(Screenshot from The Haunted Tavern’s Facebook)
With Halloween just around the corner, Alex and his friends were seeking entertainment that could give them goosebumps as they enjoyed the night life of Orlando. Attending the Haunted Tavern on Sept. 5, Alex was in shock to find the performer openly making homophobic, sexist and racist remarks to the audience.
“You could feel the room get quiet,” Alex, who asked for us not to use his last name, says. “It became a very aggressive environment.”
The Haunted Tavern is an immersive cocktail show where guests are guided through the experience by a tavern keeper. The guests are treated to themed cocktails and a collection of scary stories told by the tavern keeper and the haunted cast. The company has a touring show that travels across the country, which visited Orlando earlier this month.
The night started just like that for Alex. He says the first 30 minutes of the tour was actually enjoyable but then the individual playing the tavern keeper — identified as actor Matt Steinberg by Russel Stevens, who also attended the show — “erratically” came in and that’s when the show took a turn.
“We were given our first drink and were waiting for the storyteller. Once the storyteller came out, you can tell something was off,” Alex says. “He was very disjointed in his speech, he jumped from point to point in the stories. He wasn’t making a lot of sense.”
Alex says that Steinberg started the night telling a story that featured a Latin woman who murdered her cheating husband. According to Stevens, the performer singled out a presumably Latin woman in the crowd, all while commenting stereotypes of Latin women throughout the story. Stevens also stated that Steinberg pressured the woman to take a shot with him. Stevens added that Steinberg took some time gazing across the crowd to find a woman who looked like she was of Hispanic descent, rather than just interacting with someone randomly in the audience.
Alex says Steinberg would continuously sexualize female characters in his stories, referred to a Black woman in the crowd as “sister” and answered his phone in the middle of the performance.
During another story, Steinberg discussed an unappealing feature of his apartment describing it as “gay.” Alex says he was shocked by the performer’s choice of words. He also stated that once Steinberg noticed the room not laughing at his joke he started to backtrack, saying that he was raised during the ’70s and therefore the word gay had meant that something was silly or inconvenient.
Stevens says he responded to explanation, saying “I shouted out ‘Well I’m actually gay, so use a different word asshole!'”
Alex added that Steinberg apologized to the audience in a “passive aggressive tone” and then proceeded with the show, later admitting that he was “a little fucked up” to the audience.
Alex and Stevens say they left during the show’s intermission along with the rest of their party.
“As somebody who is a part of the LGTBQ community, a human of the world we are living in now, just the way he interacted with certain audience members and making those comments like ‘that’s so gay’ or making comments on somebody based on their culture, not knowing what their culture is,” Alex says. “Once again it was just insulting and disappointing.”
Watermark reached out to the Haunted Tavern and management says they removed Steinberg from the production after that performance and reimbursed those who attended. Ryan Austin, the show manager and head of customer management, says he called the costumers personally to refund their ticket purchases and offered tickets to a show that excluded Steinberg. He also expressed the companies’ sincerest apologies.
Austin says Steinberg’s comments during his performance do not align with the values of the Haunted Tavern cast and crew and offered their deepest apologies to the LGTBQ and other marginalized communities. Austin further stated that Steinberg had only been with the company for six or seven days and that there were no signs that Steinberg would act out this way before the incident.
“We are obviously here to entertain people and give them a spooky time and getting them away from reality and having a good time for the 55 or 90 minutes the show takes place,” Austin says. “We apologize to everyone about that, from our guest, our crew, our cast, anybody that we’ve worked with. That’s not what we want to portray and we’re gonna make sure to steer clear of any kind of those signs. We want what’s best for our guests and those communities, it’s something we strive to do.”
