A year ago, actor Lauren Patten was having lunch with her mom near Columbus Circle. “And then all of a sudden, I looked on my phone and there was a ton of texts from our cast, saying, ‘Have you looked at the news? Have you seen everyone's announcing that the government’s shut down Broadway? And it was all very sudden.”
That day, Governor Andrew Cuomo had said in a press conference that all venues with a capacity of over 500 people were going to be closed as of 6:30 that night, for at least a month. It was the beginning of closures around the city.
Patten was supposed to go on stage that night at the Broadhurst Theatre on West 44th, where she'd been performing in Jagged Little Pill, a musical based on the oeuvre of Alanis Morissette. Instead, she immediately went to the theater to get cosmetics and other daily essentials from her dressing room.
“Then I went to West Side Market and stocked up on groceries, and it was wall-to-wall packed, like I've never seen before. Crazy. And no one was wearing masks because we weren’t wearing masks at that point. I've actually thought about that moment often, like how many people got COVID at the market that day,” she said.
The Broadway closures were extended to June, and then late summer, and then fall. And then... indefinitely. Meanwhile, actors and crew members scattered, picking up gigs, going to work for Amazon, or heading home to live with family.
But now, at the one-year anniversary, there is hope: the vaccines are being administered, and in New York, venues are slowly opening. As of today, theaters are allowed to be 33% full, up to a maximum of 100 people (150 people if everyone is tested beforehand).
Yet Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League, said that’s not enough to open Broadway. She noted that the smallest Broadway theater holds 700 people and the largest is over 2,000. “Even if we got to 33%—which 100 people will not be 33% of any of our theaters—we could not keep the show open for even a week. The financial model for Broadway does not allow it.”
Broadway shows are expensive. Brian Moreland, a lead producer of the new Broadway show Thoughts of a Colored Man, estimated that a play might cost $350,000 a week, while a complicated musical can run to over $1 million a week. One hundred tickets a night wouldn’t come close to covering weekly operating costs.
But if Cuomo announced tomorrow that theaters could open at 100% capacity, that doesn't mean the curtains could rise the next day.
First, Moreland explained, shows would have to start selling advance tickets, so that they could begin to cover preliminary costs like rehearsals or construction. Then, they need to gather the actors.
“Shows that are returning to theaters will need to find out where their cast members are,” he said. “Can they return to New York City? If they return, where will they be living? How much rehearsal time will they need?” St. Martin told NBC4 that the casts of long-running shows may have the "muscle memory" to help them return sooner.
Still, new costumes and shoes will need to be built for any replacement cast members, which means that many shows will be knocking on the doors of the same few costume makers and cobblers at the same time. Stagehands will need to be found and trained. Industry insiders estimate that it will take 6 weeks to two months to get ready after theaters are allowed to open at capacity.
At this point, many producers are hoping that vaccinations will have progressed far enough that theaters can begin opening their doors sometime in the fall of 2021, a year and a half after closing. But even then, Broadway won’t really be back. City officials estimate that tourism won’t fully rebound until the end of 2024—and the Great White Way in general, and long-running shows like Phantom of the Opera and Wicked in particular, are very dependent on tourism.
Add all of those factors up and you get a five-year slump, which is a long time to be in limbo—not just for the shows themselves, but for the actors, crew, and small businesses that depend on them. So it’s understandable that people are starting to talk about a Broadway ecosystem bailout from the government. Moreland estimates about $1.5 billion would do it. Broadway, and the city's entire arts sector, has been devasted over the past year, and Broadway's contribution to the city economy alone was $14.7 billion during its last full season before the pandemic (2018-2019), according to the Broadway League. At that time, the industry supported 96,700 jobs.
In the meantime, the Broadway community is looking forward to the marquees lighting up again. The experience will likely be a little different, but will still fit in with the new normal—masks will probably be required, temperatures will be taken, Playbills will be stacked on the aisle instead of being handed out. Tickets will be paperless. Backstage, cast and crew will most likely need to take rapid tests, and/or be vaccinated. In some theaters, new ventilation systems will be installed. There might be staggered curtain times, so there can be longer, socially-distanced lines on the street outside theaters.
And people are already imagining what that giant, unprecedented opening night will be like. St. Martin, of the Broadway League, says she’d like to see a parade, with everyone in costume at a ribbon-cutting. Patten, the Jagged Little Pill actor, says she thinks it will be emotional, with happy tears because they’re reuniting and sad tears for the people and time lost. And Moreland, the producer, thinks it will feel like a party.
“In my mind's eye, when the day comes that everyone can be back in these theaters, I think it's going to be a lot of candy buying and gift-giving and welcoming,” Moreland said. “I think every dressing room window that faces onto the street will be open with balloons and flowers and banners, probably some ticker tape, some confetti, because there's going to be so much joy on the street there that the building alone is not going to be able to contain it.”
