Standing Ovations

[mrssondheim]

So here in California, there seems to be a trend to stand for EVERYTHING. I have even gotten shamed when I haven't stood up cuz I just didn't feel correct in doing so. Is this just here or is this trend across the board??? I have seem so shit that has gotten a standing ovation and I get angry about it. Standing ovations used to mean something. It used to mean excellence. Right now I feel like I could go on stage and fart for 2 hours and still have everyone stand up at the end. Sorry. This just really bugs me.

[Jenniferlillian]

I have noticed this a lot lately. My grandfather used to say, "Many a standing ovation is caused by someone getting up too early to go to their car." I don't think that's the source of the trend but about half the time I remember that saying when it happens. 

I agree with you but I'm starting to feel like it has culturally become like tipping. People think they are expected to stand if the performance is good and only withhold if there was something bad. It's a weird groupthink phenomenon and I agree. It cheapens the standing ovation. 

[mrssondheim]

I probably wouldn't have posted anything, but an actor (who is a friend of mine) actually motioned to me from the stage to stand up. What the heck??? I did stand up but now the experience was kinda ruined for me.

[KathyB]

In Colorado, it seems like everybody has stood for everything for at least ten years. I always wonder what the actors think when there's this lone person sitting (me, usually) when everybody else is standing. But I can't remember the last time I went to a live performance (including the symphony) where people didn't stand at the end.

[scenicdesign71]

People here in NYC have been bitching about this for literally decades:

2012:  https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/21/nyregion/standing-ovations-a-broadway-epidemic.html

2003:  https://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/21/theater/theater-the-tyranny-of-the-standing-ovation.html

Indeed, the automatic standing-O has been decried (to no discernible effect, alas) for long enough, at least here, to have spawned a lone defender among the culturati:

2017: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/in-defense-of-the-standing-ovation

Pro or con, everyone (including Arthur Miller, of all people) seems to agree, going at least as far back as 2003, that "ovation inflation" is most likely related to spiraling ticket costs: per the New Yorker's Michael Schulman, "for these prices, I'd better have had a 'superlative experience'."  I even seem to recall Sondheim lending his voice to this theory in some interview or other (and I'm not alone: someone on The Straight Dope apparently read or heard the same interview, at some point before 2014).

Personally, I blame the British megamusicals of the 1980s, whose price hikes -- $55 for Phantom of the Opera! -- caused a stir that I don't recall being matched until the The Producers introduced premium pricing (and more recently, of course, the widespread outrage over online resales for Hamilton, which soon enough bumped official box office prices upward).  Moreover, even while rebranding Broadway as conspicuous consumption*, the megamusicals also brought theatre to a far larger and, ahem, less-seasoned audience than it had enjoyed for a good decade or two prior.  The phenomenon of the automatic ovation may not have been as widely recognized before the turn of the millennium, but I suspect its flowering may have begun not so very long after that of, say, Cameron Macintosh's career as a full-fledged impresario.

______________________________
* To quote the immortal Forbidden Broadway lyric about Les Mis:  "Come watch us grovel in the dirt, / Then buy a souvenir and don it! / Rich folks pay twenty bucks a shirt / That has a starving pauper on it..."  The line has dated only by price: today, only a questionably-legal knockoff on Amazon would sell for as little as $20.

[Chris L]

I haven't noticed that it's any different in California than it was back east. Some people stand up and everybody else has to stand up to see the curtain calls over their heads. There were complaints about it on FTC from pretty much the moment I joined in 2002 and I don't, actually, think it's getting any worse, but it's still there.

[Chris L]

Thinking about this in more detail, I think standing ovations take place in phases:

Phase 1: A certain, relatively small percentage of people stand spontaneously for whatever reasons (because of ticket prices, because they so rarely see a show, because they think it's expected, etc.)
Phase 2: More people, who wanted to stand for the above reasons but were embarrassed to be first, stand
Phase 3: More people stand, because they feel guilty that these other people are standing
Phase 4: Most of the rest stand because they can't see

I (and I think Amy) tend to stand in Phase 4. The only recent show where I genuinely felt motivated to stand spontaneously was the touring company of Come From Away, a show that thrilled me far more than I expected it to. I think I got up during Phase 2, maybe even Phase 1.

Of course, that's in larger theaters. In small theaters, where Amy and I tend to sit down front, I sometimes stand because I want the actors to know that I appreciate them acting their hearts out for what was probably not a lot of pay.

[mrssondheim]

The show I just saw was kind of like that Chris. The first group stood when their friend came out to bow. Then all the other phases fell in behind. All that crap makes me want to stay seated all the more. 

Clear out the balcony...I am ready to be one of the grumpy old men on the muppets.

[AmyG]

I only stand to see the actors take their bows. Chris is right. Though it's nice to stretch my legs. But I've come to feel after all this time that a standing ovation just equals a regular ovation of the past so it makes no difference to me.

[Chris L]

I only stand to see the actors take their bows. Chris is right. Though it's nice to stretch my legs. But I've come to feel after all this time that a standing ovation just equals a regular ovation of the past so it makes no difference to me.

I think that's true. So the problem becomes that it's the people sitting down who are making a statement ("I didn't care for the show") rather than the people who are standing up. It's like not applauding.

[MartinG]

We saw Orpheus Descending in our local 'prestige' theatre last night. It transfers to the West End soon (in the wake of another 'home grown' piece winning an Olivier award for Best New Comedy), and there have been high expectations for it. The house was packed and very attentive, considering the first and second acts were run together at a challenging 1 hr 50 m, and clearly warmly appreciative at the end, but remained firmly seated. The only recent occasion we've seen (and participated in) such a spontaneous surge of communal affection that it brought the entire audience instantly to its feet in this natural habitat of the determinedly undemonstrative middle-classes was a few weeks ago when Ian McKellen gave his astonishing one-man show celebrating his 80th year with a spectacular display of memory and vocal perfection.

We rarely see an SO at the Royal Shakespeare Company, The Globe or the National Theatre, exceptional though the performances may have been - Follies was a notable exception, but by no means unanimous when I was there. However, audiences for practically any local amateur/community show inevitably leap up the second the lights come up on the curtain call, however undeserving the performances. These don't tend to be 'literary' works.  I wouldn't like to say it's a matter of education, ignorance of cultural orthodoxy or simple lack of discernment, but...well I guess I probably am.  

[mrssondheim]

I have become that person who stays seated to make a point and it is beginning to bother me, quite frankly.

I have also been the lone person to stand for a show that I thought was excellent. So what do I know?

[Chris L]

You're independent and strong minded, @mrssondheim. Never change.

[mrssondheim]

You're independent and strong minded, @mrssondheim. Never change.

I'll try and remember that when people complain. Lol. MISS YOU AND AMY!!!

[scenicdesign71]

I splurged on a ticket for To Kill A Mockingbird this evening, and of course I thought of this thread as soon as everyone leapt to their feet for curtain call -- though, for all its smooth professionalism and the gobs of skill and talent in visible abundance onstage and off-, I wouldn't have said the play, the production or even the performances were sweep-you-off-your-feet sensational.  Nor, for that matter, had this particular audience seemed all that wildly swept-off-their-feet over the course of the evening... until suddenly, when the final curtain fell, they apparently were.

That, or just obedient -- the final line of the play itself having been "All rise."  And indeed, when the curtain rose again, so did apparently the entire house, so immediately and automatically that I didn't really have time to think about which "phase" I, or anyone else in my abruptly-narrowed field of vision, would have fit into.  This particular ovation, though possibly as rote as most others these days, was more jack-in-the-box than wave -- or so it seemed from my vantage in the seventh row.  Admittedly, once I finally stood up myself, I didn't actually look behind me to gauge the rest of the house; so it's possible, though I'd guess unlikely, that it might actually have only been a partial standing O.

Granted, I may be projecting my own relatively lukewarm response onto the rest of that audience, which was certainly engaged (though I wouldn't have said "riveted," much less "dazzled") throughout.  And this particular play carries its own baggage: not only the pricey ticket and the Hollywood star and the fancy playwright, all contributing to the usual sense of "I'd better have had a 'superlative experience'," but also, in this case, the beloved novel and the buzz and the lawsuits and the timely import and the frantic virtue-signaling on both sides of the footlights, all conspiring to lend this entertainment a sense of special importance.  A curtain-call ovation of some sort would have been necessary even if the show itself were frankly disappointing; since, on the contrary, it's actually highly watchable, there's nothing for it but to "all rise" like a shot, and to hell with phases.

I myself was rather slow to stand -- making me, I guess in retrospect, a not-entirely-deliberately hard 4 in an orchestra section otherwise populated almost entirely by hard 1's.  This was mostly laziness on my part; @mrssondheim 's refusal-on-principle did flash through my mind, but actually sitting out the entire curtain call (not a brief one, what with the sizable cast divided into at least five or six successive groups for their bows), trapped alone amid a forest of standing bodies, seemed pointless.  In the context of everyone else rising to their feet instantly -- as if in a synchronized effort to present the cast with an already-100%-standing crowd by the time the curtain rose -- taking my own sweet time to stand may have been statement enough, even if the actual intention behind it was blurry at best.

Then, too, I wonder what if any effect yesterday's Tony nominations -- including quite a few for Mockingbird's cast and creatives but, conspicuously, no Best Play nod -- might have had on this audience, only the third since the nominations were announced.

Incidentally, that other annoying now-commonplace had already reared its head earlier in the evening: entrance applause for the star, in this case Jeff Daniels, who seemed to have figured out some mysterious, imperceptibly subtle way of curbing it, relatively quickly but gracefully, while neither breaking character nor allowing the applause to badly distort the rhythm of the scene into which he was entering.  It probably helped that Sorkin's script has Atticus's arrival being all-but-formally announced to us by Scout (Celia Keenan-Bolger, wonderful as always), in narrator-mode.  But here I abstained entirely, as did most of the people in at least my immediate vicinity.