Have you ever forgotten to turn your cell phone off during a broadway show?

george95 said: "When I saw the revival of Les Mis last summer, these girls in front of me were texting constantly, so I finally leaned over and read their texts until they stopped. Then, after the show, I took out my phone and realized that the ringer was on the loudest setting. If it had rung I would have looked like a big old hypocrite. Speaking of phones, I recently read this helpful guide on how to switch cell phone carriers It provided some great tips on making the transition smooth. Anyway, a lesson learned: always silence your phone in theaters!"

Lucky save! That could've been super embarrassing. But honestly, those girls deserved a little lesson in theater etiquette!

Updated On: 2/5/25 at 09:07 AM

It happened to me once in high school, and it was so traumatizing I now have a ritual of keeping my phone on vibrate 24/7. I don't do ringtones anymore as a result.

But unfortunately, the last time I was at the Met, I had an errant alarm set on my phone go off at 11 pm in the middle of the third act of TOSCA. I was able to us my watch to turn it off quickly, but good god was it embarrassing. I still don't even know how that alarm got set.

Not really but recently at Stereophonic I was checking the time on my Apple Watch (on theatre mode) and the damn thing bugged out on me. Screen totally black. I was tapping to try to get the screen to turn on when my phone loudly exclaims "do do do doot doot doot do do"... I had accidentally tapped the "find iphone" button. Suffice it to say, I was mortified. I have now removed that button from my Apple Watch.

Call_me_jorge said: "I’m not a baby boomer, so this has never happened to myself."

Ah, ageism.

Ensemble1728039452 said: Lucky save! That could've been super embarrassing. But honestly, those girls deserved a little lesson in theater etiquette."

Thanks so much chatbox for bringing back an asinine 17 year old thread!

Only once, when I went to see "Bright Star", and an amber alert came through. I don't think my face has recovered from the redness that took over.

I'm always been very diligent about making sure of it being off, but that one mistake has stuck with me. Back in the day when you could actually take the phone battery out, I removed it at a performance of "War Paint", a good thing because I was in the front row, and there were many moments when the stars were directly in front of me. I didn't want to be LuPone'd" (or is it "LuPhone'd" or "NoPhoned"?)

At any rate, at one point, she was directly in front of me, and did look down in my direction, hopefully acknowledging my enthusiasm. I'm shy, so I didn't want to be mentioned on the web as having Disturbed a performance, especially since that is one of my biggest irritations.

Updated On: 2/3/25 at 02:38 PM

This isn’t me directly, but, something I did witness while working a performance of Pretty Woman one Wednesday afternoon. Apple had previously announced that it was scheduling an emergency alert test for that same day at 2PM. Now, we all knew that the emergency alert sound bypasses any sort of silence settings on your iPhone and we also knew that not only would it be very loud, but, there would be countless patrons who didn’t turn their phones off and have it going on during the show. They started the show on time thinking that the loud music of the opening number would drown out the sound. Clearly the production staff was wrong and despite our best efforts, there were way too many phones going off at the same time.