performer seizes phone without missing a note

Filming the Show: Pardon the Intrusion? Or Punish It?
A seized phone. A stopped concert. A text from Rihanna. All are new fuel for a heated debate about theater etiquette in the digital age.

Joshua Henry, the star of a new Off Broadway musical called “The Wrong Man,” had tried repeatedly to signal his disapproval to the man in the onstage seating who was using his smartphone to capture his performance, but he wasn’t getting through.

By the third song, Mr. Henry had had enough. So he reached into the seats, deftly grabbed the phone out of the man’s hand, wagged it disapprovingly, and tossed it under a riser — all mid-song, without skipping a beat. “I knew I had to do something,” he explained later.

Just a few nights earlier, in Ohio, the renowned violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter had stopped playing Beethoven mid-concerto to ask a woman in the front row to quit making a video of her. After the woman rose to reply, she was escorted out of the hall by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra’s president, and the music resumed.

Both artists were cheered — first in person, later on social media — for taking a stand against the growing ranks of smartphone addicts who cannot resist snapping pictures and making recordings that are often prohibited by rule or by law, that are distracting to performers and patrons, and that can constitute a form of intellectual property theft.

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This fall Lincoln Center will make four concerts in its White Light Festival cellphone-free, using Yondr, a service where audience members can stash their devices in locked pouches during performances. The service said this will be its first use in classical music. (Both Madonna and Rihanna have used Yondr to create phone-free spaces at their own events — Madonna for her Madame X tour, and Rihanna for her Savage x Fenty show.)

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