from the reactions I got, some people genuinely seemed to believe that I had some nefarious intention when I tried to show them a different way out.

On some nights things were impossible, everyone refused to listen, and by the time we left the theater the ghost light had already been wheeled onstage and turned on. As we walked through the lobby we’d hear people complaining about how long it had taken them to exit, and how they couldn’t believe the theater didn’t have more doors. And then we’d laugh, cry and shake our heads as we went off to get late dinner.

Universal Truth: if a male and female usher are standing together, a patron in need of assistance will always approach the male employee. If two women or two men are standing together, they will ask the usher who is white. If both ushers are of the same race and gender, the patron will ask the one who is younger or thinner. It almost always works that way. People might think that sexism and ageism are dead, but when you work in a theater, you learn that’s not the case at all.

At
Phantom,
patrons would sometimes completely ignore instructions I’d given them, only to comply immediately when a male colleague told them the exact same thing two seconds later. Likewise, there were times when I’d give them information and they’d look to a male usher for confirmation. They naturally thought that the guy standing next to me was my supervisor, even if he was a sub who had only been working for two weeks.

I also had to contend with patrons who tried to be overly familiar with me. For some reason, both men and women often felt they had the right to grab me, put their arms around my shoulders or lean in close to ask questions. They absolutely never did the same to my male colleagues, and they were always very offended when I politely dislodged their hands, wriggled out of their grasp, and backed up.

At some shows I was groped. I sometimes had to contend with very grabby old men who inexplicably thought that I was going to be overjoyed by their attentions. I finally started putting my hand up in a “stop” gesture and stepping back when these octopus-like patrons approached me and extended their tentacles. I learned to tell them straight out, “I’ll be happy to help you, but please don’t touch me.” Outside of the theater, I would have told them to get the hell away from me and probably would have considered kicking them in the shins; at work I had to find ways to deal with it professionally and peacefully.

It still irks me that I
had
to deal with it, though.

On other occasions male patrons referred to me in ways that were clearly meant to be insulting, such as “girl.” At
Phantom
one evening, I tried to stop a couple from taking their drinks to their seats. They told me that “my supervisor” behind the bar had told them it was fine. Knowing that none of my supervisors happened to work behind a bar, I politely told the couple that regardless of what the bartender had told them, he wasn’t in charge, and they couldn’t take their drinks in. The man shook his finger in my face and snapped, “You need to talk to your boss, and you have a lot to learn, young lady.”

Every now and then I even encountered patrons who thought that I was going to babysit their children during the show. They’d bring them to wherever I was stationed and say, “This nice lady will watch you.” Again, I doubt they would have done the same with a male usher. They were always very disgruntled when I told them that I couldn’t babysit and that their children needed to stay with them, in their immediate vicinity, at all times.

And so on. And so forth. Ad nauseam.

Can I say one more thing about this issue? There’s no such thing as an usherette. “Ette” is a diminutive, and female ushers aren’t lesser beings. Both men and women are ushers, plain and simple.

There were three words I always dreaded hearing when I was ushering: “We’re all together.” The phrase was usually uttered by the leader of a large party of schoolchildren or a tour group, none of whom intended to show us their tickets or sit in the correct seats.

Cats, Phantom, Les Misérables
and
Miss Saigon
all attracted a lot of kids; at some Wednesday matinees students occupied more than half the seats in the building. Many productions, especially the large musicals, had full educational outreach programs with study guides, workbooks, plot summaries, fact sheets, and other material to supplement teachers’ own preparations. Sometimes students who attended matinees were able to stick around after the performance for question-and-answer sessions with the actors or stage managers.

For some schools Broadway was just another field trip; for others, it was the highlight of the academic year. Many student groups came from the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut tri-state area; others traveled longer distances. They changed with the seasons. In the summer the day camps came in. At Thanksgiving, the big musicals always got the members of the high school marching bands and color guards that performed in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. The kids usually proudly wore their red parade “cast member” jackets and carried special duffel bags with the Macy’s logo.

Unfortunately, many student groups failed to understand that they didn’t actually have the entire theater to themselves, so they really couldn’t sit wherever they pleased. Dealing with this could be an absolute nightmare. At Wednesday matinees we often had four or five different groups from different schools doing kangaroo hops around the mezzanine. And of course, when they ended up in someone else’s seats, it became a nightmare when those ticket holders actually showed up. We often spent the entire walk-in kicking kids out of seats they didn’t have. It was enough to reduce some ushers to tears.

Even worse, sometimes the kids didn’t behave during the show, but spent the entire time twittering and hissing like a pack of locusts.
Les Misérables
in particular tended to make teens and ‘tweens antsy because it was so long, had so many quiet moments, and dealt with a period of history that most of them didn’t know very much about. I’d wager that many of them had heard about the 1789 French Revolution and Napoleon in school, but hadn’t learned anything about France in the mid-1800s. As far as I remember from my own school days, the World History curriculum covered exactly six topics about France: Louis XIV, the 1789 French Revolution, Napoleon, the Dreyfus Affair, and France’s involvement in WWI and WWII. And I supposedly went to good schools. Point being, for many students, there wasn’t anything familiar in
Les Misérables.
For what it’s worth, the original production of
Les Mis
offered an amazing teacher’s guide to combat this obstacle and prepare young people for the show. I read it. It was good. The catch was whether the teachers actually used it.

Even if they understood the history, a lot of students were stymied by the show’s running time.
Les Mis
originally clocked in at three hours and fifteen minutes. At some point toward the end of its first Broadway run it was edited down slightly, but even then, it was still only a hair away from the three-hour mark. It was too long for some kids to handle. Pity, because it’s an incredible show.

At
Miss Saigon,
which played in the huge Broadway Theatre, the back of the mezzanine was sometimes closed during matinees and concealed with a velvet curtain. The ushers working upstairs always had to watch the curtain, because students could and would try to go behind it to make out.

Some groups were so badly behaved that they didn’t even make it through the performance; security escorted them out. On occasion, they managed to distract the actors. I heard about an incident at
Les Misérables
where kids in the audience threw Skittles at the actress playing Fantine as she tried to sing “I Dreamed a Dream.” She was eventually so rattled that she went offstage in tears, and the show was temporarily stopped while the offending school group was removed.

On other days the disruptions didn’t reach such an extreme level, but we still spent most of intermission fielding complaints, apologizing to the justifiably annoyed patrons who were sitting near the students; sending said patrons to the house manager to be relocated; warning the school groups to stop talking; and pleading with the teachers to at least
try
to control their charges. security would often appear at intermission on these chaotic days to warn the students that if they continued to behave badly they would be escorted from the theater.

We could usually tell how the afternoon was going to go by the way the teachers interacted with us. If a group’s adult chaperones were rude to the ushers, the young people tended to follow the example that had been set. If the teachers didn’t sit with the students, but went off on their own to cluster together in their own little social group, we knew we were in trouble.

In contrast, when the teachers sat on the ends of each row and took the time to directly supervise and guide their kids, there weren’t nearly as many issues. Many students had never been to a Broadway show before, and they truly didn’t know how they were supposed to behave. Some teachers recognized this and took pains to educate their kids on theater etiquette. Best of all, in this respect, were the drama and English teachers who handpicked the students who attended, made them dress up, admonished them on proper behavior in the theater, and knew to hand over all the tickets in one pack. We never heard a peep from those students.

At a revival of August Wilson’s drama
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
at the Royale Theatre, the poor conduct of students in attendance completely destroyed a few performances. We had large numbers of high schoolers at every matinee, and they behaved abominably. At one show, the kids were so raucous during Charles Dutton’s dramatic monologue that he refused to come out at curtain call.

The production staff blamed us, even though we’d done everything possible to calm the kids down. Shortly thereafter, the stage manager gathered us for a meeting in the back of the orchestra. We attended reluctantly; everyone was annoyed and indignant about being blamed for the melee. We didn’t like it when audience members interfered with the show any more than the backstage contingent did.

Truthfully, we’d done all we could. We’d called security and the house manager, because the situation had been well above our heads. The ushers hadn’t had any clout with those students; they’d known we could neither fail them nor call their parents. Their teachers hadn’t backed us up. Thus, the kids hadn’t felt any compunction to listen to a single word we said to them. In addition, we had been severely outnumbered. When there were about ten of us versus several hundred kids, who did they
think
was going to win?

During the show, there was no way we could stop so many kids from talking. When one or two students were noisy, standing next to them or quietly asking them to stop sometimes solved the problem, if they respected the ushers enough to listen and comply. If a handful of kids were antsy, talking to their teachers at intermission sometimes helped, but only if they were cooperative and willing to take responsibility for their students’ conduct. When an entire section was out of control, though, our attempts to intervene always proved futile. The only effective recourse we had was to let security and the house manager know about it. Even security’s options were limited; most of the time they had to wait until intermission to kick the group out. Removing a hundred angry kids during the performance could be far more disruptive than letting them stay, so it usually only happened if things had truly gone nuclear.

My colleague Jamie slumped indolently against the standing room wall as we listened to the stage manager’s lecture.

“You need to be listening,” she admonished us.

“I
am
listening,” said Jamie.

“Your body language says otherwise,” the stage manager retorted.

“What do you want us to
do,
exactly?” someone asked.

The question seemed to catch the stage manager off guard. “Well,” she stammered, “Keep doing what you’re doing…I guess.” She was lecturing us because we were an easy target, but she didn’t even know what she expected us to do to stop the problem. The rest of the discussion was much more proactive and respectful on both sides.

At the next matinee the kids were on their best behavior. Why? The teachers stepped up. The students were brought to us in manageable groups, and they’d apparently really been warned about behaving during the performance. There were many more adult chaperones accompanying them, as well. In addition, we had extra security. Nobody disrupted the monologue, the stage managers were pleased, our relationship with the backstage contingent improved greatly, and the blame game stopped.

The school groups are still going to
Phantom
and other shows in force.
Les Misérables
is back; I’m sure there are teenagers sleeping and texting through “On My Own” even as I write this.