For those wanting transformation, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. But will hardship economics allow for new possibilities from our most prominent venues or will it just be a matter of survival for the performing arts? Leaders, coping with budgetary black holes, have a ready excuse for playing it safe. But what if safety lights the path to obsolescence? – Los Angeles Times
Category: theatre
Can Playbill Survive COVID?
The Broadway program publication hasn’t printed programs since Broadway went dark. Website and social media traffic is up, but advertising has collapsed. “Just as it would be impossible to imagine New York City without Broadway once the pandemic passes, it’s pretty hard to picture Broadway without those little yellow booklets in hand when the curtain rises again.” – Fast Company
UK Theatres And Other Cultural Venues Plead For Better Guidelines, More Money
Opening with socially distanced audiences on August 1st? Not likely, say theatres. “For most theatres it will not be economically viable to reopen with 30%-40% audience required under social distancing. … We now need to progress as quickly as possible to an announcement on the all-important stage five. Without this, most theatres cannot reopen viably.” – The Guardian (UK)
Longing For Outdoor Theatre, Yes, Including Bugs And Rain
OK, we just miss it. A lot. “It’s a different absence than the loss of indoor theater, partly because of how fondly we cherish summer traditions. But as the director Anne Bogart said in a phone interview, outdoor performance by its nature involves a fuller embrace of life, and of accidents.” – The New York Times
Playwright Paula Vogel’s Advice Right Now: Follow Your Joy
Vogel isn’t saying this lightly. She started a play reading series in the middle of a pandemic. “The reason that I started Bard at the Gate is because I have asthma and diabetes. I was actually in rehearsal in New York, and all of us got tremendously sick and we thought, Oh, no. And I came back home to Wellfleet. And then I thought, ‘Well, it’s possible that the virus has my number.’ … [But] I don’t want to die before I see the play that I quit my job over in 1978.” – Token Theatre Friends
Let’s Use COVID Shutdown To Bring Major Reforms To Theatre, Criticism
“Bad habits may be broken. Theater companies large and small will be weaned off the conservative commercial values of Broadway, freed of the timidity of white theater artists and audiences who are interested in seeing shows that assert their rectitude. Enough stage works that chronicle families under pressure. Where are the innovative scripts that explore thorny issues of race, corruption, income inequality, starvation, gender, global warming, philosophy, metaphysics?” – Arts Fuse
One Of Off-Broadway’s Top Theatres Announces A Season With Artists But Without Plays
“In place of what most theatergoers have come to regard as a ‘season,’ the New York Theatre Workshop — the birthplace of Rent [and Slave Play], among other landmarks — is offering what you might call a 2020-21 un-season. A programmatic embodiment of the possible, fueled by the percolating brains of more than two dozen playwrights, directors, actors and performance artists.” Peter Marks explains how it will work. – The Washington Post
Toward An Anti-Racist American Theatre
“This moment and movement did not come out of nowhere but emerges from longstanding frustration among BIPOC theatremakers … [who] have never truly felt welcome in an industry geared toward and run by white theatremakers and audiences, into which they have only fitfully been invited to do work, and even then under terms that have been variously exploitive, unequal, and harmful.” – American Theatre
Offer To Buy Old Vic Theatre Rejected
Asked about reports that ATG had attempted to acquire the theatre, a statement sent to The Stage from the Old Vic said ATG – which owns 32 venues in the UK – “did approach the Old Vic some weeks ago, but this offer was declined immediately and definitively”. – The Stage
In The Last Big Pandemic, New York’s Theaters Stayed Open (But It Wasn’t Business As Usual)
“Royal S. Copeland, the powerful health commissioner of New York City when the [1918] Spanish flu crept in, looked askance at pandemic responses elsewhere … [and] was philosophically disinclined to intrude much on ordinary life. He also didn’t want to freak people out.” So the shows went on, but Copeland instituted some major changes in how they did so — and kept the toll in the city relatively low. – The New York Times