Mandatory Credit: Photo by Erik Pendzich/Shutterstock (10581536w)
New York’s governor ordered all Broadway theaters to shut their doors in the face of ongoing coronavirus concerns.
Coronavirus outbreak, New York, USA – 12 Mar 2020

(Judith Miller’s article appeared in City Journal, 2/22.)

Live theater has been devastated by the pandemic, and its return remains uncertain.

No industry in New York City has been hit as hard by Covid-19 as theater, and no industry is said to be as vital to the city’s recovery. But the much-heralded, long-awaited reopening of Broadway remains largely aspirational. When the pandemic shuttered New York’s theaters on March 12, 2020, performing-arts professionals hoped for a summer revival. As the virus spread, prospects for a reopening in the fall gave way to hope for non-virtual theater by January 2021, and then for summer 2021. Last October, the Broadway League predicted that New York theaters would finally reopen in fall 2021. In January, Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, made the target date vaguer by telling performing-arts professionals at a virtual conference that he thought that theaters could safely reopen “sometime in the fall of 2021,” with patrons still wearing masks and social distancing, “if everything goes right.”

But things have not gone right. The vaccine rollout has been thus far slow and problem-plagued, and more contagious Covid strains that may require vaccine boosters have emerged. Fauci’s goal of herd immunity, defined most recently as requiring 75–85 percent of the population to be either immunized or recovered from the disease, seems increasingly elusive.

For live theater in New York, this has meant even greater uncertainty in an already anxious, financially fraught time. “No one knows what lies ahead,” says Robert Marx, director of the New York–based Samuels Foundation, which supports quality work in the performing arts. “We’re in totally unknown territory when theaters and other performing arts venues will have had no earned income for over a year and a high percentage of staff will have been furloughed.”

Since March 12, 2020, according to a study by the National Endowment for the Arts, 52 percent of actors have been unemployed, among the highest rates of any sector. An industry estimated to sustain roughly 97,000 jobs in its 2018–19 season and contribute an annual $14.8 billion to the city’s coffers has never been so challenged. 

Few want to predict, for instance, how many of Broadway’s 31 shows that were running, and eight that were in preview, will reopen—or when. So far, four shows have fallen victim to the pandemic, among them Mean Girls, a hit that, since its opening in 2018, had not only recouped its $17 million capitalization costs but also grossed $124 million in more than 834 performances, its producers said.

Many of the 40-plus Broadway theaters deemed so vital to New York’s recovery may have difficulty financing the sweeping changes that will be required to reopen—including replacing air-filtration systems, reconfiguring seating, modifying lobbies and access to restrooms, and other changes that safety protocols may demand and that will likely be needed to lure back virus-wary patrons. Some of the oldest, least financially secure, theaters may not be able to reopen, given the devastating plunge in their revenues, which totaled some $1.8 billion from audiences of 15 million the year before Covid-19, the Broadway League reports, but tumbled to some $300 million in ticket sales before theaters closed last year. Even pre-pandemic, Broadway theaters had to sell most of the seats in their small spaces to make ends meet.

“On Broadway, we won’t be able to pay our bills with social distancing,” warned Barry Weissler, who, with his wife, Fran, is among the most successful producers on the Great White Way. “The changes required for 100-year-old Broadway theaters will cost millions and millions.” Some of the wealthier organizations—the Shubert, for instance, which owns 17 Broadway theaters and made millions staging popular musicals like A Chorus Line, Bye Bye Birdie, and Monty Python’s Spamalot—can afford to make the changes, but many others cannot. “So if you’re counting on Broadway to help revive the city, don’t,” Weissler said. “It will be the last to reopen.”

Some nonprofit theaters may turn out to be relatively better positioned to reopen than their commercial counterparts. Many occupy newer venues, are relatively less dependent on ticket sales, and can raise money from foundations, private donors, and the government. A coalition of select nonprofit venues spent the winter lobbying Albany for permission to sell tickets to events featuring limited live audiences. With their flexible designs, high ceilings, and open floor plans, theaters like the Park Avenue Armory, which can seat 1,500, and the Shed, which opened last year in the new Hudson Yards complex on Manhattan’s West Side and can hold 2,300, argued that they could offer live performances safely. Unlike traditional Broadway theaters—with their cramped orchestra pits and small backstages, lobbies, and restrooms—these newer venues more closely resemble the bowling alleys, gyms, churches, casinos, and museums that have been permitted to reopen, provided that patrons wear masks and maintain social distance.

When Broadway and other performance venues do reopen, ticket prices, which were steadily rising before the pandemic, could fall, at least temporarily, to lure theatergoers back into closed, even renovated, spaces. But that, too, is likely to jeopardize the commercial viability of some theaters. And given the reduction in seats available for sale, even higher prices might not compensate theater owners.

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(Chris Wiegand’s artciel appeared in the Guardian, 2/23;  Lena Olin and Erland Josephson with the Hedda Gabler sofa in After the Rehearsal. Photograph: Everett Collection/Alamy.)

Ingmar Bergman’s movie unpacks, like no other, the intimate emotional processes of staging and seeing a play

In the opening scene of Fanny and Alexander, a boy is alone in an empty house, playing with a toy theatre lit by candles. The 1982 film is an appealing portrait of the artist as a young man and, two years later, Ingmar Bergman presented a similar image in his next film, After the Rehearsal. The theatre director Henrik (portrayed by Erland Josephson) remembers creating his own makeshift stage as a child with a box and some bricks. It is a telling contrast to the ornate model playhouse that belongs to the young Alexander, played by Bertil Guve, who appears briefly in the later film, too, in a cutaway as the 12-year-old Henrik. Fanny and Alexander is a sweeping family drama told with an ensemble of actors; After the Rehearsal is less than half its length, with just a trio of characters. If the former is the crowd-pleasing main-house production, the latter is an experiment in that theatre’s studio space.

In the films’ opening scenes, both the young Alexander and the ageing Henrik are half-dreaming, heads rested on their arms. Fanny and Alexander, which revolves around a theatrical business and alludes to Hamlet, ends with the characters preparing a new production of Strindberg’s A Dream Play.

In After the Rehearsal, Henrik is preparing for the same drama, which Bergman himself directed several times on stage and for a 1963 TV film. Henrik wakes from his sleep when one of his actors, the twentysomething Anna (Lena Olin), pays a visit. The pair discuss the play and their relationship: many years earlier Henrik had an affair with Anna’s mother, Rakel (Ingrid Thulin). Rakel proceeds to enter the scene, too, and Henrik’s conversations with each woman, observed by the other, drift between past, present and imagined worlds in much the same manner as Strindberg’s play, with which it also shares similar imagery.

For Strindberg, objects become charged with meaning. As a seashell contains the sounds of the ocean, so the old woman’s shawl in A Dream Play has absorbed decades of sorrow, both from her own life and from others. This is how Henrik sees the props and furniture that are used in his productions.

He and Anna are sitting on the sofa that was previously seen in a revival of Hedda Gabler. The armchair, he tells her, was used in Strindberg’s The Father. That table? He cast it in Tartuffe. These objects are in effect their own rep company and bring their own connections with other plays, just as the “angels, demons and ghosts” of those productions still hover around the stage. They are all old acquaintances, which is how Henrik feels about the characters in A Dream Play. He still remembers seeing Strindberg’s drama for the first time as a child; he is now mounting his fifth production of the play and there’ll probably be a sixth or seventh, he suggests.

Each of these shows leaves a sort of spiritual energy on the stage, says Henrik, so that every performance at the theatre has the resonance of past productions. For Anna, it is intimidating to be acting in the footsteps of others who have played the same role. But this sense of theatre history is part of the pleasure for audiences – even if it’s just the romantic nostalgia of imagining the bygone productions whose fading posters hang in the theatre bar.

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