We all go to the theatre for the same reason, we sit in the audience and we hope that the production we are about to see does at least one of a few things: we expect to laugh or cry at the appropriate time, we want to clap loudly, or boo, and hiss hysterically; and we hope that at some point during the production we are brave enough to stand and applaud.
With this in mind, many of us will sit in the cafe/bar after a show and offer critic on the best and worst bits of the production, and how we would have done things differently given half the chance. We all go to the theatre to be moved in some way, and you’ll find that those who can’t open their minds, probably don’t go to the theatre at all.
The large majority of people sit and watch a film, or a theatrical presentation, and comment on the same things: human nature means that often it is the negatives that are highlighted instead of the positives, and audiences are not always concerned about how the show was put together – so long as what they are watching is of good quality. In our culture, “ticket price” tends to be the factor that dictates our levels of expectation, but some people struggle to differentiate between what is expected from professional performers working with a large budget (for staging, costume, lighting, sound, make-up and set design) and the priceless work of youth theatre productions and school plays.
I realise that the audience do not pay their ticket price to consider anything other than the quality of what they are offered, and I don’t expect them to sit and consider how the production was put together. We don’t accept eating undercooked food in a restaurant because the chef is only “learning”, in the same way we don’t want our football teams to play “youngsters” if it means that this will weaken our chances of winning. The public however, is the public, meaning the audience of a youth theatre production are often as hard to please as those who attend professional theatres on a regular basis.
However, speaking from my own experience of youth theatre, there is one MASSIVE difference to consider. The journey that the performers have been on is ALWAYS far more important that the quality of the production. Think of it like an iceberg, you may see just 5% of a child’s overall achievement (on stage), but over the last 15 years I have had the opportunity to see where the other 95% comes from (off stage)…