Awful experience with the ushers & house manager at the Wintergarden — Page 3

All of our band trips in high school had chaperone packets which outlined the rules of the trip, the duties they were expected to fulfill, emergency procedures, etc. Hopefully the OP will learn from this little adventure and be better prepared in the future.

I take groups of 8 high school students to Broadway shows alllllllll the time. When an usher sees us coming, they immediately go into panic mode, and they want all the tickets collected and handed to them. What I usually do is either write on a slip of paper what seats we are in, or I make a photocopy of all the tickets and show it to the usher. The usher usually acts like I gave her a million dollars and says something like "I wish more people would do that!"

When I did this at PHANTOM last April, I made a photocopy of the first ticket and the last ticket in our row, thinking I could tell the usher that we have all the tickets in between. Well, on the way to the theater, I decided I'd just show the tickets instead, so I threw out the photocopy. Little did I know that I had also left the original first and last ticket on the copy machine glass! When I HANDED OUT the tickets TO MY STUDENTS, I realized that I was two tickets short. But the Phantom box office people just printed out two replacement tickets for me without even saying a word : )

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That makes absolutely no sense and I'm going to doubt that's true.

It didn't make much sense to me either Charleston.

Snowskittle, I PM'd you.

Unless you're planning on going to the show again...I don't necessarily see the point in notifying people.

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Snowskittle: Any time you see an usher standing at the bottom or middle of the aisle looking away from the stage, it is because they are watching the audience members. Remember, an usher's job in house is NOT to watch the show. Eyes should be on audience members and aisles at all times. While most ushers are very good at watching the audience from behind, it is frequently necessary to go down the aisle to get a different view. Usually, it is a camera or cellphone that has attracted the attention. The stance may have been simply what was comfortable (although I encourage FOH staffers to never cross their arms, even in the dark) for him, or he may have been trying to send a message to the offender in the least intrusive (for others) way. It may not have been one of your group, but someone seated near you. Either way, it is his job.

Danceallnight: Some of what you described sounds like you may have been the victim of rude ushers, but as Fosse said, rudeness is very subjective.

"He didn't gripe about the 40 tickets in a bunch."
Of course ticket takers are accustomed to taking that many tickets, they just do not prefer it.

"It was the house manager that couldn't tolerate the group waiting to be complete before we moved even though we were not blocking anything."
That is not a statement I can accept, as I have never seen the venue. Having worked in older theatres, I can not stress enough how important it is to follow the front of house staff's advice on where to wait. It is so easy for theatre-goers to pile up and block traffic. You may have directed your group to a seemingly empty out of the way space, but believe it or not those spaces are EXACTLY the ones that MUST be kept clear. Why? Because other parties entering will see your group (which may be out of the way) and accumulate around that area, thereby blocking other pathways. It makes no sense unless you have actually worked in a theatre, but from the time the lobbies open to the time the auditorium opens, crowd management is the number one priority. This is probably why the manager was even involved in your seating, doing his best to keep the lobbies moving.

"Don't even ask why one of those supervising adults couldn't have prevented the group from going. Like I said, they were inexperienced and just started following when the house manager was getting berserk with them."
The house manager taking your tickets and attempting to keep your group moving is not an example of someone going berserk. I should point out that it is not a good idea for future trips to insist that the entire group must be kept all together. I would highly recommend that each child be assigned a leader that they must stick with. It is much easier to keep four groups of ten together than one group of 40. Just a thought.



JustAGuy: For some reason what you've described is a very frequent phenomena in theatre management...