Coachella stage closes after stage light falls on attendee

www.sfgate.com: Every year, electronic music heads at Coachella flock to Do LaB, a festival within a festival known for its curated lineup and surprise big-name acts; past guests have included Skrillex and Billie Eilish. DJ and producer John Summit was one of this year’s surprise sets, touching down a little after 8 p.m. Friday night. About halfway through this performance, onlookers report that a heavy light fixture fell from the stage, injuring at least one person in the audience.

Half of Americans Went to a Movie Theater During the Year, Study Finds

variety.com: With the Academy Awards approaching to celebrate the year’s best films, a new survey offered a reality check about moviegoing: Just over half of Americans say they set foot in a movie theater over the course of a year.

Solo theatergoers are on the rise — and theaters want more of them

NPR: Nearly 20% of Broadway theater tickets are now being purchased by solo attendees — double the rate from just a couple of years ago, according to audience data for the 2024-25 season from the Broadway League. One major theater company is taking action.

Cheryl Porter Gives Voice Lesson to & JULIET Audience Before Sing-Along Show

www.broadwayworld.com: Who better to warm up the audience at & Juliet than famed voice teacher Cheryl Porter? Before their recent sing-along performance, Porter – who currently plays Angélique in the hit musical – led the audience in some of her signature warmups. watch as she gets the crowd ready for a special performance of the hit musical.

Where are Kennedy Center audiences going?

NPR: Many of us have a venue we love - a theater or concert space where we really feel at home. But what do you do if that place goes through radical change? Well, that is what has been happening with audiences here in the D.C. region ever since President Trump took over the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts eight months ago. Trump abruptly fired its leaders, dismissed board members, criticized past programming as too woke. NPR's Elizabeth Blair wanted to find out where the fans are going.

Study Finds COVID Concerns Still Deterring D.C. Audiences

AMERICAN THEATRE: TheatreWashington and Limelight Insights by Shugoll have released the findings of a recent online survey aimed at assessing D.C.-area theatregoers’ opinions and attitudes toward COVID-19 safety policies. The trend among the 2,755 responses from survey participants, representing theatregoers both pre-pandemic and since theatres began to reopen in the fall of 2021, is clear: Theatre attendance is down overall, and it is driven by continued concerns about COVID-19.

Theatre for One creates a one-on-one connection between artist and audience

Theater Preview | Chicago Reader: Before the pandemic, seeing a play often meant sitting in the dark and fading away amongst the crowd of other audience members, but with Court Theatre's Chicagoland premiere of Theatre for One: Here We Are, "the audience is front and center," according to Miranda González, director of Pandemic Fight and Thank You For Coming. Take Care.

Can Planners Mandate Covid Vaccinations for Attendees?

www.meetingsnet.com: As the Covid-19 vaccination program rolls out over the course of 2021, meeting planners might be considering vaccination requirements for their in-person attendees. Is that legal?

Sold Out: Arizona Nonprofit Cuts Crowds, Pivots To Immersive Theater

www.forbes.com: Coronavirus-related shutdowns have devastated the performing arts industry nationwide — but one small theater in the southwest is seeing sustained sellouts even without the large crowds.

Theater Works, in Peoria, Ariz., re-opened in early September with ‘CURIOUSER & CURIOUSER,’ an immersive theater experience based on Alice in Wonderland.

National Theatre to transform Olivier auditorium to allow larger socially distanced audiences

London Evening Standard: The National Theatre will reconfigure its Olivier auditorium to allow bigger audiences to see shows while maintaining social distancing - including a Christmas pantomime.

The new plans will turn the Olivier theatre into an in-the-round performing space, with audiences sitting around all sides of the stage. This will increase capacity to almost 500 people.

Theater box seats as best seats in the house?

Chicago Tribune: Ever watched a show from a box at the side of the stage?

Didn’t think so.

Although boxes remain a dominant part of theater architecture, they’ve gone from highly desirable to barely salable over the last hundred years.

Unblurred Lines

HowlRound Theatre Commons: I had my first encounter with immersive theatre in 2015, when I trekked to the abandoned mental hospital in Brooklyn that houses Third Rail Projects’ Then She Fell. I remember the experience in fragmented and disordered bits, the way one might remember a bizarre dream. It’s perhaps unsurprising that the two scenes I recall most vividly were also the two most intimate moments of my journey. In both scenes, I found myself alone in a room with an actor. One room was large, the other closet sized. One performer never spoke but offered me a cocktail and silently enlisted my participation in a game. The other invited me to brush her hair and asked if I’d ever been in love. I can’t say I was totally comfortable, but I never doubted I was safe.

Must the show go on during the COVID-19 outbreak?

The Japan Times: Responses to the spread of the COVID-19 virus have varied widely from country to country and are changing from day to day. So, while Broadway shows in New York have shut down for at least a month, West End productions in London have been canceled until further notice.

The Power of Proximity and the Theatre of Touch: What Losing Live Audiences May Mean for Theatre

The Theatre Times: Being close to others is intrinsically associated with theatre.

In Shakespeare’s London, theatre gatherings were condemned by the Puritans as evil. They thought the plague spread by theatre crowds was God’s punishment on the wicked for indulging in pastimes such as acting.

The shutting down of Broadway and the West End gives an eerie historical parallel to a world we thought was well in the past. Meanwhile, COVID-19 poses an existential threat to Australia’s fragile performing arts sector.

"Safetix" Shift Leaves Hundreds Locked Out of Black Keys Show

www.ticketnews.com: Hundreds of fans were left outside of the first Black Keys’ show in five years, after being told their tickets were not valid when they were scanned for entry. Apparently, promoters had shifted to using Ticketmaster’s “Safetix” system – which features barcodes that rotate on a timer to disable the possibility of sending a screenshot of the tickets to friends or after a sale – and made the tickets non-transferrable.

Podcast: CRM and Social Media Integration

AMT Lab @ CMU: In the latest episode of the AMT-Lab Podcast series, Chief Technology Manager Ashley Anderson Kowach interviews AMT-Lab contributor Megan Ma about her research on how a nonprofit organization can integrate social media data with an existing CRM system to better understand their constituents interests which could lead to better engagement between the organization and the audience.

Don't Be Late to the Theatre. But If You Are, Here's How to Act

Theatre Development Fund – TDF: It happened to me once. I had tickets to see Jane Fonda in 33 Variations on a weeknight and a work meeting ran late. (Granted, it had transferred to a Ninth Avenue bar, but it was still business.) I thought I gave myself enough time to make it to the theatre, but between getting my waiter's attention, settling the bill and dodging tourists, the curtain had already gone up by the time I reached the box office.

We Need to Talk About Non-Consensual Audience Participation

Dance Magazine: Some of my favorite experiences as both an audience member and a dancer have involved audience participation. Artists who cleverly use participatory moments can make bold statements about the boundaries between performer and spectator, onstage and off. And the challenge to be more than a passive viewer can redefine an audience's relationship to what they're watching. But all the experiences I've loved have had something in common: They've given audiences a choice.

Gauging Levels of Participation in the Arts across America

NEA: Every segment of the economy, every branch of knowledge, and every field of human endeavor requires stories and statistics to help explain it to others and to itself.

Storytelling is the main approach we use, no matter who we are or where we come from, to justify choices as individuals or members of society. When it comes to decisions involving the arts—whether we’re talking about resource allocation for a school or community, how to curate a playlist or personal library, which furniture pieces to buy, or which show to attend—emotion-fueled narratives play an outsized part. This is to be expected. As we all know (increasingly through neuroscience), the arts routinely activate our deepest personal responses.

Ticketmaster Facing Class-Action Lawsuits for Alleged Anti-Consumer Policies

www.ticketnews.com: At least two class action lawsuits are brewing against Ticketmaster in the wake of this week’s reporting by the CBC and Toronto Star on the company’s pro-broker resale operations. One stems from a Regina, Saskatchawan-based lawyer who told CTV he has been working on the lawsuit for six months. The other is based in the United States, where the Hagens Berman firm is seeking consumers who feel they have been affected by Ticketmaster’s policies to form the basis of a lawsuit here.