Why You Should See Live Theatre (and Put Your Phone Away)

I have a theory about why people don’t go to live theatre more often, and it has nothing to do with ticket prices or parking or not knowing what to wear. It’s simpler than that. They have forgotten, or possibly never learned, that some experiences require your full participation to work. Here is why you should see live theatre: it will not play without you. Watching something on a screen does not require you. It will play whether you’re paying attention or scrolling through your phone or wandering into the kitchen for another snack. Live theatre is different. Live theatre requires you to show up, sit down, put the phone away, and be present for the next two hours. And that, it turns out, is precisely why it’s better.

I have seen a lot of theatre. Hadestown in a moment of political fury that made every lyric about walls and fossil fuels land like a gut punch. Six the Musical with a crowd of women who collectively lost their minds when the queens took the stage. Come From Away on a night when the whole theatre seemed to be holding its breath together for most of the second act. Ain’t Too Proud, which made me cry in a way I was not remotely prepared for. The Book of Mormon, which made me laugh so hard I was genuinely concerned about the people seated around me. Cinderella at the National Arts Centre with someone who had never been to a musical before and watched the whole thing with their hands pressed together in front of their face like a child seeing snow for the first time.

Every single one of those nights exists in my memory in a way that no film or television series does. Not because the stories were better, though often they were, but because I was there. I was in the room. And that changes everything.

You Have to Pay Attention

Let’s start with the phones, because I know this is where some of you are already getting defensive.

At a movie, your phone is technically supposed to be away but we all know how that goes. At home watching television, it’s not even a question. The phone is right there, the laptop is open, the show is on in the background while you do eleven other things simultaneously. We have trained ourselves to half-watch everything and fully experience nothing.

Live theatre dismantles that habit completely. The actors are right there. In the room. With you. If you pull out your phone, the light is visible to everyone around you and possibly to the people on stage. More to the point, if you are looking at your phone you are missing something that is happening once and will never happen exactly that way again. Every performance is a one-time event. The actors, the audience, the energy in the room, the particular way a joke lands on a Tuesday night versus a Saturday, it all combines into something that exists only in that hour and then is gone.

That constraint, which sounds like a limitation, is actually the thing that makes live theatre feel electric. You are not watching a recording. You are watching something happen. The stakes feel real because they are real. Nobody gets a second take.

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You Get Dressed. On Purpose.

There is something that happens to a person when they put on an actual outfit and leave the house with the intention of doing something worth dressing for. I am not talking about black tie, though absolutely do that if the occasion warrants it. I am talking about the act of deciding this evening deserves more than what I normally wear to the grocery store.

Getting dressed for theatre is a ritual, and rituals matter. They signal to your brain that something different is about to happen, that this is not a regular evening, that you have stepped out of the ordinary and into something worth showing up for. You feel it before you even get to the venue.

And the venue. Live theatre is almost always performed in a beautiful building. The National Arts Centre in Ottawa. The Elgin and Winter Garden in Toronto. The Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver. These are not casual spaces. They have weight and history and the particular smell of old velvet and possibility. Walking into a great theatre building is its own experience before the curtain even rises.

Dress for it. You will feel better. The evening will feel different. This is not a trivial thing.

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The Audience Is Part of the Show

Here is something nobody tells you before your first live theatre experience: the audience is not a passive observer. The audience is a participant.

When a joke lands and the whole theatre laughs at once, the actors hear it and the timing of the next line shifts accordingly. When a dramatic moment lands in complete silence and you can feel five hundred people collectively holding their breath, that silence is something the actors feel and respond to. The energy in the room on any given night is shaped by who is there and what they bring to it, and that energy shapes the performance in return.

I have seen the same show twice and had two completely different experiences because the audiences were different. One night a comedy gets laughs in unexpected places and the actors play into it and suddenly a scene that wasn’t particularly memorable in the script becomes the best moment of the evening. Another night a quiet moment in the same show lands with a weight it didn’t quite have before because the room was particularly still. This is not possible with film. The film is the film. It is the same every time. The audience is irrelevant to what happens on screen.

In live theatre, you matter. Your laughter matters. Your silence matters. Your presence in the room is part of the experience for the person sitting beside you, the person on stage, and yourself.

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Nobody Gets a Second Take

There is a particular kind of attention that only comes from knowing something is happening once and then it’s over.

Every person on that stage has rehearsed for months to give you the best possible performance. There is no editing room, no visual effects team, no opportunity to fix something that didn’t quite work. If a prop goes missing someone improvises. If an actor forgets a line someone covers. If something unexpected happens the show goes on, because the show always goes on, and the audience watches all of it in real time.

That rawness is part of the magic. When everything goes right in live theatre it feels almost miraculous, because you know how many things could have gone differently. And when something goes slightly sideways and the actors handle it with grace and keep going, you feel a rush of genuine admiration that no polished film can produce. You have witnessed something. You were there when it happened.

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Live Theatre Makes You Think Differently

Film and television are designed to make thinking optional. The camera tells you where to look. The score tells you how to feel. The editing moves you from moment to moment without requiring you to do anything but receive it.

Live theatre gives you a stage and asks you to fill in the rest. The sets are suggestions. The lighting is interpretation. You are not being shown a world so much as invited to imagine one. That imaginative participation is not passive. It is active, and it leaves you with something different than a film does.

I have walked out of live theatre performances in genuine conversation with people I barely knew because the show gave us something to actually talk about. Not “did you see that part” but “what did you think that meant” and “did you feel like the ending was hopeful or not” and “who do you think was actually right.” Theatre produces those conversations because it leaves space for them. It does not resolve everything for you.

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Go See Live Theatre. Just Go.

You do not need to be a theatre person to love live theatre. You need to be a person who is willing to put down the phone for two hours, get slightly dressed up, and be present for something that is happening only once. That is a low bar and the return on it is enormous.

Broadway Across Canada brings world-class productions to cities across the country. The National Arts Centre in Ottawa consistently programs shows worth getting dressed up for. Most major Canadian cities have a theatre scene that goes well beyond what most people assume. The price of a ticket is real, and it is also, in my experience, almost always worth it.

Go see live theatre. Then come back and tell me I was wrong.Then come back and tell me I was wrong.

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Why You Should See Live Theatre FAQ