Lyric Top 40: #40, Don’t Say Anything

The Lyric Top 40
You may have heard that we are celebrating a pretty important milestone in our history over here at The Lyric Stage this year: we’re celebrating 40 years of bringing Boston audiences exciting, innovative, and enriching theater.

Forty years is a long time, and we know a lot of you out there have been with us for a whole lot of those years, and some of you have just joined us recently. We think that’s awesome: that we have so many people who care about the Lyric and love things about the Lyric. A lot of really cool things have happened here, and continue to happen here, and we want to take some time to really acknowledge where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going.

And so we introduce you to the Lyric Top 40, a new feature on our blog that celebrates the large and the small, the obvious and the obscure, our very favorite things about The Lyric Stage Company of Boston, the things that make us uniquely Lyric.

Without further adieu, the Lyric Top 40.

#40: The fact that you can probably finish this sentence: “If you enjoy what you see on stage this evening, be sure to go home and tell somebody. If you don’t…”

How many of us have sat in the audience during the brief pre-show speech waiting for this line? Laugh, chuckle, or smirk-inducing as it may be, we know that most of you folks who have joined us more than once in seasons past know to expect this line, and you know it’s almost always coming. We hope that by now its tongue-in-cheeky nature brings a smile to your face. Some of you have even started to say the punchline along with us. We won’t comment on how we feel about that.

What we do hope is that you really hear the message behind the punchline: we’re so glad to have you, and we’re so glad you enjoy talking with us before the show and during intermission. The best parts of our day come when we get to hear you talk about the play and your reactions to it. You’re our family and that means we love the intelligent, thoughtful conversations we have with you about the work we’re doing on and off stage.

So keep talking: be Lyric Stage ambassadors! If a show means something to you, if you’re still thinking about it the next morning, or if you simply laughed til you cried, we want you to share that meaning, thought, or joy with a friend. Tell them we’re here – tell them what we’re doing. You are our audience, our community, and we need you to help make that community bigger and better for the next 40 years, and add more and more voices to the conversation.

The next time you’re here at the Lyric and that curtain speech starts up, sit tight in your seat, open your ears, and take it to heart: be sure to go home and tell somebody if you enjoy the show. In fact, tell multiple somebodies. Tell everyone you know! And if you don’t?

Don’t say anything.