your worst theatre expierece — Page 2

I thought you meant the worst experience " on the stage" not in the seats! LOL! Seems like "rude audience syndrome" has taken over, which in nothing new for the theater world!

Personally, I am happy to say that from an "on stage" perspective, out of the numerous shows I've seen in a dozens of years, I've had only one show that I would deem my "worst experience".
I won't reveal the theater or the show to save the dignity of those involved, but it was a one man show that was imported from mid-east that involved a tongue-in-cheek foreign comidian/showman. He told senseless stories that ran the endings into another topic altogether. He also turned his body into a human musical instrument. His humor was off color and morbid.

I was also TOTALLY unimpressed, and surprisingly dissapointed with Mandy Patinkin in a concert this past June. If "anyone" else presented that material in the same manner, he would have goten the hook in my book.

---

Wow Maggie! If I were you, I would have refused to go around and made that old man get up. You paid just as much money to see the show, and that is where the Usher escorted you.
Call me disrepectful, but I don't care how old someone is. It doesn't give them any more rights as a human being. Those old farts were sitting on the aisle seats. They should have expected other people were going to have to get passed them at some point.

---

Well tally one more to the bad cell phone experience chart. Mine was during a touring production of Titanic. Despite being thoroughly disappointed in the show as a whole, the woman sitting next to me ruined the entire experience. First, she and her guest were late and had to crawl across us to get to their seat. Then the cell phone problems started. It rang once and she ignored it. The second time she actually stopped it from ringing. When it rang for the third time I said "Could you please turn your phone off?" To this she said "I don't know how." So I promptly reached over, took the phone from her, turned it off, and gave it back with an emphatic "there ya go."

---

Does there not come a time when you just get out of your chair and ask to speak to the house manager? If more people demanded their money back because the theatre staff could not eject the troublemakers, I’ll bet you would see more ushers in the aisles playing bad cop. Stand up for your rights as a theatre patron. You do not have to take it.

---

During a performance of "Chicago", a very drunk man kept screaming "faggot" at the top of his lungs and stating that he is going to buy some "fag candy" during intermision for a "fag show". I was with three other people, all of us were about to get up and throw him out of his 2nd row mezz. seat. During the second act, he screamed it at the toooop of his lkungs during a rather quiet part, and someone actually looked right up at him from the stage in shock (he was 2nd row 1st mezz.). About ten minutes later, he was escorted out of the theatre and the entire first mezanine applauded. It was absolutely the worst experiance I have ever had at a show.

well Ffarls, at least you weren't sitting in the orchestra last year when the girl in the mezz leaned over and puked.... Thank god, I wasn't there either!

---

"Cabaret" with Jon Secada. I had the worst seats ever because we did student rush about a half hour prior to curtain and we were in the last row. Those are NOT MENT FOR MEN WITH LONG LEGS. I was sooooooo cramped. Put that together with a bad performence, a lousy crowd it BY FAR tops my worst list!

Fag candy....is that like Skittles?

'Twas an off-off Broadway play (that had even won a playwrighting prize!) called SISTERS.

It concerned lesbian nuns and how they took over the convent. It was not a comedy, but rather very serious. I'm not making this up you know.

The play was deadly dull. The kind that was so-bad-it-was-bad. Lethal. We got fanny fatigue in the first fifteen minutes. But I knew one of the actresses (who went topless as she initiated a novice into the joys of Sappho) and it was her girlfriend who directed this bad play badly. Oh dear. I had to go back afterwards, but what can one say? I finally blurted, "You had the nicest hoo-hoos in the show!" and gave the happy couple a big false beauty pageant-sincere smile.

20+ years later, this is the Bad Theatre Standard by which all are measured by both me and my friend who I dragged with me.

---

Chicago must bring out the worst in people. I remember sitting next to a plus-sized gentleman at Chicago at the Shubert. After intermission, he came back to his seat, loaded down with candy, which he devoured noisily. During "Class," he poured M&Ms into his mouth, letting them rattle like a hailstorm against his teeth. "Whatever happened to class?" indeed.

I once saw a performer stare down a few ill-behaved audience members. It was a rare staging of Peter Weiss' The Investigation at Baltimore's Center Stage. The play features unflinching testimony by Holocaust survivors cataloguing the various horrors experienced in the camps, in trials against the Nazi soldiers, commandants and doctors who abused them. The script was taken from actual testimony and shaped by Weiss into a dramatic piece. One actor, I wish I had his name, had a monologue in which he described how some campmates ate their shoes to fight off starvation. Well, some schoolgirls in the audience thought this was a laugh riot. The actor turned in their direction, locked eyes with them and stared them down, letting a good half minute of intense silence go by, until the girls regained their composure, and felt justly embarrassed for what they had done. It ended up being a chilling, very effective moment, that really blurred the lines of what you were watching. From what could have been one of my worst theatre experiences, an actor's choice made it incredibly memorable.

---

Updated On: 9/29/03 at 04:05 PM

mine was @ Mamma Mia ... I was with a friend in SRO and this old lady fainted during intermission. she was out for a min or two and then walked away and she tumbled again. she convinced everyone she was fine and managed to go back into her seat. halfway thru the 2nd act she started to throw up all over and then proceed to go to the garbage can ... throw up some more ... go lightheaded again ... sit in some chairs in the back by SRO .. talk and complain the entire time and annoy the hell out of me and my friend!

---

During a showing of My Fair Lady in London, I was stuck next to a large Scottish man who sang along with all the songs. Behind me was a boy eating crinkly candy and his mom, explaining the whole plot. The Scot redeemed himself by turning to the kid and growling, "What the hell do you think you're doing?" The child was silent for the rest of the show.

Rivaling that was a showing of Les Miz where the man next to me sang along with all the songs, but made up his own words. He also tapped his feet, which shook the seats, and kept putting his jacket over the mezzanine railing, which lead to a near-altercation with an usher.

The final example would be a woman at Phantom in front of me, who felt the need to take her three sweaters off and put them behind her back, then put them on again. Then she started doing Yoga in her seat.

---