Audiences

When three American teenagers in jeans showed up to see "The Two Gentlemen of Verona" at the new Globe Theater here, an usher sketched surprising ground rules, saying, "Please be as loud and as rude as you like." Shakespeare as you've never seen it has come home after 350 years, complete with rowdy "groundlings" standing before the chest-high stage in a faithful outdoor replica of Old Will's original "wooden O" theater.

The small, but thriving home-video market for silent films is growing steadily. Major companies such as MGM/UA, HBO, CBS-Fox and Paramount continue to release them, upgrading a market that was once overrun by shoddy product. Silent films are for specialized tastes, appealing mostly to film buffs, historians and collectors. The silent-movie fan is generally older and sophisticated--attracted by the simplicity and the sense of history inherent in these movies.

ON a recent episode of ABC's "Brothers & Sisters," the siblings of a large, close-knit Los Angeles family must lure their mother out of the house before her surprise birthday party. The ruse they employ is to have one of the daughters take her to a matinee of "Wicked." Apparently, or so the plot went, the lawyer-brother used to date one of the flying monkeys in the show. At the least, that suggests that "Wicked" must have been playing in L.A.

If a reigning star at American Ballet Theatre -- recently (if unofficially) crowned one of the kings of dance -- can't inspire enough support to launch even a midsize ballet company in Southern California, who can?

As baseball resumes this spring and as the basketball season begins to wind down, one thing is evident: On the popularity meter, these are sports heading in different directions. Basketball is gaining. Baseball, the undisputed national pastime 30 or 40 years ago, has lost its grip on the country.

Can millions of listeners just disappear? That's a question plaguing Howard Stern and one with vital implications for radio itself in the wake of the shock jock's heralded and hyped switch from free to satellite broadcasting. The self-proclaimed King of All Media once commanded a national audience of 12 million daily listeners before jumping to satellite in January. But since then, his kingdom has shrunk to a small fraction of that size.

Red ink doesn't always mean failure. It might point to opportunities. The spectator sports covered on these pages have had their share of red ink lately. The most recent case as detailed by The Times' Shauna Show is the finally revealed deficit of the Los Angeles Arts Festival. And there have been other deficit sightings: the city's Band-Aid remedy for the Los Angeles Theatre Center, the problems of San Francisco's Festival 2000, the fiscal toe-stretching of the Joffrey Ballet.

Warm-up comics have a term for what they do. They call it being "on the rail." The phrase evokes a fitting image. In television studios throughout Burbank, warm-ups perch on the railing that separates live audiences from the sitcoms they have come to see. During tapings that can last three hours or longer, warm-ups joke, cajole, answer questions and do whatever else is necessary to keep the audience in good spirits. The work is steady and the pay is good.

A few dozen men and women hired to sit in a television audience and look good doing it assembled one recent morning at Paramount Studios in Hollywood. "Leeza" was taping a new promo during an otherwise slow summer hiatus period. It's one of many television shows looking for warm bodies to present a polished image, often to offset the wrinkled T-shirt- and baseball-cap-clad hordes lining up for free tickets.

A story is wending its way through journalistic circles here about a prominent newspaper editor who, after arriving at the airport in Luxembourg on his way to a conference, spotted a man reading media baron Robert Maxwell's fledgling weekly paper, the European.