Please Don’t Sing Along at the Theatre
It seems obvious, right? Like a rule that doesn't need to be said. Along with “don’t tip your hairdresser till after you’ve seen the cut”, DON’T sing along at the theatre.
Maybe it’s not as obvious as I thought. After a recent incident during a production of The Bodyguard in Manchester, police were called after a ’riot’ broke out when patrons wouldn’t stop singing along to ‘I Will Always Love You’, the show’s headline number. A riot at a theatre is a terrible thing, but I bet it was well choreographed.
It’s not just Manchester. In Edinburgh two people were charged over a disturbance during the musical Jersey Boys and staff have spoken out about their fear of physical and verbal abuse from audiences.
I’ve seen this happen first-hand at a production of Beautiful, The Carol King Story in Glasgow. Someone was asked to stop singing along while sitting in the front row (really). They refused and were asked to leave and did after 10 minutes of debate with the staff about it. She was upset to have her night ruined, ironically while ruining the show for everyone else sitting nearby.
Firstly, abusing theatre staff is utterly unacceptable. They are an integral part of the overall theatrical experience, there primarily for your safety. We can joke about the cost of ice-creams or of a glass of wine but, similar to cabin crew, they aren’t there to babysit you and pour you a glass of wine from Chateau Lloyd-Webber.
Secondly, think about the amount of work, sweat and tears that each and every performer on that stage has endured to get to where they are.
Performance school, dance classes, auditions, open calls with 500 other people, and being told that they’ll never be this or that because of something about them that they cannot change, because commercial casting can be a horrendous experience.
Imagine enduring all that, then getting booked on a tour, rocking up to Manchester (staying in a room you had to find yourself, because if you’re on a UK tour you often have to book and pay for your own accommodation city to city even though you literally have to be there for work and in any other industry you wouldn’t be expected to do that) warming up and getting on stage only for the show to end early because someone in the upper circle has had a bit too much and they think that their bodyguard lover just took a bullet for them. What I'm saying is, your night out is their career. Be respectful of that.
It’s also not just your night out. There are over 1900 seats in the Manchester Palace Theatre. 3000 Seats in the Edinburgh Playhouse. Theatre is expensive - too expensive. You could be ruining the show for someone who saved up, waited over a year, got a babysitter and dressed up nice. It’s not about you, you are not the main character. There is a literal main character on the stage in front of you. That is their job.
With all of this said, why is there a marked increase in bad theatre behaviour? Some attribute it to the pandemic and punters becoming de-socialised. I don’t think this is true. You don’t forget how to behave in public because you haven’t been out in two years. I know not to answer my phone at a funeral even if I haven't been to the cemetery in a while.
Theatres themselves definitely have a role here. After the incident in Edinburgh, another Scottish theatre boss criticised the owners of the playhouse, ATG, for allowing alcohol to be sold freely and to be taken back to seats as well as the ‘At-Seat Ordering’ scheme where you can have interval drinks brought right to your seat. It’s a fair critique; we don’t sell alcohol at other events in Scotland with a view towards reducing bad behaviour and, well, violence. Theatre’s not there… yet? But if, like at some venues, you can only drink at the bar before the show, you will have a more sober crowd - and that’s not a bad thing. However I don’t think it’ll solve the problem entirely.
Should producers take some of the blame here? There’s a common theme between all the examples I've cited - they’re all jukebox musicals. All of them are from a long line of modern theatre that takes the back catalogue of an artist or genre and fashions them around a story or lifts the story from an existing work.
They’re not new but have definitely boomed in the last few decades. In the 90s, there were 6 pro musicals that could be considered jukebox shows. In the 2000s, there were 38. Mama Mia is the catalyst for the boom, being the most successful to date. Before you banish me to a Greek island, I'm not blaming Mama Mia, but it is the modern success story. Jump to now and you have Moulin Rouge!, a show that takes the plot and some music from the film of the same title and adds in a red windmill-sized catalogue of pop songs such as: Rolling in the Deep, Firework and Toxic. A type of production that composer Tim Minchin said is ‘not even a jukebox musical, it’s like scrolling TikTok. You’re just hearing a different bit of a different song every two seconds’.
These shows bypass the highest hurdle for a new musical - the music. If your show is already packed with Number 1 hits, then why wouldn’t someone with a lot of money be more likely to back it? Even the people about whom the shows are written have been backers and producers, an icky situation in my opinion.
If tickets are sold on the basis that the buyer will already know and like the music, it’s not unreasonable to conclude that they’ll want to sing along. I’m not condoning it but if you fill a show with pop songs and then cast a pop star to play the lead, you can’t say you’re not blurring the line between theatre and concert… where there is also a debate about people who pay £90 to not listen to the artist sing.
The answer isn’t to just accept that this will happen at these kinds of shows or indeed to ban them, as they are art in their own right and feature talented performers. I actually find the distinction that some people draw between this and ‘original’ theatre to be snobbery often laced with classism.
Where does Pantomime fit into this? “Behind you”, maybe? Pantomime is huge in the UK; four in ten Britons say they either like or love Christmas pantomimes. For a lot of people it is their first and only experience of going to the theatre. A family tradition that's passed down to the next generation. If your only experience is of catching sweets and shouting out, might you think all theatre is like that? It’s not a strong argument. If you only went to The Rocky Horror show every couple of years I don’t think you’d think it was appropriate to shout ‘a**hole’ every time the name of any leading man at any show was said. I think people know that Pantomine is its own unique, deeply weird and brilliant thing.
A theatre critic interviewed about it suggested it was caused by the “television-isation” of theatre audiences and complained that standing ovations are now very common. It’s undeniable that TV audiences are fluffed and made to be deliberately over-exuberant. However I don’t think TV is to blame - sorry, Mrs Whitehouse. Audiences are far more media-literate than they used to be and understand that their role in a TV studio setting is to be more than just a passive viewer but to represent the audience at home, encouraging them to enjoy what they’re seeing and even encouraging them to laugh. Side note… Only a critic would think that an increase in standing ovations is a bad thing.
Classism is the elephant in the room here and there are those that would attribute a lapse in behaviour to the ‘type of person that goes to see a type of show’, and that’s not the case. Singing along, sitting on phones and worse is happening in high end London theatres.
There’s no one reason for the perceived change in behaviour and there’s no one solution. Ultimately, people are responsible for their own behaviour and venues and productions are responsible for setting expectations. Perhaps if theatre was more accessible and appealing all year round to a broader variety of younger audiences, etiquette and behaviour could fall under the scope of the hidden curriculum. That would require more investment in the arts throughout early education, as well as shaking off snobbishness around what is and isn’t the “right kind of show”. I’ll grant you, that all sounds a bit serious and people just go there to have fun; they Just Wanna Dance With Somebody. That should be okay too.