Commentary: Why the Tony Awards should give one to the audience this year
Theater audiences have been getting attacked from all sides since venues reopened.
Broadway producers and artistic directors are angry that they’re not showing up in pre-pandemic numbers. Critics are complaining that their conservative taste is holding the American theater back. Actors, resuming their war on phones and hard candy now that masks are no longer required, are up in arms about bad etiquette. Patti LuPone has loudly lamented the distracted, “dumbed down” audience for Broadway, which she says is becoming more like “Disneyland, a circus and Las Vegas.”
At the start of my theater trip to New York this spring — an exhausting eight-show itinerary in five-and-a-half days — I met my niece for a matinee of “Life of Pi.” It was pell-mell outside the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre on West 45th Street. Horns were blaring, crowds were swarming and security was shouting for ticket-holders to get in the
