Nicole V.
Yelp
We went to the Civic to see Hairspray and sat in the balcony. Team VP has been to the Civic one other time about five years ago and we had excellent seats on the main floor, but the play was so horrible by intermission we left along with nearly half of the rest of the audience.
I'm hard of hearing, so we were more than a little worried about how I would do with the Civic and honestly it would have been better for me to just learn sign language because they had a signer during the whole show! Each time I felt like I was catching up with the dialogue, the orchestra would start and drown a mumbling character out, or the audience would laugh over dialogue and I'd be lost again.
I can loosely read lips, but again, we were in the balcony and some of these actors were singing and mumbling- on purpose- which made it pretty near impossible. To make everything even more complicated, the gentlemen seated across from us commented on everything happening.
None of this is the Civic's fault or problem, but I did want to let other hearing challenged or noise sensitive people know that this theater has an annoyingly brilliant way of being not loud enough (dialogue), while at the same time being way too loud (music and singing).