Have you been to a concert lately?

Look around the theater at any point during the night, and you’ll see thousands . . . that’s right . . . thousands of smartphones and even dumbphones in the air, taking photos and shooting video.  And I’d bet that at least 75% of that content gets shared in some public way: through social media, or email, or just showing it off at the water cooler.

Just think about that for a second . . . so at one concert performance, just one, there are thousands upon thousands of photos and videos of the event shared tens of thousands of times.

And it costs the entertainer nothing.  The audience becomes their advertising agency. For freebies.

This can’t happen at Broadway shows, of course.  The concert experience is a different one than the theatrical, not to mention that it would be way too distracting to the rest of the crowd (although at Godspell, we pulled off the Tweet Seats with no disruption to the rest of the audience at all).

But just because something can’t happen, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t recognize the power of the initiative and find some way around our obstacles.

For example, could we allow encourage the taking of photos and videos during the curtain call?  What about before the show?  (I still see ushers telling patrons to put away their cameras every now and then . . . when all these folks are doing is taking a pic of the curtain!?!)   Could we allow it during one immersive-like number in a show?  Could we . . .

Wait.  I’ve got an idea.

But I bet you’ve got others.

I tell you what, I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.  Just give me a couple o’ weeks.

In the meantime, comments are open to hear what you think we should do!