Not every performance deserves a standing ovation

By David Woods

Tony Award winner Patti LuPone recently offered the Wall Street Journal's readers a five-point list of theater etiquette. It included: respect your fellow audience members, as well as the actors; turn off all electronic devices; and don't feel obligated to give everything you see and hear a standing ovation.

LuPone has dramatically followed through on her own advice. During one performance, in mid-song, she seized the cellphone of a woman in the audience who was persistently texting. On another occasion, she scolded an audience member for taking photos.

I've also had occasion to take to heart the actress' advice on standing ovations.

Last summer, I attended a production of David Mamet's turgid and convoluted play The Anarchist. LuPone and the other member of the cast, Debra Winger, did their best with the material at hand, and mercifully, the play was laid to rest after only a couple of weeks. Nonetheless, while it was still gasping for breath, each performance was greeted with enthusiastic applause.

This got me thinking about how kind American audiences are. The performances were given a thumbs-up by people who had just paid anywhere from $35 to $135 for this dubious experience.

The critics were much less kind, including one who said that he'd been going to Broadway shows since the mid-'70s and seen some real stinkers, "but this one takes the cake." Another called it the worst play ever and an insult to the audience.

A European audience - those who had the patience to remain in their seats - would have booed lustily. And then they would have demanded their money back. It's not so many years ago in theatrical history that such a turkey would have been the object of hurled tomatoes or other vegetables.

What has become of the barbed critical response to productions of dubious merit?

The actress Dame Diana Rigg assembled some of the meanest and nastiest in her 1983 book No Turn Unstoned: The Worst Ever Theatrical Reviews.

There she quotes Walter Kerr's memorably pithy dismissal of I Am a Camera: "Me no Leica." And Dorothy Parker's putdown of The Lake in 1934: "Watch Katharine Hepburn run the gamut of emotions from A to B."

Rigg recounts how, during a particularly woeful production of The Diary of Anne Frank, one audience member greeted the arrival of the German soldiers by shouting, "She's in the attic."

So next time you fork out megabucks to see a dramatic production, make sure you shut off your cellphone and - just in case - go armed with an assortment of appropriate vegetables.