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 Theatre, especially large-scale
musicals and romantic dramas on Broadway and in
London's West End, faces unique challenges in
coming back during the coronavirus outbreak even
as shutdowns and restrictions are beginning to
ease around the world.
Expensive, risky and involving scores of people
backstage and in audience areas, live theatre
may be the last to bring up the curtain again,
producers and actors say, and even then it will
not be the same for some time.
"We are living real-life stories in real time,
in cramped quarters, sometimes on small stages,
sometimes with lots of people and figuring how
to do that work in the age of COVID-19 is really
the challenge that we are up against," said Mary
McColl, executive director of the actors union
Equity in the United States.
"When we cry, there are tears, sometimes our
noses run. Sometimes when we sing or are
yelling, we spit and that lands on other actors,
or it might land on the orchestra pit. And we
are doing that eight times a week," she said.
Broadway theatres went dark in mid-March and
London's West End followed a few days later.
Almost no one expects them to reopen when the
current closure period ends on June 7 and June
28 respectively.
"We are very tied to social distancing measures.
As long as they are still in place, a mainstream
return to theatre and musical theatre in
particular looks pretty impossible," said
Jessica Koravos, president of Andrew Lloyd
Webber's Really Useful Group.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll in April found that only
27% of those questioned would go to a theatre
performance when venues reopen, while 51% said
live theatre should not resume at all before a
vaccine is available.
However the theatre world is eager to get going
before then and the to-do list goes beyond hand
sanitizers in theatre foyers, seating audiences
apart and disposable programs.
CREATIVE PEOPLE, CREATIVE SOLUTIONS
The U.S. branch of Equity has hired an
epidemiologist to come up with protocols for
actors, stagehands, and costume and make-up
departments. Elsewhere, people are brainstorming
about what kind of plays would work best or
taking theatre out of traditional spaces,
including outdoors or into restaurants.
"I don't think theatre will go away. I just
think it will be different when it comes back,"
said Brian Moreland, producer of upcoming
Broadway shows "American Buffalo" and "Blue."
"For a small amount of time, it will be smaller
casts. Those are going to be smaller budgeted
shows. The returns can be lower, the ticket
prices can probably be lower," Moreland said.
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 Theatres may be dark, but
online rehearsals are going ahead, dancers are
keeping up routines and actors are running lines
on shared video platforms so they can be ready
when protocols are in place for a return.
Broadway producer and investor Brisa Trinchero
is among the optimists.
She said playwrights are writing new pieces that
would cater to social distancing and some
companies are looking to resume with one-person
productions that would minimize both costs and
risks to other performers.
"We are an industry of creative
people," Trinchero said.
"I think there will be an exciting resurgence of
smaller performance pieces, cabaret, more
intimate things that make sense financially but
also allow for performers initially to be a
little bit more remote and don't require
thousands of people in the audience to make the
math work," she said.
Musicals, which have large casts, musicians and
backstage crews and are the most expensive to
mount, are likely to be the last to come back.
The Really Useful Group, producers of shows like
"Cats" and the planned new London musical
"Cinderella," had to shutter 28 musicals around
the world before the pandemic.
The Seoul production of "Phantom of the Opera"
is back up but only due to extensive coronavirus
testing and contact tracing by South Korean
authorities, Koravos said.
Shows with one or two actors, or limiting
theatres to 50% capacity might work for some.
But for big musicals "it wouldn't be possible
commercially to survive on those audience
levels," said Koravos.
Despite the tough outlook, the theatre community
is more hopeful than a month ago and convinced
that the shutdowns have proved the value of
human connection and live entertainment that
theatre offers.
"People are now talking about what it looks like
on the other side and three to four weeks ago we
weren't prepared to have this conversation,"
Moreland said. "So that makes me very hopeful."
(Reporting by Jill Serjeant in Los Angeles and
Alicia Powell in New York; editing by Jonathan
Oatis)
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