Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Reuters
This reporting is one of several scoops featured in this week’s edition of Confider, the newsletter pulling back the curtain on the media. Subscribe here and send your questions, tips, and complaints here.
Playbill pulled an investigation into Broadway audience misbehavior from its website after the renowned theater mag’s CEO complained it was “too salacious,” Confider has learned.
Playbill published the 2,000-word exposé on Wednesday, headlined “Physical Assault, Vomit in the Aisles, Stalking in the Streets: Why Audience Misbehavior Has Gotten Out of Hand,” detailing nightmare accounts of theater workers who’ve experienced a rise in verbal and physical altercations with patrons. “We never had alcohol around like we do right now,” one anonymous worker told Playbill. “You could have a drink in the lobby before the show, but you couldn’t take it to your seat, so there was no nursing a triple and getting progressively more drunk as the show went on. Now we have people so hammered they can’t even stand by intermission, and our custodial staff are having to clean up in-house vomiting at least once a month.”
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