She puts up quite a charm offensive: plunging into the crowd and reappearing wearing a fez; addressing them as "my darlings"; dragging audience members on stage for selfies; appearing to be on verge of tears when the crowd raise their mobile phones during her cover of Bob Dylan's Make You Feel My Love.
Faced by a more combative, vocal audience, Darling was comprehensively outboxed, appearing wooden and incoherent.
Speaking at a conference featuring information sessions with names like "Saving America's children from pimps and perverts" and "Exposing and defunding Planned Parenthood, America's abortion giant," Mrs. Bachmann, the Tea Party darling, knew her audience well.
Horne, always outspoken, persevered and became a singing star instead, eventually ending up on Broadway where she became a darling of white audiences.
A postwar British piano sensation with a zest for Gershwin and other American masters, he became the protege of Dame Myra Hess and the darling of composers, audiences and critics on both sides of the Atlantic.
This show just happens to star, as the title character, an actress who has turned a mob wife and a Vicodin-addicted nurse into audience darlings and who makes a point of returning to her New York theater roots every chance she gets.
The Piper, created by My Darling Patricia, splits its audience in two.
But the same is often true for the runners-up, who in this case included Julian Smith, a soulful saxophonist who was a darling of the studio audience and came in third.
They gained a reputation for mental toughness and became the darlings of the viewing audience with four fourth-quarter comebacks.
The Jets had made themselves darlings of the viewing audience this season for their audacious comebacks from the brink of disaster.
