There are a lot of small regional organizations on this list who are stepping up despite finances that are precarious even in good times, but the only big-name company there is Houston Grand Opera. And though Lincoln Center Theater is included (for its now-cancelled production of the new Ricky Ian Gordon-Lynn Nottage opera Intimate Apparel), the Metropolitan Opera is definitely not. (Across the Atlantic, English National Opera will honor at least one month of contracts.) – The Middle-Class Artist
Author: Matthew Westphal
Actor Lyle Waggoner, Known For ‘The Carol Burnett Show’ And ‘Wonder Woman’, Dead At 84
In addition to being the handsome announcer and sketch actor on Burnett’s show and the foil to Lynda Carter’s superheroine, he was the first-ever centerfold for Playgirl magazine and, later in life, launched a successful business renting custom trailers for actors to retreat to during movie and TV shoots. – Yahoo! (AP)
For The American Shakespeare Center, COVID Could Be An Existential Threat. Here’s How The Company’s Holding It Together
The replica Elizabethan theatre in the Shenandoah Valley normally thrives, in the usual hand-to-mouth way, with a mix of school groups and out-of-town visitors. Now both are gone indefinitely. Peter Marks traveled to Staunton, Va. to see how the ASC is coping. – The Washington Post
A Guide To Concerts And Operas To Stream During The COVID Quarantine
Of the dozen or more such articles that we’ve seen so far, this one from David Patrick Stearns is our favorite so far — not only because it offers a lot of options, but also because of his sense of humor and compassion. – WQXR (New York City)
How Dancers And Dance Organizations Can Prepare For The Financial Fallout Of COVID-19
Garnet Henderson’s guide includes more than just obvious advice such as “keep three to six months’ worth of income in savings” (which, she acknowledges, is impossible for many dancers). One key point: be sure to save documentation of every gig you’ve lost because of the epidemic, because you’ll need it when you apply for aid. – Dance Magazine
What We Can Learn (And Should Unlearn) From Albert Camus’s ‘The Plague’
“If you read The Plague long ago, perhaps for a college class, … perhaps you paid more attention to the buboes and the lime pits than to the narrator’s depiction of the ‘hectic exaltation’ of the ordinary people trapped in the epidemic’s bubble, … caught up in ‘the frantic desire for life that thrives in the heart of every great calamity’: the comfort of community. The townspeople of Oran did not have the recourse that today’s global citizens have, in whatever town: to seek community in virtual reality.” – Literary Hub
Jazz vs. lockdown: Blogs w/ vid clips defy virus muting musicians
Jazz doesn’t want to stay home and chill, so members of the Jazz Journalists Association have launched JazzOnLockdown: Hear It Here, a series of curated v-logs featuring performance videos of musicians whose gigs have been postponed or cancelled due to coronavirus concerns. – Howard Mandel
We’ll be together again
I doubt it will surprise any of you to learn that I’d been growing increasingly worried about the inability of Mrs. T’s doctors to rouse her from the medically induced coma into which she was placed after her double-lung transplant surgery two weeks ago. – Terry Teachout
The Vexed Relationship Between Theatre And Disease
Alexis Soloski, who wrote a dissertation on the subject, reminds us that playwrights from Sophocles through Shaw to Kushner and Kramer have grappled with the subject. “It’s only a matter of time before the first COVID-19 plays emerge, and we can … be nudged toward compassion for the afflicted, be constituted as a community of support. Because that’s what theater can do: It can ask us to think and feel beyond the confines of our own experience and find fellow-feeling, immediately and intimately, with those around us.” – The New York Times
‘It Felt Like A Parallel Universe’: Watching The Philadelphia Orchestra Stream Beethoven From An Empty Hall
“The few people present in the hall … were asked not to applaud because such meager clapping would sound pallid to listeners tuning in from elsewhere. But for those who were there, it was confounding to have the orchestra standing to receive phantom applause that wasn’t there,” reports David Patrick Stearns. “The atmosphere, though, was hardly grave.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer