Throughline - Why does everything get a standing ovation now?

Episode Date: October 13, 2026

Call it standing ovation inflation: these days, it feels like it's mandatory to stand and clap for live performances. Has our please clap era gone too far? That's what one Throughline listener wanted to know. So we traced the winding road from Shakespeare’s epilogues to Broadway divas to ridiculously long film festival ovations… and how they helped engineer the way we applaud.Guests:Roger Gilbert, professor in the Department of Literatures in English at CornellKyle Buchanan, reporter and columnist for the New York TimesSupport public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Okay, Rand, I'm going to start today's episode by taking you back to a time in history where through my episodes occasionally begin. All right, Skyler. I'm ready. Can you guess? Oh, my God. You're giving me all of human history to choose from? I don't know. Tell me. Ancient Rome. So back then when a general in his army came home after winning a battle, people from the city would gather to celebrate their victory. These celebrations could take a few different forms. And the highest honor was something called. A triumph. A triumph. Okay. Yeah. So it was this day-long parade through the streets of Rome.

Imagine a long procession of musicians, people waving flags, throwing flower petals, exotic animals and the spoils of war marching through the streets celebrating their victory. Obviously, we don't have any audio recordings of a triumph from back then. But we can imagine it must have sounded a little bit like this. Say, let's go, Nix. Yeah, that's right. I just wasn't going to pass up an opportunity to relive the glory. That's right. Let's go next.

Yeah, someone tweeted New York City is really experiencing their ancient Rome phase because of this outsized ticker tape parade through the streets of Lower Manhattan. Okay, tell me why were you researching the ways ancient Rome celebrated military victories? Well, to be honest, the triumph was a detour. on a journey I went on looking into standing ovations. Oh. It turns out the standing ovation, as we know it, also has its roots in ancient Rome. After an army would return home from war, people in the city would gather and cheer and applaud. But it wasn't the highest form of praise.

The triumph is the higher one. Right, right, right. But the standing ovation, the reason why I was looking into all of this is that we got a question from a listener. Hi, this is Haley in Portland, Indiana. She left us a voice message explaining how, as a performer, she's noticed that every live show these days seems to get a standing ovation. That's what everyone does now. It doesn't mean anything anymore. How did we get here? Wait, that's so true. That is what everyone does now. Thanks for the question, Haley. And Haley's question got me thinking about this in the context of theater and the arts in particular, because she's right. It definitely feels like everything gets a standing ovation these days.

I'm excited for this. After the break, producer, Skyler Swenson is going to take me and you inside the history of the standing ovation. So trying to track down something as nebulous as standing ovations through all of human history is, of course, not that easy. I imagine not. But using theater as my North Star, I moved from ancient Rome to, of course, Shakespeare. Shakespeare. Okay. And I found out something interesting during Shakespeare's time, which was that the audience was already standing. The groundlings at the Globe Theater, which is what they were actually called, were standing on the ground.

They didn't have seats. So there's the standing part of standing ovation. But Shakespeare had a little trick to get people clapping. He would often write in the epilogue lines to get the audience to applaud. You know, it's a little weird when I've just said, okay, please applaud now. And then, of course, people applaud. I mean, they would have applauded anyway. But, you know, I've just asked them to.

This is Roger Gilbert. I am a professor in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell. And I found Roger because he had written about standing ovations and applause in pop culture. And he has also, in addition to being a professor of literature, has performed in a few Shakespeare productions. I actually played a prospero myself last summer in The Tempest. And I got to say the lines where he says, release me from my bands with the help of your good hands. So he's telling them you can clap. But then he says, gentle breath of yours, my sails must fill or else my project fails.

So he's saying you can also cheer. You know, I want to hear your voices as well as hear your hands. So that suggests that even back in Shakespeare's time, that was a part of the way audiences responded when they really liked something. I kind of love this. I mean, Shakespeare was basically saying, hey, you need to get on your feet, you need to clap, show the performers that you like what they did. It kind of reminds me of a laugh track, you know, from the sitcom era. I'm a 90s kid. Where the audience, just like Shakespeare did, was queued to laugh and to engage.

Make like a tree and leave. It's make like a banana and split. The cues kind of guarantee the audience is sort of on your side, right? Totally. So how do we go from like Shakespeare into the more modern times? Was there a moment when the scales tipped and it was only positive phrase and only big standing ovations? I found a ton of op-eds by grumpy theater critics about this issue of like the standing ovation is just getting out of hand. And a lot of people in the musical theater world and historians see the rise in standing ovations on Broadway.

in American theaters at least in the 1960s after World War II. And that's for a few reasons. The first being televisions became really popular in this time. And then entertainment became more and more an inside-the-house thing. And then in contrast, if you go out to see a show live, it becomes more of a special occasion. It becomes more of a thing to maybe stand up for and clap as opposed to watching from home. sitting on your couch. Other musical theater historians have referenced an intentional manufacturing of more applause because of the differences in the actual composition and the end

scenes or the end musical numbers. So there's an American musical theater historian, Ethan Morden, who came up with a theory called The Big Lady Shows. And it explains the shift in more applause and standing ovations at the end of Broadway musicals. So in the 50s, there were like these classic 50s musicals like My Fair Lady, and the music that happens right before the curtain call was pretty short. And it barely gave time for an ensemble to come out on stage and like take their bows. Right. But around the 60s, there was the shift to really celebrating and showcasing the main lead

actress, the diva. The big lady. Is that one? The Big Lady of the Big Lady Theory? Yeah. So Hello Dolly, which was produced in 1964, the biggest Broadway hit at the time that really provided an example of this shift. So this is the closing night curtain call moment featuring Bet Midler on Broadway and the production, the revived production of Hello Dolly. So, you know, they've finished all their align.

This is just like the final moments of the musical. The whole ensemble comes out and build up to the most important character, right? Yeah, you get like progressively more central actors coming to the front. Exactly. Bowing. Now we have the male lead, right? He's giving a bow, takes his hat off. The music is still kind of like building and building.

And then the full ensemble gets together and outcomes. Oh, they're out pointing. Oh, yeah, there's your lead lady. I mean, if you're not on your feet by now, you don't have a heart. They're basically doing the Shakespeare thing. Yeah, like taking a page out of Shakespeare's book, right? Like, we're going to bake into the end people's engagement. Right, right.

Maybe not saying explicitly, like, please clap now, but the music kind of forces you to get into the scene and to like... And to get on your feet, too. Yeah, yeah. I was pumped up just watching my video on YouTube. You know what I mean? Let's go. This is energizing, you know? I love that we're like hearing the applause.

There's something about applause, right? It just has a way of pumping you up. So outside of live theater and Broadway, I'm guessing you and our listeners maybe have heard about standing ovations and particularly long-standing ovations at film festivals, especially the Cannes Film Festival.

At the premieres, it's borderline mandatory. There's just so many factors that go into it, so it's not sort of an empirical badge of quality. This is Kyle Buchanan, and he's a reporter and columnist for the New York Times, and he's been going to Cannes for several years. He says supersized standing ovations are now the trademark of this film fest. But Kyle says that it's actually really different when you're in the room. It is a very long process,

but it isn't just sort of numbingly clapping at nothing. So you're watching a movie, music swell, The screen fades to black, the credits roll, and at that stage, people, usually if they like the film, will start to clap, and maybe that's when the standing starts. But once the closing credits are done, a cameraman will station himself in front of the row that has the cast and crew.

And so that cameraman will beam footage up to the big screen of the Grand Theater Lumier. Everybody's on their feet, everyone's applauding, but it's not like they're applauding because they saw it like the best movie they've ever seen. They're actually applauding because there's someone to applaud for. Maybe it's the director. Let's say it's Wes Anderson at a Wes Anderson movie. So there will be one minute of awkward Wes Anderson close up as everybody is applauding him.

Then it will move over to the lead, the number one person in the film. Then that person will get about a minute or two depending on how much they milk it. Still kind of the big lady theory, right? Because now instead of the stage, you're like projecting them on screen and it's like, get on your feet. Exactly. You know, it's the same energy. Okay.

Yeah, that's interesting. Maybe one of the cast members has gone over to the director and they're crying. That's getting applause now. So are we applauding for what we've just seen or are we applauding for the new micro narrative that we're seeing on the screen afterwards? Okay, so, I mean, I get that these super long standing ovations are. exaggerated, kind of performative. But I also think they can carry a certain power beyond that room, right? You know, the example I'm thinking of is from last year's Venice Film Festival. There's this

movie called The Voice of Hindrajab. It made headlines for its 23-minute long standing ovation. Maybe we can hear a little bit of it. Okay, I'm going to cue it up. So quick overview of the movie, Hindraja was a five-year-old Palestinian girl. She's at the center of this movie. In it, you hear her real-life calls to paramedics, her actual voice as she's sitting in a car trapped for hours surrounded by the bodies of her family members before eventually being killed by the IDF in Gaza. I saw it. It's a heartbreaking movie. In the U.S., though, it had a very limited release, right? So a lot of people didn't get to see it. And what they were more likely to have seen is the 23-minute standing ovation that was circulating online, which felt like it was making a really powerful statement, that it was a kind of way to make people notice. I think that we shouldn't underestimate the power of the optics, right? And the impact a viral video can have on far more people than the amount that can fit in a theater.

Right, right. I mean, I don't think it's an accident that, again, at the Venice Film Festival, just a few weeks ago, a documentary called Naza by two Israeli filmmakers, which exposed Israel's calculated targeting of civilians in Gaza, got a 25-minute standing ovation. So I don't know. You know, if we're talking about recognizing the value of an individual piece of art or film or whatever it might be,

I can see how giving everything a standing ovation maybe devalues things. but if you look at it a different way, maybe it gives everything a little bit more value. Right. So Roger Gilbert, who we heard from earlier, actually brings this point up as well. I do remember being out on the quad at Cornell on the day of a solar eclipse. And we reached the moment, I think it's called annularity when the sun was completely obscured. and a whole bunch of people were out there with me, and we just all spontaneously started clapping. It was nothing that had been planned.

There was no signal. It was just something we all felt the need to do. And I learned something important about applause at that moment. It was such an illustration of how applause is not necessarily or even primarily meant for the people. or performers that you're applauding for, because in this case, there were no performers. The sun was not listening to our applause.

So we were doing it for ourselves, but it was a way of communicating with each other, I think, more than anything. We all just needed to make a noise because we were seeing something so amazing. That's beautifully put. And I guess that's where I personally am landing a little bit, where I'm like, you know, yeah, we probably give something standing ovations that don't deserve it. But also, if it leads to a moment of connection between you and the person next to you, it's worth it.

I agree. Yeah, there's something really beautiful about it being this ancient human tradition that we just keep doing. I am really glad we went on this journey. Thank you for looking into it. Thank you to Haley for calling us with her question that inspired this episode. And for all of you, If you have a question of your own or if you have a side quest for us with an interesting nugget you can't stop thinking about, send us an email at ThruLine at NPR.org or call 872-5888-8-805 and leave a voicemail. And if you're open to us giving you a call back, leave your number two. Throughline was created by me and Ramtinada Blewe. This episode was produced by me and Skyler Swenson, Leanna Simstrom, Jasmine Romero, Julia Redpath, Sarah Wynes,

Wyman, Amy Padula, Molly Marcello, Irene Noguchi. This episode was fact-checked by Greta Pittenger, and mixed by Jimmy Keeley. Music by Ramtinada Bluey and his band, Drop Electric. Thanks also to Johannes Durgy. I'm Miranda Abdel Fattah. Thanks for listening.