Broadway Ushers — Page 3

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.

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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

Not at all.

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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