Front of House: Observations from a Decade on the Aisle (4 page)

“I’ll move if someone comes in.”

Along with “we’re all together,” this is a phrase that ushers hate to hear. I know I did when I was working. It generally comes from a person who has hopped from their reserved seat to a vacant one and is resisting returning to their original place.

At many shows, audience members try to sneak into other seats as soon as the lights go down; we see their hunched-over forms scurrying down the stairs and aisles in the dark, like roaches. Some standing room patrons will plunk themselves into empty seats as soon as the curtain goes up. In other cases, people attempt to move up before the show starts.

When I saw this, I really had no choice but to go after the patrons and send them back to their original seats. I often took a lot of verbal abuse in the process or had to listen to long debates.

I know, I know. It’s hard to see an empty seat, especially in an enticing area, and hear an usher tell you that it’s unavailable. Whenever I’m at a show I surely appreciate the opportunity to spread out a little. I can especially understand this if you have a standing room ticket and you’re facing the prospect of spending close to three hours on your feet. It’s easy to think of an usher who is blocking you from moving up as a little person on a power trip; numerous patrons who were angry that I wouldn’t let them relocate certainly told me as much.

However, the ushers aren’t denying you the chance to move because they’re horrible trolls. Really. They are just trying to keep the show from being disrupted as much as possible. In other words, they’re trying to ensure that everyone, including you, has a great experience at the performance.

See, there’s a high probability that someone has already purchased the seats you want. Said patrons are most likely going to come in late. If the seats are empty, the usher can quickly throw the latecomers in. It’s a disruption, but a minor one. If people have moved into those seats, however, it’s a problem. The usher then has to shine her flashlight down the row, check everyone’s tickets, kick out the people who don’t belong there, and finally seat the latecomers…who, by the way, have been standing in the aisle, blocking others’ view of the show, during this entire exchange. After that the usher has to reseat the errant party who moved up. This assumes everything goes smoothly and the “relocated guests” cooperate and don’t try something cute, such as pretending they can’t hear the usher when she asks for their tickets. Just so you know, that never works; it just earns you a nice conversation with security.

At the end of the day it’s a horrendous mess, it disturbs everyone, and it can be avoided if you simply keep your butts in the seats to which you’re assigned. Or, at the very least, use your brains and think critically about it. Common sense says not to plunk yourselves down into those two empty seats that are dead center in an otherwise totally occupied row. Really, guys, do you
think
those are going to remain empty?

This even holds true if there’s a huge gaping section of empty seats. Especially then. I always cringed when I saw those sections, because it often meant that a huge group was running late. I worked at some performances where several hundred people came in halfway through Act I. Let me tell you, friends, those situations were horrible for everyone.

It would be great if everyone arrived on time, but one has to be realistic: it’s New York. Things happen. Buses get caught in traffic, they get lost, they discover that they can’t park in front of the theater and they have trouble finding places to discharge their passengers. Subways stop in the tunnels or don’t come at all. Tourists can’t figure out the lay of the land. There are a thousand plausible reasons why a patron who means well and ostensibly leaves enough travel time might not make it to the theater by curtain. I was late to a show once when I was in London because I walked the wrong way from the Tube station and got hopelessly lost. I didn’t make it to the theater until well after curtain time.

Given all of the above, I tried to be sympathetic toward latecomers. The only time they became annoying was when they took out their frustrations on me. Hey, I understood that they were upset at missing part of the show. I comprehended that whatever held them up had probably been stressful, and that their anxiety levels were still high. However, that wasn’t my fault.
I
hadn’t made them late.

There are usually specific cues in both straight plays and musicals when ushers are allowed to seat patrons. At musicals the seating cues tend to be either during the overture or at the ends of songs, while everyone is applauding. At some productions there are also complete no-fly zones during the performance when people aren’t even allowed to go to their seats if they are returning from the bathroom and don’t need our help. At
Phantom,
for example, nobody comes in during “Music of the Night,” period.

I always tried to hold people at the top of the aisle or on the side of the orchestra so they could watch the show while they were waiting to be seated. It wasn’t always possible, though, and every production had its own policies on latecomers. At
Copenhagen
they had to sit in the back row until intermission. At
Miss Saigon, Blast, Bombay Dreams
and
Les Misérables,
latecomers couldn’t go into the auditorium at all until the show was about twenty minutes in; in the meantime they had to watch the performance on the television screens in the lobby. I also worked at a handful of shows that didn’t admit latecomers at all. If you weren’t there by the time the curtain went up, you were out of luck.

Some performers worked patron lateness into their shows. The original
Blue Man Group
off-Broadway, which I saw a few times, had the very best response to this: they played a loud song, rang sirens and showed the latecomers on a TV screen as they entered. At
Master Class,
the actress playing Maria Callas directly scorned them. John Legiuzamo, during his one-man show,
Sexaholix,
stopped, stared at the latecomers and offered up a very sarcastic “Hey, thanks for coming.” For the most part, though, seating latecomers was a non-event. My goal was always to whisk them to their seats as quickly and quietly as possible.

I often encountered latecomers who were completely put upon to learn that they had to wait to be seated. They would rail on me, telling me they wanted to be seated
right now,
and huff and puff when I told them it wouldn’t be possible. They apparently thought that I was holding them back for my own personal amusement. In fact, I was following the strict regulations I’d been given by my house manager and the production staff and trying to minimize the disruption for the rest of the audience and cast. Lesson of the day: one of the fastest ways for a Broadway usher to piss off stage management and upset the creative team is to ignore the seating cues.

Keeping to the cues was a challenge when so many guests were uncooperative. Some of them had actual temper tantrums when they heard that they would have to wait a few minutes before going to their seats. I remember a man at
The Graduate
who was so livid about it that he threw his ticket in my face. He carried on so much that I halfway expected him to stomp his feet and prostrate himself on the carpet like a toddler.

At
The Invention of Love
we held people in the back of the orchestra for late seating. At the very last performance, there was a latecomer who decided that I needed to explain every single aspect of the show to him: who was onstage, what was happening, and what he had missed. You really can’t hold conversations, much less give someone a complete synopsis of the show, when you’re two feet away from seated patrons who will be disturbed by the noise. I politely explained that I couldn’t keep talking to him and walked away.

Another group of latecomers came in, and I asked them to wait in the back for the seating cue. The man stormed over to me and ranted about the fact that I had said two words to the other patrons, when I’d told him that I couldn’t explain the show to him.

It was the final day of a very exhausting, stressful run, I wasn’t in the mood to deal with any more rude patrons, and this guy had just stepped on my last nerve. I struggled to keep my temper in check, snapped “Sir, it’s not my responsibility to explain the show to you,” and walked away. I switched aisles with one of my colleagues so I wouldn’t have to be near the man again. The usher who took my place was a large, strapping fellow, and I noticed that my disgruntled latecomer didn’t even attempt to get a show summary from him. I wasn’t surprised.

One night during the walk-in at
Phantom,
a frantic man approached me. He asked me if I’d seen a “fairly large boy” walking by. I wasn’t much help. There were over sixteen hundred people in the theater on a busy night at
Phantom,
including children both large and small. Since I had thirty minutes to seat about three hundred of them, I wasn’t paying much attention to faces.

Here’s a clue: asking an usher if they have seen your wife or friend is usually a pointless exercise. And no, it doesn’t really matter if you tell us they’re blonde or handsome or whatnot. We’re dealing with hundreds of people in a very short period of time, and one face fades into the next. The only real exception to this is if there’s something extremely unforgettable about your lost loved one’s appearance; say, they have a rainbow Mohawk or they’re wearing a space suit.

I sent the man to the house manager and security to report the lost child. We didn’t seem to have much information to go on, and the father’s answers to our questions were very vague. Was the child autistic? No. Did he have any developmental disabilities? No. What did he look like? White, blond and “fairly large.” How old was he? Was that question answered?

Chaos reigned for the next ten or fifteen minutes. security was alerted. Someone watched the front door. Theater staff searched for the elusive child, but he was nowhere to be found. I personally began to worry that he’d left the theater, either on his own or in the company of an unsavory person, to wander the streets of New York. The boy’s grandmother was in tears and kept crying, “I’ve lost my grandchild. I’ve lost him!” The father was also visibly upset.

Eventually, the boy was located in one of the lounges, unhurt, unruffled, and happy as a clam. The reason nobody had found him earlier was because he happened to be a six-foot-three, smart-aleck sixteen year old. They hadn’t mentioned that.

When a patron approached me during walk-in or intermission I was usually expecting them to ask one of two things: “Where’s the bathroom?” or “I hate my seat. What can you do about it?”

Patrons yelled at me over the seating arrangements all the time. I suppose that when someone’s frustrated, it’s easiest to take it out on the nearest person who cannot fight back. In most cases, that was me.

Sometimes people made requests that were beyond absurd. Once someone asked me, in all seriousness, if I could take away one of the banisters in the mezzanine.
Sure, let me grab my blowtorch and saw, I’ll get right on it.
Patrons were angry with me because their seats were too close to the stage, too far away, too central, too far to the side, too high up or too low. Nobody ever seemed to understand that I hadn’t assigned their seating locations. I didn’t work at the box office, TKTS or Telecharge. I just read the tickets and directed them accordingly.

Every now and then we did have people who had legitimate issues with their seating, and I always tried to help them where, when and if I could. If someone was sitting next to a person with body odor or excessive perfume, for example, I empathized completely. My ability to offer direct assistance was usually limited, however. I generally had to send them off to the house manager.

Quite a few patrons turned out to be afraid of heights. On more than one occasion these acrophobics didn’t even have to tell us; when they completely broke down in terror in the middle of the balcony it was painfully obvious to all.

On one memorable night, when I was working the mezzanine at
Phantom
with my friend Sheila, a woman stomped up the staircase. She was roughly hauling a teenage boy behind her. The boy was in full-blown hysterics; he was frantically flailing, crying, and struggling to get away. As the woman dragged him up the stairs by one arm, he kicked his feet, pulled backward and screamed.

Sheila jumped right into the fray: “Stop that right now!” There wasn’t any time to be gracious about it; we were dealing with an emergency. The woman was being downright horrible to her son, and in the process she was endangering every single person on the staircase. If either she or the boy had fallen backward during their struggle, they would have tumbled down the steps and severely injured themselves or others.

Even though the woman immediately stopped yanking the boy’s arm when Sheila told her to stop, the scene was still horrific. The boy sobbed, the mother yelled, and the father and another child stood ineffectively to the side and stayed out of it.

It turned out that the kid was absolutely terrified of heights and didn’t want to go to his seat in the mezzanine. The mother was trying to force him into it. She thought he was faking his terror so he could avoid seeing the show. Sheila and I disagreed. The boy was shaking, crying, and having a full-on panic attack. He kept spluttering, “You knew I couldn’t do this. You
knew!”
which brought that point home even more.

We sent the father off to speak to the house manager, and two places downstairs were located for the boy and his dad. The mother and the other sibling were sent up to their original seats in the back of the mezzanine. I was honestly glad that the boy got away from that dreadful woman for at least a few hours.

It certainly wasn’t the only time we dealt with intense acrophobia at the theater. In another instance at
Phantom,
a woman climbed all the way to her seat in row L — that’s the very top of the mezzanine — without incident. Unfortunately, she then looked back toward the stage, realized how far up she was, and completely melted down. She was so overwhelmed and terrified that she cowered behind the last row of seats and cried. It took several ushers walking in front of her, behind her and beside her to coax her back down to the mezzanine landing so she could be relocated. She crawled down the stairs on her hands and knees, sobbing.

Why would you buy a mezzanine ticket if you were afraid of heights? I give people the benefit of the doubt on this one. Price is an issue. Broadway tickets have become horrifyingly expensive, and if the only affordable section happens to be the balcony or rear mezzanine, that’s where you go. If a show is hot and tickets are hard to come by, those might be the only sections available. I also really think that sometimes when customers buy their tickets, they just don’t realize how far up they’re going to be. When you hear that you’re in the eighth row it sounds all right, until you get to the theater and realize that the eighth row is up a sharp incline.

It doesn’t help that the seating configurations and architecture at every theater differ, too. That eighth row might be feasible at one theater and completely frightening at another. A positive experience at one show doesn’t indicate what you’re in for at another house. Some upper levels, like the mezzanine at the Winter Garden Theatre, are very gently raked. I don’t recall ever hearing a single complaint about the mezzanine height at the Winter Garden. Other mezzanines and balconies are so steep that they resemble the Hillary Step on Mount Everest.

In particular, the balconies at some of the oldest theaters can be really, really scary. At a few places, like the Lyceum, I honestly felt as though I were walking up and down a ladder when I traversed the balcony. It was really that steep, and even though I had no fear of heights, it made me dizzy. I hated late seating there, because it meant that I had to navigate those steps myself.

It isn’t always possible to find a satisfactory solution for everyone on this issue, unfortunately. There really isn’t any way to make a balcony level in a theater that isn’t high above the ground. There isn’t any way to ensure that every patron will be okay with heights. Acrophobia is a problem that Broadway ushers and customers will be handling now and forever, to quote
Cats.