Children in the audience

It was a Friday night performance of “Fiddler on the Roof’’ at the opulent Opera House downtown, a special night, to be sure, for the 74-year-old Topol, who was in the midst of a farewell tour, and for the audience. They came to see him. To hear him. To buy posters at intermission, snap photos they were not supposed to snap, all so they could say one day that they saw one of the great Topol’s last performances as the weary and warm-hearted milkman, Tevye.

But the woman in front of us, just to our right, wound up spending the three-hour performance distracted, with one eye on the stage, and the other eye to her left. Her head was turning so often she must have had whiplash by intermission.

What was so distracting to her, and to us, was the woman to her left, in the row in front of us. On her lap sat not just one young child, which would have been disturbing enough, but two. Neither of the children could have been older than 4, and neither seemed remotely interested in what was happening on stage for more than two minutes at a time. The girl rested or slept most of the performance on the woman’s left shoulder, occasionally looking up, but fidgeting mostly to try to get comfortable. The boy, who was younger, sat on the woman’s right knee or stood in the row, looking toward the stage or around him at the people.

Remarkably, and to their credit, both children were quiet. They whispered occasionally. They were the definition of being seen, not heard. But that was the problem.

Now none of us can even pretend to know why the children were there for a performance that started a few minutes after 8 p.m. and didn’t end until almost 11. Maybe she was their mother and a baby sitter had canceled. That was our best guess. Maybe Topol was their grandfather. Maybe the woman was a fiddle teacher and those were her prize pupils. The truth is I don’t really care, and I doubt the woman next to her did either, after probably paying a hefty sum for her front-and-center tickets. The reason the children were there is irrelevant. They shouldn’t have been, or if it was that important to the woman, she should have bought them their own seats, regardless of the cost.

As someone who treasures his two young children but also treasures a night away from them, I can certainly relate to the challenges of getting out for a few hours. But theater isn’t a restaurant. Taking young children to a restaurant has its perils, but at least they can be contained to your own private table, away from others. And theater isn’t a movie, where for $15 they can at least have their own seat and a bag of popcorn to occupy them. And theater is certainly not Fenway, where kids are encouraged to stand and scream.

Theater is theater (and crunching popcorn and yelling “booooo’’ at the director is strangely frowned upon). No matter how good those children were, and they were good, every twitch, every stand-up-sit-down, every head turn - and there were about a thousand of these through the night - was distracting to anyone close by. I wanted to focus on the stage, so I could see Topol while listening to his slow, methodical, deep rendition of “Rich Man.’’ But instead my eyes kept glancing down at the kids in front of me, who could not sit still for 30 seconds.

I don’t blame them, of course. They were going where they were told and doing what they were told. But every time they fidgeted, or every time the boy hopped off the knee and stood up right next to the woman beside him, almost touching her, she glanced over. Not angry (at least not visibly). She just glanced. And that was one more moment when her eyes were off the stage, off of Topol. And that’s too bad for her. Because it was a memorable performance.

At least the parts that I saw.