Welcome to today’s edition of ShentonSTAGE Daily.

Audience (mis)behaviour is making the news again. On last Wednesday’s This Morning show on ITV, Vanessa Feltz expressed consternation that audiences were being asked not to sing along during theatre performances, saying, “Isn’t the whole point of going to a musical that you know is that you sing along to all the bits you know and when you don’t know the words you just make them up? Isn’t that what everybody does very loudly while eating an ice cream?’

But just two days later, a performance of THE BODYGUARD in Manchester on Friday evening had to be stopped and abandoned when the audience did precisely that, and some virtually rioted, as the Manchester Evening News reported. The police had to be summonsed.

The theatre tweeted this statement on their website:

Of course this has been a live issue for some months now, with theatre managers and unions intervening to suggest that there’s a crisis brewing. (A performance of BAT OUT OF HELL at London’s Peacock Theatre had to be stopped recently, owing to a disruptive audience member).

But Dr Kirsty Sedgman, who styles herself Doctor of Audiences at Bristol University, recently tweeted:

She has also clarified in another tweet:

And The Guardian’s chief theatre critic Arifa Akbar recently wrote about reported incidents of popcorn eating at the opera:

“The conversation begins to assume the same shades of class snobbery and cultural elitism that the industry is trying so hard to shake off….Related to complaints about audience behaviour are moans about younger people and their mobile phones, standing ovations and even clapping between scenes. What is this criticism saying? That there are some who don’t follow the right protocols, presumably learned at finishing school?”

Some of this is culturally coded, as she goes on to write.

“As someone of South Asian heritage, I know that encouraging interjections from the audience is welcomed by performers during poetry readings in Pakistan. Whoops of approval in productions such as Inua Ellams’s Three Sisters or Natasha Gordon’s Nine Nights at the National Theatre also show that audience response can be culturally coded. My sister-in-law’s father, from Tennessee, recently came to London and accompanied me to Moulin Rouge, where he exclaimed his responses and, by the interval, had made friends and found fellow Americans in a show of southern conviviality. The crowd as a whole was relaxed, some exclaiming, others quietly checking phones. It was, in fact, one of the friendliest audiences I have sat among in a long time. If live performance is about connection and the shared experience, this kind of informality can surely be part of it.”

Audiences in Manchester on Friday certainly had a shared experience. It’s just that many no doubt wished they’d not spent their hard-earned money to share the space with others determined to make the show all about themselves. At least THIS MORNING co-presenter Alison Hammond has now had the good grace to acknowledge her error, issuing a statement on Twitter,

The churn of artistic directors

We are in the midst of another churn of artistic directors at theatres up and down the land. Some of these are part of a natural cycle — unlike in America, where tenures for senior leaders can be virtually for life, here we mostly have an acceptance that people move on after around a decade.

That’s exactly what has happened at the Royal Court, which has just advertised for a new artistic director to succeed Vicky Featherstone.

Whoever gets the job will have to know all about crisis management. There was the now infamous occasion when no one — not least the artistic director, at whose desk the buck must stop — seemed to notice that a character in the play Rare Earth Mettle had been given a name Hershel Fink that has specifically Jewish associations, until days before it was actually due to open.  

Other problems can emerge later in the process. Last week actor Danny Lee Wynter dropped out of the lead role of his own debut play Black Superhero, and performances were lost. In a statement posted on Twitter, he stated that

At other theatres, changes have been much more unexpected and as seemingly premature as Danny Lee Wynter leaving his own play. Mike Longhurst, exiting the Donmar after only five years, is one; last week it was announced that Briony Shanahan and Roy Alexander Weise, current joint artistic directors and CEO’s at the Royal Exchange (pictured below), will leave after just three years.

Though no official reasons have been given for either action — and whether the artistic directors have chosen to go, or have had their contracts either not renewed or abbreviated by their theatre boards — there have been signs of trouble at both venues. The Donmar lost its Arts Council grant entirely in the last funding round, and its productions — once a guaranteed sell-out — no longer do so as a matter of course.  

SHOWS AHEAD IN LONDON, SELECTED REGIONAL THEATRES AND ON BROADWAY

My regularly updated feature on shows in London, selected regional theatres and on Broadway is here: https://shentonstage.com/theatre-openings-from-w-c-april-10/

This week’s openings include Adjoa Andoh directing as well as playing the title role in RICHARD III at Liverpool Playhouse, ahead of a transfer to the Rose in Kingston; a return West End season for VARDY V ROONEY: THE WAGATHA CHRISTIE TRIAL at the Ambassadors, the opening of HAMNET at Stratford-upon-Avon’s refurbished Swan Theatre, ahead of a transfer to the Garrick, and a new PRIVATE LIVES at the Donmar Warehouse.

Broadway has the transfer of the Pulitzer-winning FAT HAM after premiering at the Public last year, and a newly scripted version of Lerner and Loewe’s musical CAMELOT, updated by Aaron Sorkin, with Andrew Burnip as King Arthur, and Jordan Donica as Lancelot and Philippa Soo as Guenevere (pictured above).

I’ll be in New York again from this coming Wednesday, and will be seeing both of those, plus the other new shows of the season, and will be reporting as usual on these in my twice weekly newsletter. 

See you here on Friday

I will be back on Friday. If you can’t wait that long, I may also be found on Twitter (for the moment) here: https://twitter.com/ShentonStage/ (though not as regularly on weekends)