Here’s a Q&A about why ushers at many Broadway shows now scan the bar codes on your tickets instead of tearing them. Tidbit:

[T]he scanners record exactly when each patron enters the theatre, allowing Telecharge to amass and analyze data on when people tend to show up. What have they found so far? A lot of the data has confirmed conventional wisdom. For instance, at plays, which tend to attract native New Yorkers, lots of people show up five minutes before curtain. At musicals, which attract more tourists, people tend to show up earlier.

We just got back from the first Broadway preview of [title of show]. It was a night at the theater I’ll never forget.

[title of show] is a musical about its own creation. It was written for the New York Musical Theatre Festival in 2004, transferred to an Off-Broadway run at the Vineyard Theater, and led to a series of YouTube videos about the gang’s quest to get their show on Broadway. (More here.) It’s developed a big cult following among the theater geek set. We first saw it at the Vineyard a couple of years ago, we’d both watched all their videos, and we’ve listened to the cast album a lot, so a few weeks ago we decided to get some tickets for the first preview.

I have never heard cheering in a Broadway theater as loud as I heard in the Lyceum tonight. It was overwhelming. The audience was clearly filled with fans. From beginning to end, the audience screamed and shouting and clapped its heart out for the five people up there. It was a wall of sound.

I felt bad for the elderly couple sitting next to me. They seemed thoroughly baffled. I was next to the husband, who was using the theater’s hearing equipment. At the very beginning, when Larry Pressgrove, the music director, who is actually part of the show, walked out onto the stage, and the audience erupted in cheers, the man leaned over to me and asked who the guy and why everyone was cheering for him.

For the rest of the audience, it was lots of fun. And since the show is about trying to get to Broadway, and this was the first preview on Broadway, it was poignant. The audience spontaneously broke into a standing ovation at the end of the second-to-last song, and it must have lasted a good minute and a half. Who knows what the four principals, Jeff, Hunter, Susan, and Heidi, thought of this. Their expressions were frozen on their faces as they waited for the ovation to die down, but they must have been overwhelmed. During the final number, which is a low-key, poignant piece, a couple of their voices broke as they sang, and Susan’s eyes were filled with tears.

I don’t know how run-of-the-mill Broadway audiences will respond to it. They certainly won’t respond like the audience did tonight. That’s why it was so much fun to be there tonight.

There are a few kinks they need to work out with some of the new material. But the show remains clever and witty and endearing, and it’s filled with inside theater jokes. If you’re a theater geek — or any sort of creative type, for that matter — you’ll appreciate the show and its message.

Glory Days, the new musical about four college friends, has closed after opening night. One official performance. The reviews were pretty miserable. We saw one of the preview performances a couple of weeks ago; it was a cute show (with cute guys), earnest and somewhat poignant, but it didn’t belong on Broadway.

The songs aren’t bad. You can hear some of them on the show’s MySpace page.

(The last show to close after one performance was The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, a one-woman show starring Ellen Burstyn five years ago. But at least both those shows opened, unlike Bobbi Boland, starring Farrah Fawcett, which closed in previews.)