Audience Differences

Lovely Lady Vixen is always intrigued by audience behavior. I spend a lot of my time watching audiences, and I spend even more thinking about audiences while waiting for a show to get out. Like I said, I'm always prowling.

Our regular audience has their own flow, and I have become very accustomed to it over the past few years. So when we have rental groups coming through, I am always taken by surprise. I’m sure my fellow vixen’s will agree, it can be jarring. The want different things, need different thing, act different, behave different. It’s odd.

Recently I have worked a few very interesting rentals. A few weeks ago I worked a foreign language movie showing, which was interesting because the whole day seemed doomed from the beginning. I arrived at 3:30 to meet the group at 4:00 so they could be ready for their 4:30 showing. Instead, I arrived at 3:30 to meet the group at 4:30, who ended up starting their movie at 5:20.

Rule 1 with Miss Vixen, DON’T BE LATE!! Theatre is a time tabled art, and since I also work part time as a stage manager, time is very important. And late = bad.

Not to mention, 9 times out of 10, if you show up late, it means you are going to stay late, and when you stay late, you are biting into my personal time. So this group doesn’t only start there showing at 5:20, but they also had a second showing at 6:30 that I knew they weren’t going to make. And sure enough, the second showing began at 7:30.

Suddenly the promise that I would be out the door by 9:00 was shattered. Sure enough, I left at 10:00 that night.

The other weird thing was audience behavior. For the most part they were quiet and respectful, which of course normally would please me, and would even make up for the fact that they were late. But there were three gentlemen that decided that a quiet, contemplative Vixen sitting at her desk, needed desperately to be hit on. Badly! One insult my love for my job, the second encourage me to cheat on my significant other and one hit on me after his girlfriend went to the bathroom.

When the end of the night finally came, I was thrilled to be out of there.

Now bad audiences are actually few and far between. I don’t mind the bad ones so much because we always have a really cool one to make up for it. The really cool one, was this past weekend. We had, in our little theatre, a fabulous little old school Vaudeville Melodrama group. It was great! Moustache twirling, hero cheering, and chainsaw juggling! It was fantastic.

The cool part was that their audience was so into it! It helps of course that the group had sponsorship from a local beer manufacturer and they gave said beer away. So the audience was wasted! Truly wasted! One gentleman in particular had to have had 4 or 5 (don’t worry, I checked, he had a DD!) and each time he came back to the bar he would start increasingly more interesting conversations. First about the beer, then the group, the he talked about volunteer work, then Robot Chicken and finally he rounded out at the end of the night with complimenting my hair. He was fun! He also used all his free tickets on beer, then would buy other people, he didn’t know, cookies and candy. I loved him!

The group was into the show, and ended up staying for quite a bit after the show ended. It typically takes me 20 minutes after a shows end to close up, that night I was there for nearly an hour. It’s always a good sign.

My only complaint is with the group itself. Though they were incredibly sweet and lovely people, they were very needy. They must have asked me for at least 5 extra services, which is normally fine, but when asked at inconvenient times in inconvenient ways, it become hectic, and tends to unnerve me. Normally my response would be anger, but these people were so damn nice, I couldn’t be mad at them. So I ended up being frustrated at the fact that I couldn’t even really be mad at them for asking me to do things I should do for them despite the fact that they asked me while I was busy trying to do the best job I could for them. What kind of ridiculous complaint is that? It makes me sound so silly!

It was a fun show! I caught about 50% of it, including the chainsaw juggling (how could you not watch chainsaw juggling?) and I have to say, I wish I had caught the whole show. It was a ton of fun!!

Things are heating up in the theatre world as it is the Christmas season, so stay tuned. I’m sure I’ll have a ton of stories! And video blogs are certainly on their way....