The following occurred a few years back in the management comp seats at an orchestra performance that included a world premiere:
Amanda, flipping through program, sees composer’s headshot: He’s hot.
Friend: Good thing, because his music sucks.
Amanda, squints and sees composer up in a box: Oh, not as hot in person.Friend: Too bad, because his music sucks.
[first half of the concert begins, ends, intermission comes]
Nice older gentleman, gesturing to the empty seat between him and his wife and Amanda and her friend: Excuse me, would you mind if our son came and sat here?
Amanda/Friend: Sure, no problem.
[older gentleman waves to his son in the box, composer comes downstairs and takes his new seat]
There are, of course, a hundred stories like this. If you are critical of a performance while still within the venue walls, inevitably you’re going to be on the water fountain line behind the concertmaster’s Great Aunt Susie. Or worse, sitting behind the composer or the soloist who just played on the first half of the program. My mom always says that the truest reviews of a Broadway show come from the Ladies Room (/ the line for the Ladies Room) at intermission. People – perhaps just women? I’ve not experienced the Men’s Room but welcome any intelligence on the matter from the men reading – seem a bit more frank in that setting than they are at their seats.
At one intermission, a journalist I had literally met the night before walked up and started searing me about my client. Loudly, and in front of another journalist I had been talking to. He was angry! Really angry that he wasn’t enjoying the concert. (Note: it’s not as if he wasted his money, as he had press tickets.) I disagreed with his opinion, as did the other journalist, and he snapped that publicists don’t always have to enjoy their clients’ performances. I said thank you for that permission, and wondered why he didn’t save his criticism for his review. After the concert, I heard him laying into some other poor soul he (presumably?) knew about the performance, and again found it curious: he has a platform for criticism that he actually gets paid for, so why the need to personally go from audience member to audience member, spreading negativity?
Perhaps performances should be like voting sites; no political buttons, sweatshirts, signs or discussion about the candidates within X feet of the booths. After the Can Our Son Sit Here Incident of 2005, I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut until I’m a safe distance from the venue (and the popular post-concert hang-outs), and actually get jittery when my friends start being negative too soon after/during any performance, not just one of my clients’.
Do we think the “reviews from the Ladies Room” are a publicist’s problem? If so, is there some deft way to manage them?
But is the reviews from the Ladies Room so wrong? I too like to wait until I’m far away before I really say what’s on my mind (plus gives me time to digest) but isn’t word of mouth, word of mouth? Good or bad? (Then again, they say people spew bad warnings way more than good, though I think in theatre, that’s not true, I think it’s when it’s REALLY BAD or REALLY GOOD that buzz gets around).
But I guess for comp tickets maybe it should be different. I’m surprised there’s no code cause I just went to the ballet and sat in front of the Globe and Mail reviewer (I’m in Canada and it’s like the default national newspaper here) but she wasn’t allowed to say a word of what she felt. She said it was a big no no. (Though she did say she could ask me how I felt and would love to hear my opinion, especially as a young person new to ballet (paying the youth rate)).
Have to admit that in the past I’ve sent a friend into the ladies to pick up frank views on the prevailing mood (the gents, by the way, is useless for progress reports – for men, small talk in these situations is tantamount to sexual harrassment). My favourite was a woman at Edward Bond’s grotesque comedy The Sea protesting that she had travelled to London for the play, and that the East Anglian village in which it was set was nothing like her own. Which was probably just as well, given that one character remarks during a particularly fraught scene, “after this, I shall regard Gomorrah as a spa resort”.