There is a time and a place for belting into song, with some appropriate options being the shower, the car, cleaning the house, making a pot of spaghetti, etc. Absent from the list of when and where to unleash the melody in your heart, however, is a movie theater. Unless maybe the theater is screening “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” or something.
AMC Theatres, hip to the discourse surrounding “Wicked” fans’ exuberance for singing along with Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande in packed theaters, and the annoyance expressed by others who paid good money to enjoy the songs from the film sung by the actors actually performing them, and not local drama nerds, have made effort to crack down on this carrying on. Will it work? Probably not. But the effort is appreciated by some.
“Yall theater nerds better not be singing during my screening of ‘Wicked’ tonight,” one fan wrote in a post to X, expressing a view held by many following the out-of-place trend that began as soon as the film hit theaters in early screenings ramping up to its official November 22 wide release.
“To avoid a full theater of people singing along, I got tickets to a 3D screening of ‘Wicked’ tonight. Infinitely more excited,” wrote another fan.
Stepping in front of a rising issue here, AMC Theaters’ new advisory will now run before each screening, with the warning: “No talking. No texting. No singing. No wailing. No flirting. And absolutely no name-calling. Enjoy the magic of movies.”
The fear is that this advisory may inspire people to sing even louder, out of rebellion and an unharnessed love for musical theater, such as in the case of one fan who posted to X that they are more than ready to break the rules, writing, “Me seeing the ‘Wicked’ movie singing along after I’m told not to,” along with a clip of Kyle Richards singing on the Fox reality show, “We Are Family.”
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