Broadway Ushers- Page 3

[Bettyboy72]

Posted: 7/25/06 at 11:27am

Fosse, you raise a good point. People can be really stupid when trying to locate their seats. Also, if you notice, it gets really hectic just before curtain as sometimes half the theatre can be seated in 10-15 minutes with people rushing in just before the show starts. It can be a stressful environment.

[Fosse76]

Posted: 7/25/06 at 11:35am

The thing with the seat-switching is that it can cause seating problems at some point. I remember ushering a performance of Miss Saigon in Chicago and four people came late, and as I took them to their seats, there were only three empty seats, when there should have been four. Well, suffice it to say, I had to go through the entire row, during the performance, and look at every single ticket to determine who was not in the right place. And trust me, this happens FREQUENTLY at Broadway shows, particularly with large school groups. I yelled at a teacher once because I heard her tell her studnts to sit anywhere in the three rows they had tickets for (despite the fact that they didn't have all the seats in those rows). It can cause a great deal of problems. So I understand not allowing people to move around. But as I stated, many of these ushers have been around since the 60s, if not longer, and have witnessed first hand the audiences get dumber and dumber.

[Celra]

Posted: 1/4/09 at 10:03pm

The usher from RENT when it was still open made me laugh. I had Lotto seats and the guy next to me took like 3 pictures and sat his playbill on the stage and then put his feet up on the stage and she was like "YOU GET YOUR FEET AND PLAYBILL OF THE STAGE! AND IF I CATCH YOU TAKING ANOTHER PICTURE YOUR OUTTA HERE!" he was like "I..I..diden't know" and she goes "WELL NOW YOU DO!"

I laughed

[PiraguaGuy2]

Posted: 1/4/09 at 10:13pm

Did she get mad at you for screaming?

[Celra]

Posted: 1/4/09 at 10:22pm

Not at all.

[PiraguaGuy2]

Posted: 1/4/09 at 10:24pm

Huh. Guess she understood that you paid good money for your ticket and have the right to wear creepy stalkerish T-shirts and disrupt the show.

[Celra]

Posted: 1/4/09 at 10:29pm

Hey you listen here! I never once wore a creepy stalkerish shirt!

I may have done a lot of odd and insane things but wearing a stalkerish shirt NEVER!

[PiraguaGuy2]

Posted: 1/4/09 at 10:37pm

Mm hm.

[Celra]

Posted: 1/4/09 at 10:40pm

I did alot of messed up things. But that is not one of them.

[luvtheEmcee]

Posted: 1/4/09 at 10:51pm

I'm compelled to add a "yet" to the end of your sentence.

[Manny2]

Posted: 1/4/09 at 10:56pm

I did SRO at Phantom once, and I witnessed the funniest thing ever.

So one of the ushers was this short, rather old, Asian woman. She was really jittery and was shaking, just looking at her made me nervous.

So this Asian guy in the audience guy goes up to her, and before he gets there, she starts speaking rapidly in some language, and he clearly doesn't understand her. He starts screaming in some other Asian dialect, so I basically had two Asian people from different countries, screaming in different tongues right in my ear. They went at it for like five minutes, now THAT was the real show.

[StateOfJade]

Posted: 1/5/09 at 9:02am

I'm an usher for an off-broadway theater and I also ushered Shakespeare in the Park this past summer. I always try to be peppier than usual...you're actually instructed to LOOK approachable (some people don't take this advice, though)). I've definitley had some awful expiriences with patrons, though. Though some are exciting, like the time a guy peed in a cup in the middle of a Sondheim musical.

Updated On: 1/5/09 at 09:02 AM

[Reginald Tresilian]

Posted: 1/5/09 at 10:14am

I've always found the Public Theater and Shakespeare in the Park ushers to be particularly nice (and helpful).

I always brace myself before approaching a Bway usher; experience has taught me to be wary. But I also usually make a point a make eye contact and say "Hello, how are you?" It almost always gets a very positive response.

But sometimes the nasty-usher "pre-show" is just jaw-dropping. I know audience members can be @ssholes, but I'm sorry: dealing with them is your job if you're an usher. If you can't do it without turning into a psychopath, don't do it. To see them savaging someone who hasn't done anything can be really upsetting.

[MadameRoseRules]

Posted: 1/5/09 at 10:06pm

I'm five feet tall. My worst Broadway usher experience happened at the revival of "Annie" in the 1990's. The theater is now called the Hirschfeld. Maybe it's been renovated since then, but at the time the rows of seats in the orchestra weren't on an steep enough angle and people's heads were in each other's way. They had all these "booster pillows" available, so I took one.

They did NOT, repeat, not, one mo' time, that word was NOT, have a sign visible saying that the booster pillows were for children only.

So I sat down in my aisle seat on the booster pillow.

After the show started, this gargantuan baboon of an usher comes by with a flashlight to seat someone else in my row. She sees that I'm sitting on the booster pillow. She growls, "You can't have that, they're for kids only!" And then that nasty Nazi of an usher grabs the booster pillow right up from under my astounded rump. She takes off running up the aisle with the booster pillow. Did I mention that I'm also stuck sitting behind The Jolly Green Giant?

I tried to complain to the theater manager at Intermission because I thought that the usher had gone way too far, and I draw the line at putting up with latter-day Nazis. The manager said he couldn't do anything about the ushers because they're in a separate union. I suspect that's how a lot of the ushers can get away with behaving like they're Hermann Goering.

[proptart101]

Posted: 1/5/09 at 10:28pm

However many years ago when Metamorphosis was splashing its way along in Circle In The Square, my wife and I had the "wet seats", first row where we were sure to get splashed. As bad luck and bad traffic would have it, we not only missed our dinner resos but were about 5 minutes late for the curtain time.

The house manager let us in at the appropriate time, the action having already started. We approached the back of the house, and sat in the back row of the 2/3 full theater. We were actually content to stay there, as we had no desire to disturb the other patrons in that very small house by going to our front row seats during the actual show.

Alas, just after we settled in, an usher came up to us to see our tickets. When he discovered that we belonged in the first row, he said, full voice: "Follow me."
We demurred, whispering that we were fine staying in these seats in the back, and didn't want to annoy the other audience members.

Well, Brainiac would have none of that.

Full voice, he insisted, not once, not twice, but a few times, that we take our seats, eventually getting loud enough that the actors actually paused and looked over at us, along with the entire audience.

Feeling shamed and stupid, my wife and I meekly took our assigned seats, under the glare of the rest of the audience, even though we were whispering and trying to be as quiet and unobtrusive as possible.

Needless to say, we complained to the house manager immediately after the show, wrote several letters to Circle In the Square, but we still were a part of an usher driven disturbance that we tried to avoid.

I'm not sure if it was the result of the usher being a fool or the pre-show hype, but I never saw the "amazement" that other viewers saw in that show. To me it was a fairly decent college production with a good budget, not much more.

[Azuah.]

Posted: 1/5/09 at 11:21pm

How does someone get a job as an usher?