I'll sometimes do that, but often I find that using auto-duck to temporarily drop the levels can work as well. Much depends on how loud the applause is relative to the music, and whether the music resumes while the audience is still clapping.
Sometimes I'll just lightly trim the applause peaks, so that I can get an extra 2-3 dB when normalizing (I usually record classical).
The easiest way I found to use auto-duck is to create a separate monaural audio track, fill it with a continuous tone, and mute it.