All the playing to the audience and hyper audience reactions annoyed me as well for the same reason...I was missing lyrics because the audience was screaming at everything. I didn't see how the broadcast started because I live in New York, where some issue with Spectrum Cable kept the broadcast off the air for about 8 minutes at the beginning, but I thought one of the most effective things about the original staging was that the cast just took the stage in silence at the start of the show and held through whatever audience response they got. In my experience seeing the show, that let the audience get a lot of their feelings out of their system all at once at the top and mitigated somewhat the reactions that we saw last night.
But, I suspect that the audience for the broadcast was coached to be as big and responsive as possible and the staging, of course, had the cast playing directly to, high-fiving, and stage diving with the crowd, none of which added anything to the proceedings and should have been cut. |
