Front of House: Observations from a Decade on the Aisle by Denise Reich Read Free Book Online

struggled to keep my temper in check, snapped “Sir, it’s not my responsibility to explain the show to you,” and walked away. I switched aisles with one of my colleagues so I wouldn’t have to be near the man again. The usher who took my place was a large, strapping fellow, and I noticed that my disgruntled latecomer didn’t even attempt to get a show summary from him. I wasn’t surprised.

A Fairly Large Boy

    One night during the walk-in at Phantom, a frantic man approached me. He asked me if I’d seen a “fairly large boy” walking by. I wasn’t much help. There were over sixteen hundred people in the theater on a busy night at Phantom, including children both large and small. Since I had thirty minutes to seat about three hundred of them, I wasn’t paying much attention to faces.
    Here’s a clue: asking an usher if they have seen your wife or friend is usually a pointless exercise. And no, it doesn’t really matter if you tell us they’re blonde or handsome or whatnot. We’re dealing with hundreds of people in a very short period of time, and one face fades into the next. The only real exception to this is if there’s something extremely unforgettable about your lost loved one’s appearance; say, they have a rainbow Mohawk or they’re wearing a space suit.
    I sent the man to the house manager and security to report the lost child. We didn’t seem to have much information to go on, and the father’s answers to our questions were very vague. Was the child autistic? No. Did he have any developmental disabilities? No. What did he look like? White, blond and “fairly large.” How old was he? Was that question answered?
    Chaos reigned for the next ten or fifteen minutes. security was alerted. Someone watched the front door. Theater staff searched for the elusive child, but he was nowhere to be found. I personally began to worry that he’d left the theater, either on his own or in the company of an unsavory person, to wander the streets of New York. The boy’s grandmother was in tears and kept crying, “I’ve lost my grandchild. I’ve lost him!” The father was also visibly upset.
    Eventually, the boy was located in one of the lounges, unhurt, unruffled, and happy as a clam. The reason nobody had found him earlier was because he happened to be a six-foot-three, smart-aleck sixteen year old. They hadn’t mentioned that.

A Fear of Heights

    When a patron approached me during walk-in or intermission I was usually expecting them to ask one of two things: “Where’s the bathroom?” or “I hate my seat. What can you do about it?”
    Patrons yelled at me over the seating arrangements all the time. I suppose that when someone’s frustrated, it’s easiest to take it out on the nearest person who cannot fight back. In most cases, that was me.
    Sometimes people made requests that were beyond absurd. Once someone asked me, in all seriousness, if I could take away one of the banisters in the mezzanine. Sure, let me grab my blowtorch and saw, I’ll get right on it. Patrons were angry with me because their seats were too close to the stage, too far away, too central, too far to the side, too high up or too low. Nobody ever seemed to understand that I hadn’t assigned their seating locations. I didn’t work at the box office, TKTS or Telecharge. I just read the tickets and directed them accordingly.
    Every now and then we did have people who had legitimate issues with their seating, and I always tried to help them where, when and if I could. If someone was sitting next to a person with body odor or excessive perfume, for example, I empathized completely. My ability to offer direct assistance was usually limited, however. I generally had to send them off to the house manager.
    Quite a few patrons turned out to be afraid of heights. On more than one occasion these acrophobics didn’t even have to tell us; when they completely broke down in terror in the middle of the balcony it was painfully obvious to