For an instant during one of the first L.A. performances of "The Black Rider," actor Matt McGrath thought he might be witnessing another heart attack in the audience. Like that time on the East Coast, in a different play, when they had to stop the show and call in the medics.
But it soon became apparent that the three people causing the commotion in the Ahmanson Theatre's front tier were merely sick of what they were seeing. With the first act still in progress, they got up and walked out.
Such interruptions are rare in live theater, so this was a statement -- and a harbinger of more early exits to come. As playgoers continue to abandon seats costing as much as $95, a night with "Rider" has turned into the showbiz equivalent of red states versus blue, two camps seeing the same thing and reaching polarized conclusions.
The highly unconventional musical, which runs two hours and 35 minutes, including intermission, is the concoction of writer William S. Burroughs, songwriter Tom Waits and director Robert Wilson -- famously nonconformist figures from literature, pop music and the stage, respectively. The storytelling is largely oblique and nonlinear, the visuals dazzling and surreal, the songs and dialogue sardonically macabre. The show is playing through June 11 in a 2,100-seat house -- scaled back to 1,600 for this run -- where the 30,000 subscribers are most accustomed to Broadway musicals and revivals of middlebrow comedy.
"Rider," in all its cracked-cabaret strangeness, is at the Ahmanson because Michael Ritchie, Center Theatre Group's artistic director, loved it two years ago during a wildly successful stand in San Francisco. He admired how it attracted a diverse audience, including the younger folks theaters covet as they fret over how to replenish their older subscription crowds. "I thought, 'That's the kind of audience I want in my theaters,' " recalled Ritchie, whose average subscriber in three CTG houses is 51 years old. To draw them in, the company launched a separate website for the show, www.theblackrider.org, and distributed leaflets in rock music clubs.
But what about keeping them there from curtain to curtain? Sales were 70% of capacity through the first 3 1/2 weeks, about 1,120 per show, according to CTG figures. After last week, with attendance declining beyond the run's halfway mark, the overall average had dipped to 66%. Nightly attrition winnows the audience further.
