As the cast and crew hurried to prepare for their 7:30 p.m. curtain call in Connecticut's Norma Terris Theater last month, patrons filled the house and prepared to get lost in the production of Hello! My Baby.
For some, that meant powering on their smartphones and iPads and telling all of their Twitter followers about the musical with the hashtag #hmbmusical.
A growing number of theaters and performing groups across the country are setting aside "tweet seats," in-house seats for patrons to live-tweet during performances, including the Carolina Ballet in Raleigh, N.C., and the Dayton Opera in Dayton, Ohio.
Rick Dildine, the executive director for Shakespeare Festival St. Louis — an outdoor theater festival that began using tweet seats two years ago — said tweet seats have "become a national trend."
Fuck Twitter.
Unless one actor literally murders another on-stage, there's really nothing about a play that the world needs to know about immediately. It can wait 90 minutes until you get out.
Twitter is short for “Look at me! Look at me!” Which is fine for my 2 1/2 year old, full grown adults attending a theater performance, not so much.
Even Roger Ebert, who is a mad twitter user, doesn’t tweet while he’s watching a movie. If he wanted to be all hip and edgy, he could send out little 140-byte messages documenting his ongoing immediate impressions of the film he’s watching. But instead he’s a damned professional who watches the whole show before he puts his thoughts to, er, paper.