Front of House: Observations from a Decade on the Aisle (14 page)

Longacre Theatre

One of the show posters lurking in my closet is from
Def Poetry Jam,
which played at the Longacre Theatre during the 2002 — 2003 season. It’s covered with personal messages from most of the performers in the cast. Beau Sia wrote, “Without you I’d feel like an unpopular poet.” Georgia Me admonished me to “Keep God first.” Reading over those Sharpie inscriptions always makes me smile, because
Def Poetry Jam
was a participatory event for me.

I was sent over to the Longacre after my show at the Royale closed. It was a happy arrangement; I was very fond of the chief and most of the staff. I’d subbed there before for
The Young Man from Atlanta
and
Judgment at Nuremberg,
and had worked the entire run of
One Mo’ Time,
which had only been about five weeks.

That was par for the course for the poor Longacre, sadly. Despite the “long” name, most of the shows that ran there were short-lived. Once they even had a production that closed after a single official performance:
The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All.
The actors who appeared at the Longacre were outstanding, but the theater itself was Teflon: nothing stuck to it.

Despite all of this, we had great expectations for
Def Poetry Jam.
It brought in a different crowd than the usual Broadway show; they were young, energetic and friendly. On occasion they came in wearing sandwich boards or holding the signs they’d used to protest earlier in the day. Mixed among them were the traditional Broadway matinee ladies, teenagers and children.

Def Poetry
was very much a New York show with a New York audience; we didn’t tend to get a lot of tourists. It’s a shame, because I think they would have loved if they’d given it a try. On the other hand, if they were looking for a traditional Broadway musical or a classic play, they weren’t going to find it at the Longacre.

An onstage DJ provided music both before and during the show, so we seated patrons to the beats of 50 Cent, Ludacris, Lauryn Hill and Jill Scott. The poets in the show, who were heavy hitters from Russell Simmons’ HBO program of the same name
,
presented both solo and group pieces. We all tried to avoid taking breaks when our favorites were on.

There’s an inevitability when you work at the same show every night: you begin to learn the dialogue. There’s something to be said for repetition; when you hear the same thing over and over again it burns itself into your brain, even if you’re not paying close attention to it. If you talk to any usher at a long-running production, it’s entirely likely that they will be able to recite complete scenes for you, recreate the blocking and do some of the choreography. If the production ever needed backup stage managers to supervise rehearsals and prompt the actors, all they would need to do is go to the front of the house. Ushers might even respond to completely random comments with lines from their show. At
Phantom,
for instance, Erik’s frenzied “Don’t gooooo! So
BE IT!”
rant from the end of “Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again” and Monsieur André’s “These things do happen” comment tended to pop up a lot.

At
Def Poetry Jam
the same held true: in no time at all, we started reciting bits and pieces of the poems and working them into our conversations, completely out of context. Beau Sia’s piece about “extreme” situations and Suheir Hammad’s frequently reprised “Even. Now.” were front of house fan favorites.

However, things went one step further than they normally did. Instead of just repeating the poems from the show, several ushers began drafting parodies of them. Perhaps, surrounded by so many brilliant and creative people, we were inspired. Perhaps we were bored. Whatever the case, almost every piece in the show eventually had a satirical version.

Our poems were about the ushering life. We lamented the conduct of a famous billionaire who had attended the show one night. We railed on latecomers and rude patrons. We borrowed Beau Sia’s poem about stereotypes and transformed it into a piece about generalizations about ushering. There was a biting commentary on the poor hygiene habits of one of our colleagues, riffed from Georgia Me’s “Sister 2 Sister.” Poetri’s ode to Krispy Kreme donuts was reworked as a love note to Popeye’s Chicken, a favorite lunch choice of many of our ushers. There were only a few poems we didn’t touch, mostly because they were just too serious to parody. For instance, even though we loved Staceyann Chin, none of us felt right about sending up her brutal, stirring piece on homophobia and violence. It was left alone out of respect.

The ushers’ room became a rehearsal hall as we ripped through our poems. Jasmine, an usher who was a TV actress and singer, took on the role of stage manager and put together a call book. A running order was worked out. We had no idea what we were going to do with it, but it was a blast. People started showing up way before call time to recite their poems.

The cast got wind of our antics, and it opened a door to dialogue between the performers and the ushers. There hadn’t been much interaction between the front and back of house, but once they discovered that we had satirized half of their show, we became friends.

Eventually, someone arranged for us to perform our production, now entitled
Def Ushers’ Slam,
onstage at the Longacre. I was reeling. Performing my own writing, even if it happened to be a satire of someone else’s work, was an intoxicating prospect. Doing it on a Broadway stage? Even better.

The entire cast of poets, as well as some of the production team, box office staff and stagehands, came to our performance. I heard a rumor that Russell Simmons was there, too, hanging out on one of the upper levels of the theater, but that can neither be substantiated nor denied, because I didn’t see him.

We printed up programs with usher bios, like the ones that appeared for the performers in the Playbills. By this time we’d all adopted a specific poet to parody. I got Beau Sia. Georgia Me’s poems were divvied up between Jasmine and a male usher, and Poetri was essayed by an older woman, Regina.

Everyone’s poems were received with laughter and applause, and at the end of the show, the poets were on their feet to give us a standing ovation. Usually things worked the other way around, but this time they clapped for us. After the performance, we all retired to the ushers’ room for a well-deserved feast.

It’s been said that poetry brings people together, helps them expand their horizons, and enables them to see more of the world around them a little more perceptively. For the poems performed at the Longacre that spring, all of those statements were spot-on.

Winter Garden Theatre

The ushers’ room at the Winter Garden was high above the mezzanine in a little alcove. During
Cats
it was somewhat run down; when the theater was drastically renovated for
Mamma Mia
it received a makeover. In any case, the ushers used it only to store their belongings; it was too small, too stuffy and too remote to allow for any sort of congregating.

Even though it was dingy, during
Cats
it was an oasis for me. After I put my things away I would peer through the smudged windows down to 7th Avenue and cherish the incredible luck of getting paid to see the show. When I was subbing, whenever Erin told me to go to the Winter Garden Theatre, it was all I could do to avoid cheering into the phone. What made
Cats
different from any other production I ever worked was that I was a genuine fan of the show.

I never was able to become a regular at
Cats.
The Winter Garden was way too popular, there wasn’t a lot of turnover with the staff, and I was perhaps too far down on the totem pole. However, it was a frequent destination for me. During college I subbed there often; after
Kat and the Kings
closed I was sent over as a regular sub. I ended up working at the Winter Garden for almost two months, right until I left for postgraduate studies in South Africa. When I returned to New York on my summer break, I went right back to the Winter Garden for a few more weeks. As a result, it became yet another home away from home.

Working at
Cats
involved several paradigm shifts. The caveats were as follows:

One: It’s your job to help keep the actors safe.
Keep all of the passageways clear for them. There shouldn’t be anything in their way, including people.
The
Cats
cats spent a lot of time running up and down the aisles and crawling along the parts of the set that spilled out into the seating area. During the overture, they did this in nearly complete darkness, guided only by the flashing green headlights they wore. They had neither the time nor the ability to dodge obstacles in the aisles; it was our job to keep their paths clear.

Two: It’s your job to keep
yourself
safe from the performers.
The cats certainly didn’t want to hurt any of us, but it was very, very dark when they were running around, and they were not necessarily able to see people until they plowed right into them. It only took one collision to teach me that I’d best plaster myself to the back wall during the overture and stay clear of the curtains.

Three: Cats enjoy soft drinks.
During the overture, one of the bartenders in the mezzanine always prepared two sodas and set them on the edge of the bar on napkins. They weren’t for the ushers. After the overture was finished, two of the cats swung by the bar to grab their beverages before scurrying backstage again.

Four: You’re going to be onstage and backstage, so get used to it. Cats
had stage seating, so we had to escort patrons through the wings to their places. On one side of the stage, the audience members couldn’t get backstage proper without going by the stage doorman, so it was safe. On the other side, an usher was always positioned backstage at intermission to ensure that the patrons didn’t roam into restricted areas.

We also helped guard the set. During intermission, the audience was allowed to walk around onstage and explore all of John Napier’s handiwork. This opportunity to explore the set up close was truly unique, but it came with its own special considerations. Numerous crew members and stage managers were positioned around the set. Several were tasked with looking after the actor playing Old Deuteronomy, who “slept” onstage. A velvet rope was placed in front of him to protect him further. Several ushers had strategic posts around the stage to provide additional coverage.

My favorite post, by far, was the tire. Someone had to sit on a tire at the lip of the stage during intermission to ensure that nobody stepped on the mountains of “garbage” that made up the
Cats
junkyard or otherwise disrupted, broke or molested the set. It meant that for fifteen minutes the ushers were literally center stage.

The drawback to being onstage during intermission was that it required a constant litany of “Please don’t do that.” The audience often wanted to climb, jump and play the way the cats did. I can’t say that I blamed them, on some level. The set was fascinating, and when I had seen the show as a customer, I’d enjoyed exploring it too. When I was a teenage patron, in fact, I may or may not have been admonished not to do pique turns down the stage. I’m keeping mum on that.

Some people took it too far, though. On at least one occasion, a group of adult cosplayers showed up in their homemade leotards and wigs and tried to crawl around onstage. I often had to get people down off the stage ramps. Sometimes they tried to peel back the edges of the star trap, the little trap door set into the floor of the stage that was used during “The Awefull Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles.” Once I was horrified to see a small boy deliberately stomp his heel into one of the footlights. By the time I’d shouted at him to stop and scurried over to the ramp, he had scampered back into the crowd. Luckily, despite his best efforts, he hadn’t managed to break or otherwise damage the gel on the light.

We had to get the stage cleared of patrons before the cats showed up again for Act II. The stage managers always gave five and one-minute warnings over the loudspeaker before the show resumed, which helped with time management. From my vantage point on the tire I could also see the monitors that linked the performers to the conductor backstage; when he reappeared on screen it was my cue to exit. For the remainder of intermission I hung out on one of the aisles, watching for problems. I was often positioned by one of the curtains at house left, so I got to greet the cats as they crawled out into the audience. No matter how many times I was stationed there, and no matter how much I knew that the actors were going to crawl through the curtains at some point, they always managed to startle me. And I think they enjoyed it. I know I did.