From House Manager to Bouncer

To produce the rock musical Murder Ballad, Studio transformed Stage 4 into a gritty dive bar—but strong pours and vulgar bathroom graffiti aren’t the only elements of the immersive experience. In this first-person account, House Manager Robert Montenegro details the usually cheerful front-of-house team’s transformation into a surly bar staff. 

If you visit Studio with any degree of regularity you're likely to run into one of the affable and gregarious members of the front of house team. We house managers are the ones who oversee your day-of-performance experience. With assistance from our superb corps of volunteer ushers, we direct you to your seats, answer questions on myriad topics, assist patrons with disabilities, and point out the notoriously hard-to-find first floor men's restroom—all with a flourish of good humor and resplendent grace. Our goal is to serve while being as friendly and welcoming as possible. I dig it. It's fun. We do a pretty good job.

All that said, you can probably imagine my apprehension when, during rehearsals for Murder Ballad, Artistic Director David Muse called a meeting to let us know things would need to run a little bit differently for this production.

You see, Murder Ballad is an immersive experience. Where a show like Laugh or Bad Jews begins when the actors hit the stage, the Murder Ballad experience starts as soon as you step foot on the corner of 14th and P. Rather than tickets, your name is on a list. Rather than through a theatre door, you enter the space by way of a dingy back alley. And rather than acting like cheerful and welcoming house managers, our staff was directed to play the role of a brusque bar staff. Affable and gregarious? Make way for surly and supercilious. It's all part of the experience.

I find all this rather groovy. It's unlike anything I've ever seen before at Studio and it's thrilling to play an integral role in the performance. That said allow me just to put this out in the open: I sure as hell am not an actor. You'll find that the folks who work in theatre administration are typically cut from one of two cloths:

Cloth One: Person was a huge theatre nerd growing up. At some point they either decided a) "there's no way I can pull off being an actor" or b) "I don't want to be completely destitute the rest of my life," and so they took on some other profession: accountant, publicist, the person from development who hounds you for money, etc.

Cloth Two: "Theatre? Yeah sure, I'll do it."

My theatre origin story isn't 100% Cloth Two but it certainly resembles it more than Cloth One. My most heralded on-stage performance was as a sheep in the parochial school Christmas Pageant. I became a playwright (and thus, a bona fide "theatre person") almost by accident. I have, for the most part, done the public a major service by remaining offstage as much as humanly possible.

So to say that adopting a thick performative element to my front of house routine has been challenging, well, understatement of the year right there. It goes against my nature to be gruff to Studio patrons. I can still be helpful and answer questions, but my helpfulness needs to be candy-coated with the most bitterly sour flavor imaginable. I've got to be the Sour Patch Extreme of house managers, more or less.

During our first few Murder Ballad run-throughs I kept catching myself uttering forbidden words like "sir," "m'am," "please," and—the horror!—"thank you." I'd make up for this by lathering on my character work, which I found consists mostly of intense squinting. My job is also to check IDs for folks who want to drink at the Murder Ballad bar. It's hard not to force a (forbidden) smile when a sweet 80-year-old lady produces a driver's license and promises it's not a fake.

Honestly, with all hyperbole aside, it's been a lot of fun and a neat new challenge for me. I suppose it's fitting because Murder Ballad is a neat new challenge for the theatre as a whole. The results are a brilliant success and that's a testament to the flexibility and gung-ho attitude of the great people who work for this company.

And I think those results are going to continue what we at Studio do best, which is to evoke wonder within our audience. Several patrons approached me after a recent performance to express their awe at the whole thing, how every detail contributes to a vivid and encompassing experience. That was pretty cool to hear because it meant we pulled it off... squints notwithstanding.

Robert Montenegro