Arenas and Big Shows

A twenty-thousand seat room is a compromise everywhere except outdoors, where the compromise becomes the point: the Hollywood Bowl permits picnics, Berlin's Waldbühne is a stone amphitheatre in a forest, and the summer programme in both is worth the trip even when you do not know the act.

Indoors, the seat matters. Side-stage seats at the back of the lower tier usually beat expensive floor standing for sound, and the upper tiers of a modern arena are acoustically better than the reputation suggests, because the delay towers are aimed at them.