My wife and I usually go out of town to see cultural events. Over the last few years we have attended performances of the San Francisco Ballet, Los Angeles Philharmonic and Chicago Symphony Orchestra. We have been to the Disney Center, the Hollywood Bowl, Ravinia, Chicago Orchestra Hall and the War Memorial Opera House. Now we wanted to see if we had been giving short shrift to the town we live in. Attending a Joshua Bell performance at a brand new venue, what could go wrong? The answer is a lot. Granted, this was one performance and I was sitting in the balcony. That caveat said, the Smith Center has problems in three areas: audience behavior, acoustics and staffing.\n\nI have been in better behaved audiences at death metal concerts. The woman behind me kept tapping her toes, crossing and uncrossing her legs and occasionally kicking the back of my chair. This was a problem because of the steepness of the seats in the balcony, all the noise and kicking was right by my ears. The patron next to my wife decided to crack her knuckles and joints during the third selection. Another patron was rustling her program so loudly (even though she could not possibly have read it in the dark) that I could hear it twenty seats over. But most of all was the incessant coughing, throat clearing and crinkling of plastic water bottles. There is less background noise when a train goes by Ravinia than in this concert hall. I am always glad to see children exposed to good music and attending a concert is a great way for young people to be socialized. However, parents control your children or remove them from the hall quickly. Other venues restrict attendance to children over 8 years of age. The Smith Center should consider such a limit. To my fellow audience members: you should applaud at the end of each piece, not between movements. If you do not know when that is, remain quiet so as not to disturb your fellow concertgoers.\n\n Dear Smith Center Management, Please make announcements about remaining quiet and turning off cell phones and pagers at the beginning of each performance. Your audience does not know any better and it won't learn unless you tell it. I silenced my phone for this performance but its ring would have gone unnoticed in this circus.\n\n The staff obviously felt the audience was not making enough noise while the music was playing. While the music was playing, we could hear slamming doors and items being dropped. The noises seemed to be coming from backstage. I was wondering what would come next. Perhaps the beep beep beep of a trash truck backing up or maybe a backdrop falling over on the stage. There was definitely no way to just lose myself in the music and enjoy the performance.\n\n The staff in the front of the house was courteous and excited to be showcasing the new venue. However, they did nothing (and I expect this is from inexperience and lack of training) to deal with all the audience noise. A question I have is, why ask people to arrive an hour before (6:30) the performance but not open the express elevator to the balcony until 7? Furthermore, the doors to the hall were opened later than that. This really is a quibble, but what is blogging for?\n\n I cannot speak to the overall acoustics in Reynolds Hall after hearing one performance in one seat and I am not an acoustical engineer. My experience does raise questions about the acoustics at the Smith Center. First of all, there is no carpeting on the floor of the balcony seats. It seems to me that this would help dampen the noise emanating from the audience. The fact that I heard noises from backstage points to a design flaw. You know people have to work during the performance. You know you do not want that noise heard out front. Your design must incorporate things to isolate the backstage activity from the front.\n\n Unfortunately there is no way to tell if all the noise was because of the audience or if the volume of the music reaching me was lower than expected. In other words was I sitting in a dead spot? I cannot be sure. Perhaps my criticism is more properly leveled at the balcony seats. To know for sure, I would need to attend another performance and sit in another location. But, after this experience, that is not likely to happen for years.
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