Audience Misbehavior: Everyone Wants To Get In On The Act, by Nancy Salz

An audience many years ago

An audience many years ago

They looked like a normal Broadway audience, these adults attending a matinee of Seminar. Then ten minutes into the play, when Alan Rickman, the star, made his entrance, they went berserk—screaming as if he were Professor Snape, his Harry Potter film character, instead of an actor on stage—and stopped the show in the middle of a tense scene.

A few weeks ago a fistfight broke out during the Brahms Second Symphony at a Chicago Symphony performance. In January Alan Gilbert, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic halted a performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony when a member of the audience wouldn’t or couldn’t silence his cell phone. Gilbert’s rare action made the front page of the New York Times. In November 2011, an audience member shouted, “Terrible! Too slow!” during Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony at the London Philharmonic and barged out of the auditorium.


Read the full article on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts!