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and that their anxiety levels were still high. However, that wasn’t my fault. I hadn’t made them late.
    There are usually specific cues in both straight plays and musicals when ushers are allowed to seat patrons. At musicals the seating cues tend to be either during the overture or at the ends of songs, while everyone is applauding. At some productions there are also complete no-fly zones during the performance when people aren’t even allowed to go to their seats if they are returning from the bathroom and don’t need our help. At Phantom, for example, nobody comes in during “Music of the Night,” period.
    I always tried to hold people at the top of the aisle or on the side of the orchestra so they could watch the show while they were waiting to be seated. It wasn’t always possible, though, and every production had its own policies on latecomers. At Copenhagen they had to sit in the back row until intermission. At Miss Saigon, Blast, Bombay Dreams and Les Misérables, latecomers couldn’t go into the auditorium at all until the show was about twenty minutes in; in the meantime they had to watch the performance on the television screens in the lobby. I also worked at a handful of shows that didn’t admit latecomers at all. If you weren’t there by the time the curtain went up, you were out of luck.
    Some performers worked patron lateness into their shows. The original Blue Man Group off-Broadway, which I saw a few times, had the very best response to this: they played a loud song, rang sirens and showed the latecomers on a TV screen as they entered. At Master Class, the actress playing Maria Callas directly scorned them. John Legiuzamo, during his one-man show, Sexaholix, stopped, stared at the latecomers and offered up a very sarcastic “Hey, thanks for coming.” For the most part, though, seating latecomers was a non-event. My goal was always to whisk them to their seats as quickly and quietly as possible.
    I often encountered latecomers who were completely put upon to learn that they had to wait to be seated. They would rail on me, telling me they wanted to be seated right now, and huff and puff when I told them it wouldn’t be possible. They apparently thought that I was holding them back for my own personal amusement. In fact, I was following the strict regulations I’d been given by my house manager and the production staff and trying to minimize the disruption for the rest of the audience and cast. Lesson of the day: one of the fastest ways for a Broadway usher to piss off stage management and upset the creative team is to ignore the seating cues.
    Keeping to the cues was a challenge when so many guests were uncooperative. Some of them had actual temper tantrums when they heard that they would have to wait a few minutes before going to their seats. I remember a man at The Graduate who was so livid about it that he threw his ticket in my face. He carried on so much that I halfway expected him to stomp his feet and prostrate himself on the carpet like a toddler.
    At The Invention of Love we held people in the back of the orchestra for late seating. At the very last performance, there was a latecomer who decided that I needed to explain every single aspect of the show to him: who was onstage, what was happening, and what he had missed. You really can’t hold conversations, much less give someone a complete synopsis of the show, when you’re two feet away from seated patrons who will be disturbed by the noise. I politely explained that I couldn’t keep talking to him and walked away.
    Another group of latecomers came in, and I asked them to wait in the back for the seating cue. The man stormed over to me and ranted about the fact that I had said two words to the other patrons, when I’d told him that I couldn’t explain the show to him.
    It was the final day of a very exhausting, stressful run, I wasn’t in the mood to deal with any more rude patrons, and this guy had just stepped on my last nerve. I