Julianne Moore and Bill Nighy in David Hare's The Vertical Hour. Photo: Paul Kolnik/AP
I'm barely into my week of New York theatre-going and have experienced three standing ovations. This is par for the course these days on the Great White Way. Whereas those who leap to their feet at the conclusion of a West End production are often made to feel foolish (or branded as - gasp - American), no Broadway show, it seems, is complete without the audience rising as one - the exception being those contrarians who take the opportunity to race up the aisle so they can be first to grab a taxi in the post-show scrum.
I've been thinking about the phenomenon of the New York ovation of late, not least because a mini-foray I took round Broadway in February yielded not a single one. You could argue, I suppose, that David Hare's The Vertical Hour - a play about the Iraq war - isn't necessarily going to rally theatre-goers in the same way as, say, Frasier star David Hyde Pierce in enchanting form in an otherwise pretty forgettable John Kander/Fred Ebb musical called Curtains. On the other hand, The Vertical Hour did feature a bona fide movie star, Julianne Moore, which should have been sufficient catnip for an audience to find itself "ovating again", as Maggie Smith once inimitably remarked of the Broadway public.
Maybe it's simply the difference between catching shows in the dog days of February and now, amidst the spring fever of awards season. There are related events almost every day: Thursday is the annual Tony nominees lunch.
The fact is, this is the time to see Broadway at its most self-defining. Each show is more determined than the next to garner its share of a fickle market. Behind those moist-eyed, smiling faces greeting the rapturous crowds night after night is the recognition that, as a song in Curtains tells us, "it's a business". And the biggest business goes to those productions and performers that jolt the audience fastest out of their seats.
You could argue, I suppose, that New York ticket prices themselves provide their own rather different jolt. If you had paid $251.25 - well over £100 - for so-called "premium seats" to Kevin Spacey and Eve Best in A Moon for the Misbegotten, you too would be likely to be on your feet cheering at the end of the O'Neill play's three hours, as a packed house visibly was when I peeked into the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on Tuesday night.
Is it possible these ovations have less to do with merit than with a public needing to justify its considerable financial outlay? After seeing Curtains, I'd be inclined to say yes. Except that David Hyde Pierce is really very, very good.
