Sometimes it’s hard to get to a performance on time. There are the vicissitudes of bad weather, human forgetfulness (speaking as someone who had to turn around on New Year’s Eve and retrieve the tickets from the kitchen table), and people who aren’t ready when they say they will be. MoDOT’s the-public-be-damned approach to highway work has, of course, ratcheted up the problem by several orders of magnitude for a two-year span.

Some venues (Powell Symphony Hall, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis) take a strict policy toward latecomers: You can’t go inside the auditorium while the music is playing. Others, like the Fox, have trained their audiences to saunter in noisily whenever they show up, interrupting the focus of those who arrived on time.

Now, the Touhill Performing Arts Center at the University of Missouri-St. Louis has unveiled a middle way of sorts. Starting with this Sunday afternoon’s performance by soprano Kelly Kaduce and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, latecomers will find a battery of large LCD monitors outside the doors of both theaters. The monitors will allow them to follow the performance until there’s an appropriate time for seating. They’ll also provide information about such things as future performances during intermissions.

The TouPAC will also unveil a new three-tiered late seating policy. The lowest level is “Open Seating” (for comedians and competitions; audience members can come and go at will), followed by “Continuous Seating” (for non-classical concerts: audience members may enter the hall as they arrive and wait in the back for an appropriate break to take their seats) and “Set Late Seating Point” (for classical concerts, opera, dance and theater: patrons must wait in the lobby until a specific seating point arrives).

The policy seems to have been carefully worked out. Good for the folks at “The Blanche” for approaching a constant issue in a thoughtful manner.