Glancing Askance: Sitting out loud

By MARC WOLLIN

If you go to a sporting event, you expect people to wear their opinions on their sleeves. Indeed, since your view of the action is likely significantly better if you were to stay home and watch it on television, the main reason to go in person is to cheer and react and get involved in the game. You can revel in the home runs, groan at the fumbles and malign the ref’s eyesight to your heart’s content as long as your vocal cords hold out.

Go to an opera or symphony, however, and it’s exactly the opposite. Traditional decorum dictates that you sit silently, only reacting at certain specific moments. Even if the soprano hits a high F, or the violin executes a particularly difficult cadenza, the audience sits mute waiting for the end of the piece to express its appreciation and admiration. Indeed, it is even considered a breach of protocol to applaud between movements of a symphony, resulting in a few scattered claps here and there from the uninitiated after the scherzo, interruptions which are quickly squelched.

The continuum between those two extremes turns out to be the theater. For long periods of history, going to watch a play or musical was, if not a contact sport, certainly a participatory one. Playhouses were rowdy and noisy places. In ancient Greece and Rome, audiences cheered, hissed and threw food at the actors. Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre effectively had a mosh pit in front of the stage where the audience stood and drank beer, while rich patrons bought seats on the stage to show off their clothing. They could even procure spots to preen above the stage in private spaces called the Lords Rooms, effectively the first skyboxes.

It was German composer Richard Wagner, who turned the tide in the 1800s, enforcing a strict policy of silence and darkness at his opera house to watch what he viewed as sacred art. High society quickly adopted those rules, and the mark of refinement became a quiet and respectful audience. But that has been changing. We live in a participatory world, where everyone everywhere can make their opinion known anywhere anytime. The internet has democratized reactions both good and bad, not to mention shortened the publishing cycle from days and hours to virtually instantaneous. 

Makes no difference the venue. Restaurants? Pages of comments online, often contradictory, lauding or hating everything from the food to the service to the décor. Stores? Likewise, with reactions not just to the quality of the merchandise, but also the delivery process and the customer experience itself. Plumbers, dog walkers, tutors: you feel you have a right, maybe even an obligation, to register your point of view.

And it seems as if the theater is no different.

However, we’re not talking about reviews after the fact, but commentary during it.  At a recent show on Broadway we attended, the audience was anything but subdued. They reacted as if they were in their living room watching the show on HBO. They cheered certain characters, professed outrage at insults and offered several rounds of applause, even standing ovations in the middle of the show. 

To be sure, there are shows that invite audience participation, with the current darling being Broadway’s “Every Brilliant Thing.” In a role originated by Daniel Radcliffe and currently occupied by Tracee Ellis Ross, a solo performer engages the audience to create a list of things worth living for. A few years ago in a staging of “Jesus Christ Superstar” live on television, the audience lined the thrust stage and Christ played to them as if they were indeed the rabble. And multiple interactive shows invite the audience to watch and be part of the crowd at a wedding or a murder.

First appearing in a cartoon in the British magazine Punch in 1846, it is believed to be an old Cockney stallholder’s cry to customers: “You pays your money, you takes your choice.” Updated for today, it might be more like, “you pays your money, you get to have an opinion and proclaim it.”

I prefer to wait till the end and then render a judgment. For others, it seems that there is no time like the present.

Marc Wollin of Bedford enjoys most types of IRL performance. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.