Free Front of House: Observations from a Decade on the Aisle by Denise Reich

about five hours to kill, I was often more ambitious. Sometimes I visited museums and other attractions. I wandered over to the main library branch on 42nd, where they had rotating free exhibits on the first floor. I tried to do as many errands as possible, scheduled eye appointments and picked up prescriptions. The city became my playground, and I wandered around taking photos.
    Often, though, just I did what many other show folks did: I went out, I got my lunch, I took it back to the theater to eat, and I slept. If I happened to be working in a house that made a microwave available to the ushers, I’d bring some soup to nuke.
    If you walk into a theater between shows on matinee days, you need to be quiet, because it’s naptime. Some folks are lucky enough to have their own private dressing rooms or offices to sleep in. The rest of the actors, ushers and crew crash wherever they can find a quiet, comfortable place: the couches in the lounges; the seats in the auditorium; the carpeted floors; under the stage.
    My favorite place to nap was the auditorium itself. I’d select a seat, close my eyes and rest under the kindly glow of the ghost light. As I leaned back in my seat I heard sounds around me, faintly, in the distance. A flurry of woodwind notes might drift in from the lobby as the house manager practiced his clarinet in his office. A new actor might be running through his songs with the musical director in the orchestra pit. One might pick up the echo of crew members calling to their friends from the stage door alley on the other side of the orchestra fire exits. The noise was comforting in the calm cocoon of the darkened theater.
    At Phantom my wakeup call was the “Magical Lasso,” or the Phantom’s red killer noose. It would descend to the bare stage in all its ghastly glory, swinging and spinning slightly, so the crew could lock it in place for the next performance. The noose was always one of the first things the crew attended to during the pre-set. It meant that the lights in the auditorium would shortly be turned on, and that all of the nappers would groggily start to wake up. It was time to get back to work.

Accessible Prejudice

    Over the last twenty years, Broadway theaters have become increasingly accessible to disabled patrons. This is unquestionably a wonderful thing. In the 1990s and early 2000s the Shuberts and other theater owners worked architectural magic to make their venues welcoming to as many patrons as possible. Considering that many of the theaters they were dealing with were very old, and were constructed in eras when the disabled were extremely marginalized, this was no small feat.
    Accommodations for disabled patrons vary from theater to theater. There is almost always an accessible restroom somewhere on the first floor. These facilities were added to the older theaters one at a time, and were sometimes carved out of box office space. There are seats with retractable armrests for easy transfer from wheelchairs, for people with casts or braces, or for patrons of size. Some seats can be removed altogether, in only a few minutes, to accommodate patrons who need to remain in their wheelchairs.
    Many of the pay phones are equipped with keyboards for text relay service for the hearing impaired. Sometimes the Theatre Development Fund also organizes special performances for deaf patrons, which involve rigging up a zipper board on the side of the stage that displays all the dialogue and lyrics. When I was working I always looked forward to these performances, since many of them also included live actors who interpreted the show in sign language. They stood in front of the stage on one side of the orchestra during the performance and signed to the hearing impaired patrons in front of them. These ASL interpretations were exquisitely beautiful, and I always found myself ignoring the performers who were singing and watching the ones who were signing. Every theater also has infrared assisted listening