Lights Out: Live Entertainment Business Struggles to Find a Way Forward Amid Pandemic

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From Broadway to the concert industry, the live entertainment business bleeds money as the coronavirus pandemic offers no end in sight

Not only had he wrapped up a long run playing a pivotal supporting role in Matthew Lopez’s two-part AIDS epic “The Inheritance,” but Hickey was also making his Broadway directing debut with “Plaza Suite,” a romantic comedy starring real-life couple Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker. The Neil Simon revival had finished ain Boston and was shaping up to be one of the season’s hottest tickets when it opened in April. As he juggled his work, Hickey started feeling sick.

Given those bleak prospects, Broadway power brokers believe their best and only option may be to devise a way to reopen safely, even if there’s no vaccine yet. Plans are in place to test casts and crews before every show, to implement contactless ticketing, to outfit HVAC systems with better filters and to have orchestra members play offstage or at a social distance from each other.

That’s left the thousands of people Broadway employs to design costumes, take tickets, choreograph dance numbers and perform eight shows a week suddenly forced to seek alternate work in a terrible job market. “The first date of the tour was in Delaware on March 11,” he says. “During rehearsals, we kept hearing about places getting shut down — and on the morning of the first show, we were told, ‘You’re doing this one show and then everybody goes home.’ We had a one-day tour!”

Audrey Fix Schaefer, who handles PR for several Washington, D.C.-area venues as well as the recently formed National Independent Venue Assn., estimates that without government assistance, some 90% of independent venues will not survive the pandemic. “This isn’t just about art and keeping a nightclub going — independent venues are economic drivers for their communities.”However, a combination of desperation, impatience and stupidity has led some artists, agents and venues to schedule concerts anyway.

“We need social distancing to go [away]. We need confidence by audiences to come back to a public space, and we need to build an audience back up,” says Julian Bird, chief executive of West End trade organization the Society of London Theatre. “Things like international tourism are nonexistent at the moment, so if you’re looking at the West End, we have an issue with audiences as well as social distancing.

“My innate way of creating dances is to have a lot of intertwined bodies navigate space and bob and weave together,” says Sonya Tayeh, choreographer of “Moulin Rouge! The Musical.” “That might not be possible right now.” Jon Morgan, director of Theatres Trust, warns that smaller venues lack the same resources. “Lloyd Webber is throwing everything at it, all of which could be helpful … but if I’m running a 200-seat theater, I won’t be able to afford heat sensors,” he says.

“We can do better in terms of the stories that we present,” says Leon. “We can do better in terms of tackling the lack of diversity in our crews backstage and our casts onstage. The institutions that house these shows could benefit from self-examination. If we didn’t have the pandemic, I’m not sure we’d take that look.”

 

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