What Are We Afraid We'll Miss?

Tickets to Broadway plays are expensive and for that reason alone I expect the audience to be as in thrall as I am, keeping noise noiseless and giving rapt attention to the stage. Instead I find myself in the distinct minority.

During "Time Stands Still," a dark story about the difficulties of returning to "life as it was" after documenting the cruelties of war, cell phones rang out no less than six times during the performance forcing the actors to freeze mid-sentence or, as they once chose, to began the interrupted scene again. The man sitting next to me had his wife's cell phone in his pocket as a favor to her (no purse) and had no idea how to turn it off when it began playing her customized medley. Poor guy, he was mortified.

"Billy Elliott," a delightful musical and birthday present for my newly 13 year old grandaughter was full of youngsters who really thought the darkness was an opportunity to text away the two plus hours driving the theater ushers nuts as their lit palms clearly weren't what the actors had signed on for. Then there was the performance of "The Doll's House," where I watched ushers physically remove cells phones from the hands of two theater goers.

All this is leading me to Mozart's opera, Don Giovanni, which I saw in Lucca, Italy a month ago. An SRO crowd, many families with children, young children, and mostly Lucchese, living in Puccini's hometown. As with his Turandot the year before, in a land where the cell is a life line (I rarely saw any that were more than merely phones) not one rang, not one child whined with boredom or begged for a coke or milk duds. The audience sat in their velvet seats and gave themselves, as we did, over to an afternoon of intoxicated freedom.

My daughter, just back from Radio City Music Hall with her eight year old, called to say how great the Rockettes were, such symmetry...ah, well. She then told me how it seemed as if noone stayed seated, and there was more up and down in the audience than on stage. And she doesn't even know my rant on this subject.

So, what's up? Does anyone else feel like Science Friday comes around way too quickly?