Man shouts 'Heil Hitler! Heil Trump!' at 'Fiddler on the Roof' performance
Some audience members ran for the doors at Baltimore’s Hippodrome Theatre on Wednesday night when a man began shouting Nazi slogans in the middle of a performance of “Fiddler on the Roof.”
The Baltimore Sun reported that a man stood up in the balcony during the intermission of Wednesday night’s performance and shouted “Heil Hitler! Heil Trump!” In a video tweeted by audience member Rich Scherr, the man shouts unintelligibly at his fellow theatergoers, some of whom can be heard responding, “Get out!” Shortly after the video was taken, the man was removed from the Baltimore theater by security staff.
Sick, sad world. A man stands at intermission of tonight’s performance of Fiddler in Baltimore and yells, “Heil Hitler,” along with pro-Trump references. pic.twitter.com/slDcPwF7re
— Rich Scherr (@writerguyRich) November 15, 2018
Last month’s deadly attack at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh began with the shooter yelling anti-Semitic slogans, so it’s no wonder that Hippodrome audience members feared the worst. Scherr told the Baltimore Sun that as soon as the man at “Fiddler on the Roof” began shouting, some audience members starting bolting for the exits. “I’ll be honest, I was waiting to hear a gunshot,” he said. “I thought, ‘Here we go.'”
Nina Pachino, who was also in the audience, said she “stood paralyzed” as the man shouted those words. While she stayed for the second act, she said the experience was “tainted.”
“I could not stop my body from shaking and I kept looking around me, nervous something else was going to happen,” she wrote on Facebook.
The local news site Baltimore Fishbowl later reported that police were called to the scene, where officers made contact with the suspect but did not detain him. A Baltimore Police Department spokesperson told Baltimore Fishbowl that the man “left the location without incident” and “no arrest was made.”
In a statement emailed to Yahoo, representatives from the Hippodrome confirmed that their security team and ushers “quickly” removed the offending audience member and that local law enforcement “met the man as he was escorted out of the building.” The venue also noted that it employs “a full team of professional security personnel, who are always on premise during live events to implement bag checks, provide screening and metal detection, and to monitor cameras throughout the venue.”
“We apologize to those patrons who were affected by this unfortunate incident,” Hippodrome representatives said in the statement. “Our venue has a proud tradition of providing shared experiences to people from all walks of life, right in the heart of this wonderfully diverse city, and we intend to continue that tradition in the spirit of bringing people together, not dividing them.”
The incident at the theater seems to be one of a recent pattern of hate-speech incidents in the Baltimore area. Earlier on that same day, racist graffiti targeting “specific student residents” was found at Baltimore County’s Goucher College. And one month ago, a dozen cars in the Lochearn neighborhood were vandalized with “curse words, swastikas, and hate speech,” including the letters “KKK.” According to a study by the state of Maryland, hate crimes and “bias incidents” in Baltimore County increased 39.4 percent from 2016 to 2017.
It’s not just Baltimore. Statistics released by the FBI earlier this week show a 17 percent increase in national hate crime incidents between 2016 and 2017. Of the 1,749 victims of anti-religious hate crimes, 58.1 percent were victims of crimes motivated by their offenders’ anti-Jewish bias.
“Fiddler on the Roof” tells the story of Jewish peasants whose religious traditions and community are threatened by the persecution of Tsarist Russia. Based on the stories of Yiddish humorist Sholem Aleichem and written by an all-Jewish creative team, the musical has had a particular resonance with Jewish audiences since its Broadway premiere in 1964, many of whom see their personal family history reflected onstage.
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