An Authentic Shakespeare Audience, in Manhattan

This week, Lincoln Center Theater’s production of Shakespeare’s Henry IV played to a packed house – of public high school students. Student audiences are rarely a performer’s dream, but this one was apparently quite different. “Certainly they were not the usual Wednesday matinee crowd. They hooted, cheered, hissed and roared with laughter. They were probably closer to an Elizabethan audience at the Globe than anything the actors at the Vivian Beaumont Theater had ever faced. It was, in the language of the theater, a great house.”