Front of House: Observations from a Decade on the Aisle Read Online Free PDF Page B

kicking kids out of seats they didn’t have. It was enough to reduce some ushers to tears.
    Even worse, sometimes the kids didn’t behave during the show, but spent the entire time twittering and hissing like a pack of locusts. Les Misérables in particular tended to make teens and ‘tweens antsy because it was so long, had so many quiet moments, and dealt with a period of history that most of them didn’t know very much about. I’d wager that many of them had heard about the 1789 French Revolution and Napoleon in school, but hadn’t learned anything about France in the mid-1800s. As far as I remember from my own school days, the World History curriculum covered exactly six topics about France: Louis XIV, the 1789 French Revolution, Napoleon, the Dreyfus Affair, and France’s involvement in WWI and WWII. And I supposedly went to good schools. Point being, for many students, there wasn’t anything familiar in Les Misérables. For what it’s worth, the original production of Les Mis offered an amazing teacher’s guide to combat this obstacle and prepare young people for the show. I read it. It was good. The catch was whether the teachers actually used it.
    Even if they understood the history, a lot of students were stymied by the show’s running time. Les Mis originally clocked in at three hours and fifteen minutes. At some point toward the end of its first Broadway run it was edited down slightly, but even then, it was still only a hair away from the three-hour mark. It was too long for some kids to handle. Pity, because it’s an incredible show.
    At Miss Saigon, which played in the huge Broadway Theatre, the back of the mezzanine was sometimes closed during matinees and concealed with a velvet curtain. The ushers working upstairs always had to watch the curtain, because students could and would try to go behind it to make out.
    Some groups were so badly behaved that they didn’t even make it through the performance; security escorted them out. On occasion, they managed to distract the actors. I heard about an incident at Les Misérables where kids in the audience threw Skittles at the actress playing Fantine as she tried to sing “I Dreamed a Dream.” She was eventually so rattled that she went offstage in tears, and the show was temporarily stopped while the offending school group was removed.
    On other days the disruptions didn’t reach such an extreme level, but we still spent most of intermission fielding complaints, apologizing to the justifiably annoyed patrons who were sitting near the students; sending said patrons to the house manager to be relocated; warning the school groups to stop talking; and pleading with the teachers to at least try to control their charges. security would often appear at intermission on these chaotic days to warn the students that if they continued to behave badly they would be escorted from the theater.
    We could usually tell how the afternoon was going to go by the way the teachers interacted with us. If a group’s adult chaperones were rude to the ushers, the young people tended to follow the example that had been set. If the teachers didn’t sit with the students, but went off on their own to cluster together in their own little social group, we knew we were in trouble.
    In contrast, when the teachers sat on the ends of each row and took the time to directly supervise and guide their kids, there weren’t nearly as many issues. Many students had never been to a Broadway show before, and they truly didn’t know how they were supposed to behave. Some teachers recognized this and took pains to educate their kids on theater etiquette. Best of all, in this respect, were the drama and English teachers who handpicked the students who attended, made them dress up, admonished them on proper behavior in the theater, and knew to hand over all the tickets in one pack. We never heard a peep from those students.
    At a revival of August Wilson’s drama Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom at