770 replies to this topic

[Courfeyrac]

What a load of tosh this thread is,badly behaved and rude box office and theatre staff is much more of a concern I think and its getting worse in London.
People do pay a lot to see shows and deserve to be treat with a bit more respect.

Personally, I've always found box office and theatre staff to be very helpful. Obviously you don't share that view so maybe it would be more use if you quoted examples of badly behaved staff.

Oh, and 76 pages of this thread would seem to suggest that quite a few people don't consider this type of audience behaviour to be "tosh".

[Marius Pontmercy]

...and actually, If I had to choose one, I'd rather the box office staff were rude to me than have someone spoil the play itself.

I tend to book most of my tickets online, but when I have booked through a box office or collected my tickets from there I've never encountered rude staff.

[Weez]

If someone's rude to me before I see a play, it goes out of my head while I watch and enjoy the play. If someone's rude to an entire audience during a play, there's no ignoring it and it ruins my evening FAR more.

[curzon]

Last night at Bryn Terfel's concert in Brum. The usual scattering of consumptive coughers saving their best efforts for the quiet bits. Come the encores and a phone with an idiotic ringtone goes off and then continues to ring for 1/2 the number as the imbecile owner would rather that than actually fess up to being the culprit. Nice one!  

Seb

[PaulT]

We saw the Jersey Boys on Monday (16th Nov).
Great seats in Row E of the stalls.
The man and his wife behind thought it was okay to talk the whole way through....  in the songs, scene changes and even in the talking parts of the show.
I turned my head at one point thinking he might shut up, but no, he never stopped.
I'm not sure if he got half price tickets from the Ticket Booth.  We paid the full price of £60 for our tickets and it was not good to have him constantly talking all the way through.  
Do you think he thought he was at home in front of the telly?  I mean why pay all that money to talk through a really good show?
Grrrr!  

[Trev]

Last night at Bryn Terfel's concert in Brum. The usual scattering of consumptive coughers saving their best efforts for the quiet bits. Come the encores and a phone with an idiotic ringtone goes off and then continues to ring for 1/2 the number as the imbecile owner would rather that than actually fess up to being the culprit. Nice one!  

Seb

Poor Gert had to put up with Welsh people next to her at the RFH concert!

[curzon]

Poor Gert had to put up with Welsh people next to her at the RFH concert!

There were a lot of Welsh people near me but they were quite polite about it!  

Seb

[Jenny_tyr]

I had one of those bad experiences yesterday – as a birthday treat my father had gotten us tickets to see my favourite Swedish theatre group, a small company that often does Shakespeare in the commedia dell'arte tradition (their take on Macbeth remains the funniest night I've ever spent at a theatre, my jaws were sore for days afterwards from all that laughing, but this time they were doing Chekhov).

The woman sitting behind me seemed to be dead set on trying to screamingly laugh as loudly as she possibly could, even when there was no punch line being delivered, and not only did she drown out the lines, but she also had my ears aching before we were even halfway through the first act.

And it wasn't a natural laughter, it was a "look at me, and how much I appreciate and understand this" sort of screeching hyena kind of laughter, which even had people sitting four rows further in front turning around just to see who the loony was that had apparently gotten a day pass from the local institution.

When I turned on her after the first act ended she was totally unapologetic and in fact plain rude – goodness knows I was SO near punching her in the face that I don't even know how I managed to restrain myself.

We moved seats at the interval, but the wailing banshee continued on, prompting even the actors (probably to her extreme satisfaction) to comment on her behaviour in their adlibbing, with comments like "can someone remove that one from the auditorium" and "you should see a doctor about that, you know".  Really, some people shouldn't be allowed out without a keeper, that's for sure.