Professional Audience in Macau?

In certain places in mainland China, when the local government organized official activities such as sports games, cultural activities, they would hire extras to sit in the stands so the show would look good on television and left a good impression to their superiors, although everbody knows that the activity they organized was a complete failure. Hence came the term "professional audience" by Chinese journalists.

Although I had never heard of the term "professional audience" being used in Macau, something quite strange was spotted at Il Trittico, a collection of one-act operas, Il Tabarro, Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi, by Giacomo Puccini. Five minutes before the start of the opera by the renowned Italian composer on October 31, only about one-third of the seats were occupied at the auditorium of the Macau Cultural Center. Then a group of teenagers rushed in right before the curtain was lifted. This group of casually dressed audience formed a strong contrast with the rest of the formally dressed audience, since most of them soon fall sleep on their seats 15 minutes into the performance. Some children or first-time opera goer left during the first intermission, however, nobody from this group of dedicated sleepers chose to leave. Finally, the show ended. While I was leaving the Macau Cultural Center, I overheard one of the teenager whispering to his companion, "Don't leave! We haven't collected our pay yet." Then I saw something very strange. Hundreds of teenagers who had been sleeping for three hours during the opera formed a straight line right outside the Macau Cultural Center. Five minutes later, a couple of people came, checked their identification card against a list, and handed each of them an unmarked envelope. "Let's go get some beer," was what I heard from a teenager who took his envelope.

As a long-time opera lover who stood in line since 7 o'clock in the morning and paid hard-earned cash for my tickets, I really couldn't believe what I saw was really happening. How could anyone at the Macau Cultural Institute justify wasting taxpayers' money to hire the professional audience into the auditorium such that they could still proclaim that their unpopular opera production was a success? They money should be spent on promoting classical music or other valuable art forms to the general public, not on hiring sleeping extras to fill in empty seats at the Macau International Music Festival. Not with my tax money!