General Etiquette > Life...in general

My Own "Did This Really Happen?!"

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NEDESAPIO:
I'm a pretty regular attendee of live performances -- plays, concerts, operas, etc.  An incident that happened at  a concert I went to last weekend had me thinking to myself "Did this really happen?!"  As I've mentioned before I live in the Washington, DC area; this concert took place at one of the embassies.  You'd think people who go to this kind of event would know well how to behave, but apparently a couple do not.

The woman sitting beside me was really maddening.  It turns out she was the organizer of the whole event, and she obviously had studied conducting; I know this because she spent nearly the entire program co-conducting it:  that is, she sat at her seat waving her arms about in time to the music, just like the actual conductor on the podium.  Since they did not dim the house lights at this particular concert (so the audience could read the printed texts in their programs), she was doubly distracting.

But the incident that had me shaking my head in disbelief occured when intermission began.  I was sitting at the end of my row, with the conducting woman on my left.  Suddenly she saw someone she knew, a man.  He came over to talk to her, and the two of them held their conversation with him leaning right across me in order to speak with her.  It was as though I wasn't even there.  So as not to seem rude myself, I waited until a break in their oh-so-interesting conversation, said "Excuse me" very pointedly, gave them each the "glare of death," and left to go the the restroom.

Might I point out that these were older people, probably in their sixties, who should have known better.  Does anyone else here have any live-performance-rudeness stories to share?

     

kingsrings:
I'm sorry, but I am LOL at the sight in my head of a woman sitting there, waving her arms around, conducting the music from her seat. It sounds like something out of a comedy skit. Although if I were trying to enjoy the show, I'm sure I wouldn't think that it was funny at all. And I think that you were right to correct that woman and her rude friend, however, you should of done it immediately when they started it, because that is so blatantly rude. As a theater actor, I have many tales of rude audiences, where do I start? The biggest offense is when someone brings in their crying kid and doesn't leave, even when the director is standing by them, giving them the glare of death. And my next story is more funny than offensive, since the offender was a cast member's great old auntie. Everytime he came onstage, she would start waving to him from the audience! He was so embarrassed. Sometimes actors have to enter through the audience, and rudeness erupts from that. Audience members will heckle you, trying to get you to break character (why is that funny?), and late-arriving audience members can really interfere with your entrance. A couple of months ago I attended a show and at intermission, one of the audience members grabbed some chips from a chip bowl onstage, even though there was a reasonably-priced snack bar in the lobby. And last summer at a show I attended, an audience member walked across the stage to get to their seat rather than go around.

MineralDiva:
I hate when people in the front row, think that the stage in front of them makes a convenient foot rest! 

RandomAngel:
As a birthday present I took BF to the symphony.  We got all dressed up, and were having a lovely time--the only downside was the massive school group a few rows behind us. 

Apparently it was flu/allergy season, because a couple of the kids could not stop coughing.  Which...fine.  NOT fine, however, was when more and more of them started doing it, to the point where it was obviously a "joke"--suddenly fifty-plus teenagers are all hacking and coughing one right after the other, right in the middle of the performance.

Lovely.

NEDESAPIO:
Kingsrings, I went to an opera last summer that had no assigned seating and was not sold out.  I considered this a luxury, as I got to change my close-to-the-stage seat after the first act and go upstairs to hear the second act from a different perspective.  However, at the end of my row was a mother with a baby who cried during the entire duration of an aria.  It was a challenge trying to "listen around" that.  Why someone would bring a baby to a night performance of Il Trovatore I can't imagine.    

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