Here's how everybody first had it confirmed that Horror Show really knew absolutely nothing about theatre. This comes from an email sent by New Line's director.
Back in August, the New Line people had been begging Horror Show for a seating chart so that Metrotix could put their tickets on sale for their show opening in September, Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll. The developers and Horror Show insisted that New Line use reserved seating at the Ivory, but they couldn't do that without a seating chart. For weeks, Horror Show swore on various occasions that she had given the seating info to Metrotix, even though she actually had not. Everybody involved in the Ivory would soon find out that was a pattern. First fuck up, then lie about it to cover your ass. Problem is, she always gets caught because she's such a clumsy liar.
Finally she sends New Line a seating chart, but with no numbers on the seats! Metrotix couldn't build a house of reserved seating without seat numbers! Also, New Line had been promised a center aisle down the middle of the house (New Line likes to play scenes out in the audience). In fact, Horror Show had actually drawn a center aisle onto an architect's rendering of the house when she promised the aisle would be there. In the end, it would turn out that there would never be a center aisle, despite months of promises. In the end, there would be a cross aisle between the third and fourth rows, but because Horror Show doesn't know the vocabulary -- or mechanics -- of theatre, she thought that was pretty much the same...
Then finally in mid-August, after three months of begging, Horror Show sent New Line and Metrotix a seating chart. And the real horror began. On this chart, Horror Show had numbered the theatre seats consecutively up through the house, starting at seat 1 and going up to seat 230, so that each row would have entirely different numbers:
Row A, seats 1-15 (left to right)
Row B, seats 16-30 (right to left)
Row C, seats 31-45 (left to right)…
You get the idea...
It made everyone wonder if Horror Show had really ever even been in a theatre before…! New Line told her that she had to number the seats like other theatres do, every row, 1-15. She wasn't sure if she liked that idea. She wanted "to do something different."
And though this is a small, 230-seat house, all one section, she also wanted to label small, 4-row sections of the theatre as "orchestra," "mezzanine," "lower balcony," etc.
Why would she do that, you ask? "To make it special," she told them.
Can you imagine a better way to piss off audiences than to make them feel like they’re being manipulated, to use labels that don’t mean anything, to let someone buy a mezzanine ticket and then arrive to find there is no mezzanine…?
But the fun was still only beginning...
Sic Semper Tyrannis!
An Ivory Survivor
