Why does everything get a standing ovation now?

Call it standing ovation inflation: these days, it feels like it's mandatory to stand and clap for live performances. Has our please clap era gone too far? That's what one Throughline listener wanted to know. So we traced the winding road from Shakespeare’s epilogues to Broadway divas to ridiculously long film festival ovations… and how they helped engineer the way we applaud. Guests: Roger Gilbert, professor in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell Kyle Buchanan, reporter and columnist for the New York Times Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:18Speaker 01

  OK, Rans, I'm going to start today's episode by taking you back to a time in history where thriller episodes occasionally begin.

• 0:26Speaker 02

  All right, Skylar, I'm ready.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Can you guess?

• 0:28Speaker 02

  Oh, my god. You're giving me all of human history to choose from? I don't know, tell me.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Ancient Rome.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  So back then, when a general and his army came home after winning a battle, people from the city would gather to celebrate their victory. These celebrations could take a few different forms. And the highest honor was something called a triumph.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  A triumph, OK.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it was this day-long parade through the streets of Rome. Imagine a long procession of musicians, people waving flags, throwing flower petals, exotic animals in the spoils of war, marching through the streets, celebrating their victory. Obviously, we don't have any audio recordings of a triumph from back then, but we can imagine it must have sounded a little bit like this.

• 1:25Speaker 02

  You're saying, "Let's go Knicks."

• 1:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. I just wasn't going to pass up an opportunity to relive the glory.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  That's right, "Let's go Knicks."

• 1:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, someone tweeted, "New York City is really experiencing their ancient Rome phase because of this outsized ticker-tape parade through the streets of Lower Manhattan."

• 1:47Speaker 02

  OK, tell me, why were you researching the ways ancient Rome celebrated military victories?

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Well, to be honest, the triumph was a detour on a journey I went on looking into standing ovations.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  It turns out, the standing ovation as we know it also has its roots in ancient Rome. After an army would return home from war, people in the city would gather and cheer and applaud. But it wasn't the highest form of praise.

• 2:13Speaker 02

  The triumph is the higher one.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  Right, right, right. But the standing ovation, the reason why I was looking into all of this is that we got a question from a listener.

• 2:23Speaker 03

  Hi, this is Haley in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  She left us a voice message explaining how, as a performer, she's noticed that every live show these days seems to get a standing ovation.

• 2:33Speaker 03

  That's what everyone does now. It doesn't mean anything anymore. How did we get here?

• 2:38Speaker 02

  Wait, that's so true. That is what everyone does now. Thanks for the question, Haley.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  And Haley's question got me thinking about this in the context of theater and the arts in particular, because she's right. It definitely feels like everything gets a standing ovation these days.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  I'm excited for this. After the break, producer Skylar Swenson is going to take me and you inside the history of the standing ovation.

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• 4:44Speaker 01

  So trying to track down something as nebulous as standing ovations through all of human history is, of course, not that easy.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  I imagine not.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  But using theater as my north star, I moved from ancient Rome to, of course, Shakespeare.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  Shakespeare, OK.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  And I found out something interesting during Shakespeare's time, which was that the audience was already standing. The groundlings at the Globe Theater, which is what they were actually called, were standing on the ground. They didn't have seats. So there's this standing part of standing ovation. But Shakespeare had a little trick to get people clapping. He would often write in the epilogue lines to get the audience to applaud.

• 5:24Speaker 06

  You know, it's a little weird when I've just said, "OK, please applaud now." And then, of course, people applaud. I mean, they would have applauded anyway, but, you know, I've just asked them to.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  This is Roger Gilbert.

• 5:38Speaker 06

  I am a professor in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  And I found Roger because he had written about standing ovations and applause in pop culture. And he has also, in addition to being a professor of literature, has performed in a few Shakespeare productions.

• 5:55Speaker 06

  I actually played a prospero myself last summer in The Tempest. And I got to say the lines where he says, "Release me from my bands with the help of your good hands." So he's telling them, "You can clap." But then he says, "Gentle breath of yours, my sails must fill, or else my project fails." So he's saying, "You can also cheer." You know, "I want to hear your voices as well as hear your hands." So that suggests that even back in Shakespeare's time, that was a part of the way audiences responded when they really liked something.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  I kind of love this. I mean, Shakespeare was basically saying, "Hey, you need to get on your feet. You need to clap, show the performers that you like what they did." It kind of reminds me of a laugh track, you know, from the sitcom era, "I'm a '90s Kid", where the audience, just like Shakespeare did, was cued to laugh and to engage.

• 6:52Speaker 07

  Make like a tree and lead. It's make like a banana and split.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  The cues kind of guarantee the audience is sort of on your side, right?

• 7:02Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  So how do we go from like Shakespeare into the more modern times? Was there a moment when the scales tipped and it was only positive praise and only big standing ovations?

• 7:17Speaker 01

  I found a ton of op-eds by grumpy theater critics about this issue of like, the standing ovation is just getting out of hand. And a lot of people in the musical theater world and historians see the rise in standing ovations on Broadway, in American theaters at least, in the 1960s after World War II. And that's for a few reasons. The first being, televisions became really popular in this time. And then entertainment became more and more an inside-the-house thing. And then, in contrast, if you go out to see a show live, it becomes more of a special occasion. It becomes more of a thing to maybe stand up for and clap as opposed to, you know,

• 8:02Speaker 01

  watching from home.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  Sitting on your couch.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  Other musical theater historians have referenced an intentional manufacturing of more applause because of the differences in the actual, like, composition and the end scenes or the end musical numbers. So there's an American musical theater historian, Ethan Morden, who came up with a theory called "the big lady shows." And it explains the shift in more applause and standing ovations at the end of Broadway musicals. So in the '50s, there were like these classic '50s musicals, like My Fair Lady. And the music that happens right before the curtain call was pretty short.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  And it barely gave time for an ensemble to come out on stage and like take their bows.

• 8:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  But around the '60s, there was the shift to really celebrating and showcasing the main lead actress, the diva.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  The big lady. Is that what? The big lady of the big lady theory?

• 9:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. So Hello, Dolly, which was produced in 1964, the biggest Broadway hit at the time that really provided an example of this shift.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  So this is the closing night curtain call moment featuring Bette Midler on Broadway in the production, the revived production of Hello, Dolly. So, you know, they've finished all their lines. This is just like the final moments of the musical. The whole ensemble comes out and build up to the most important character, right?

• 9:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, you get like progressively more central actors coming to the front.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  Bowing.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  Now we have the male lead, right? He's giving a bow, takes his hat off.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  The music is still kind of like building and building. And then the full ensemble gets together.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  And out comes-

• 10:05Speaker 02

  Oh, they're up pointing.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, there's your lead lady.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  I mean, if you're not on your feet by now, you don't have a heart.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  They're basically doing the Shakespeare thing.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, like taking a page out of Shakespeare's book, right? Like, we're gonna bake into the end, people's engagement.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  Maybe not saying explicitly, like, please clap now. But the music kind of forces you to get into the scene and to like-

• 10:33Speaker 02

  And to get on your feet, too.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  I was pumped up just watching the video on YouTube. You know what I mean?

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Like, let's go.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  This is energizing, you know? I love that we're like hearing the applause. There's something about applause, right? It just has a way of pumping you up.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  So outside of live theater and Broadway, I'm guessing you and our listeners maybe have heard about standing ovations and particularly long standing ovations at film festivals, especially the Cannes Film Festival.

• 11:05Speaker 08

  At the premieres, it's borderline mandatory. There's just so many factors that go into it, so it's not sort of an empirical badge of quality.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  This is Kyle Buchanan, and he's a reporter and columnist for The New York Times. And he's been going to Cannes for several years. He says supersized standing ovations are now the trademark of this film fest. But Kyle says that it's actually really different when you're in the room.

• 11:31Speaker 08

  It is a very long process, but it isn't just sort of numbingly clapping at nothing.

• 11:38Speaker 02

  So you're watching a movie, music swells, the screen fades to black, the credits roll. And at that stage, people, usually if they like the film, will start to clap. And maybe that's when the standing starts.

• 11:53Speaker 08

  But once the closing credits are done, a cameraman will station himself in front of the row that has the cast and crew. And so that cameraman will beam footage up to the big screen of the Grand Theatre Lumiere.

• 12:09Speaker 02

  Everybody's on their feet, everyone's applauding. But it's not like they're applauding because they saw like the best movie they've ever seen. They're actually applauding because there's someone to applaud for.

• 12:20Speaker 08

  Maybe it's the director. Let's say it's Wes Anderson at a Wes Anderson movie. So there'll be one minute of awkward Wes Anderson close up as everybody is applauding him. Then it will move over to the lead, the number one person in the film. Then that person will get about a minute or two, depending on how much they milk it.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  Still kind of the big lady theory, right? Because now, instead of the stage, you're like projecting them on screen. And it's like, get on your feet, get on your feet.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  It's the same energy.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Same thing.

• 12:51Speaker 02

  Okay, yeah, that's interesting.

• 12:52Speaker 08

  Maybe one of the cast members has gone over to the director and they're crying. That's getting applause now. So are we applauding for what we've just seen? Or are we applauding for the new micro narrative that we're seeing on the screen afterwards?

• 13:07Speaker 02

  Okay, so, I mean, I get that these super long standing ovations are exaggerated, kind of performative. But I also think they can carry a certain power beyond that room, right? You know, the example I'm thinking of is from last year's Venice Film Festival. There's this movie called The Voice of Hindra Jabb. It made headlines for its 23-minute-long standing ovation. Maybe we can hear a little bit of it?

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Okay, I'm gonna cue it up.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  So a quick overview of the movie. Hindra Jabb was a five-year-old Palestinian girl. She's at the center of this movie. In it, you hear her real-life calls to paramedics, her actual voice, as she's sitting in a car, trapped for hours, surrounded by the bodies of her family members, before eventually being killed by the IDF in Gaza.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  I saw it, it's a heartbreaking movie. In the US, though, it had a very limited release, right? So a lot of people didn't get to see it. And what they were more likely to have seen is the 23-minute standing ovation that was circulating online, which felt like it was making a really powerful statement, that it was a kind of way to make people notice.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  I think that we shouldn't underestimate the power of the optics, right? And the impact a viral video can have on far more people than the amount that can fit in a theater.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  Right, right. I mean, I don't think it's an accident that, again, at the Venice Film Festival just a few weeks ago, a documentary called Nazah by two Israeli filmmakers, which exposed Israel's calculated targeting of civilians in Gaza, got a 25-minute standing ovation.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  So I don't know, you know, if we're talking about recognizing the value of an individual piece of art or film, or whatever it might be, I can see how giving everything a standing ovation maybe devalues things. But if you look at it a different way, maybe it gives everything a little bit more value.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  Right, so Roger Gilbert, who we heard from earlier, actually brings this point up as well.

• 15:29Speaker 06

  I do remember being out on the quad at Cornell on the day of a solar eclipse. And we reached the moment, I think it's called annularity, when the sun was completely obscured. And a whole bunch of people were out there with me. And we just all spontaneously started clapping. It was nothing that had been planned. There was no signal. It was just something we all felt the need to do. And I learned something important about applause at that moment. It was such an illustration of how applause is not necessarily, or even primarily, meant for the people or performers that you're applauding for.

• 16:14Speaker 06

  Because in this case, there were no performers. The sun was not listening to our applause. So we were doing it for ourselves, but it was a way of communicating with each other, I think, more than anything. We all just needed to make a noise because we were seeing something so amazing.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  That's beautifully put.

• 16:37Speaker 02

  And I guess that's where I personally am landing a little bit, where I'm like, you know, yeah, we probably give some things standing ovations that don't deserve it. But also, if it leads to a moment of connection between you and the person next to you, it's worth it.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  I agree, yeah. There's something really beautiful about it being this ancient human tradition that we just keep doing.

• 17:04Speaker 02

  I am really glad we went on this journey. Thank you for looking into it. Thank you to Haley for calling us with her question that inspired this episode. And for all of you listening, if you have a question of your own, or if you have a side quest for us with an interesting nugget you can't stop thinking about, send us an email at [email protected], or call 872-588-8805 and leave a voicemail. And if you're open to us giving you a call back, leave your number, too. Throughline was created by me and Ramtin Atablouei. This episode was produced by me and-

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Skylar Swenson.

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  Leanna Simstrom. Jasmine Romero. Julia Redpath. Sarah Wyman.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  Amy Padula. Molly Marcello. Irene Noguchi. This episode was fact-checked by Greta Peddinger and mixed by Jimmy Keely. Music by Ramtin Atablouei and his band, Drop Electric. Thanks also to Johannes Durkey. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. Thanks for listening.

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