The path back for performing arts in America is winding through
a parking lot in Los Angeles, a Formula 1 racetrack in Texas, and Shakespeare’s
summer home in New York’s Central Park.
اضافة اعلان
As the coronavirus pandemic slowly loosens its grip, theaters,
orchestras and opera companies across the country are heading outdoors,
grabbing whatever space they can find as they desperately seek a way back to
the stage.
The newest sign of cultural rebound: New York City’s Public
Theater said that it would seek to present Shakespeare in the Park once again
this summer, restarting a cherished city tradition that last year was thwarted
for the first time in its history.
“People want to celebrate,” said Oskar Eustis, the theater’s
artistic director, who is among the 29 million Americans who have been infected
with the coronavirus. “This is one of the great ways that the theater can make
a celebration.”
Large-scale indoor work remains a ways off in much of the
country, as producers wait not only for herd immunity, but also for signs that
arts patrons are ready to return in significant numbers. Broadway, for example,
is not expected to resume until autumn.
But all around the country, companies that normally produce
outdoors but were unable to do so last year are making plans to reopen, while
those that normally play to indoor crowds are finding ways to take the show
outside.
This is not business as usual. Many productions won’t start
until midsummer, to allow vaccination rates to rise and infection rates to
fall. Limits on audience size are likely. And attendees, like those visiting
the Santa Fe Opera, will find changes offstage (touchless bathroom systems) and
on: Grown-ups (hopefully vaccinated), not children, will play the chorus of
faeries in the opera’s production of Britten’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
There remain hurdles to overcome: Many of the venues still need
to win permission from local officials and negotiate agreements with labor
unions. But the signs of life are now indisputable.
In Los Angeles, the Fountain Theater is about to start building
a stage in the East Hollywood parking lot where it hopes in June to open that
city’s first production of “An Octoroon,” an acclaimed comedic play about race
by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. Austin Opera next month aims to perform outdoors for
the first time, staging “Tosca” in an amphitheater at a Formula 1 racetrack,
while in upstate New York, the Glimmerglass Festival is planning to erect a
stage on its lawn.
Organizations that already have outdoor space have a head start,
and are eager to use it.
Mark Volpe, the president and chief executive of the Boston
Symphony Orchestra, said that later this month he will ask his board to approve
a plan to hold performances once again this summer at Tanglewood, the company’s
outdoor campus in Western Massachusetts. The season, if approved, would be just
six weeks, mostly on weekends, with intermissionless programs lasting no longer
than 80 minutes, and no choral work because of concerns that singing could
spread the virus.
The audience size remains unknown — current Massachusetts
regulations would allow just 12 percent of Tanglewood’s 18,000-person capacity
— and Volpe said that, even if the regulations ease, “we’re going to be a tad
conservative.” Nonetheless, the prospect of once again hearing live music on
the vast lawn is thrilling.
“Having the orchestra back onstage with an audience,” Volpe
said, “I can only imagine how emotional it’s going to be.”
The Muny, a Saint Louis nonprofit that is the nation’s largest
outdoor musical theater producer, is hoping to be able to seat a full-capacity
audience of 10,000 for a slightly delayed season, starting July 5, with a full
complement of seven musicals, albeit with slightly smaller than usual casts.
“Everyone is desperate to get back to work,” said Mike Isaacson,
the theater’s artistic director and executive producer. “And our renewal
numbers are insane, which says to me people want to be there.”
For professional theaters, a major potential hurdle is Actors’
Equity, the labor union, which throughout the pandemic has barred its members
from working on any but the small handful of productions that the union has
deemed safe. But the union is already striking a more open tone.
“I am hopeful now in a way that I could not be earlier,” said
Mary McColl, the union’s executive director. She said the union is considering
dozens of requests for outdoor work, and has already approved several. As for
Shakespeare in the Park, she said, “I’m very excited to see theater in the
park. We are eagerly working with them.”
A few theaters already have union permission. Utah’s Tuacahn
Center for the Arts starts rehearsals next week for outdoor productions of “Beauty
and the Beast” and “Annie.” Tuacahn, which stages work in a 2,000-seat
amphitheater in a southern Utah box canyon, is planning to use plexiglass to
separate performers during rehearsals, but expects not to need such protections
by the time performances begin in May.
In some warm-weather corners of the country, theaters are
already demonstrating that outdoor performances can be safe — and popular.
The Phoenix Theater Company, in Arizona, and Asolo Repertory
Theater, in Sarasota, Florida, both pivoted outdoors late last year; the
Arizona company borrowed a garden area at the church next door to erect a
stage, while Asolo Rep built a stage over its front steps.
The audience seems to be there. Asolo Rep’s six-person concert
version of “Camelot” sold out before it opened, and the Phoenix Theater’s
current “Ring of Fire,” featuring the music of Johnny Cash, is also at
capacity.
The finances are complicated so long as there are capacity
limits imposed by health officials. For some, performing outdoors promises more
revenue than working indoors with social distancing.
“I was sitting in my theater alone, looking out at the empty
seats, and realized that if audiences were forced to sit 2m apart, it reduced
my audience size from 80 to 12, which is not a robust financial model to
present to your board of directors,” said Stephen Sachs, a co-founder and
artistic director of the Fountain Theater. “So why not go outside?”
But for larger organizations that cost more to sustain, capacity
limits pose a different challenge. In San Diego, the Old Globe says that, at
least in the near term, it might only be allowed 124 people in its 620-seat
outdoor theater.
“Just to turn on the lights requires an investment that will eat
up most of what those seats will yield,” said the theater’s artistic director,
Barry Edelstein. “It’s just incredibly challenging to figure out what we can
afford to do — maybe a little cabaret, or maybe a one-person performance of
some kind.”
Nonetheless, Edelstein said he expects, like his peers, to
present work outside soon. “There is a lot of stuff happening outdoors —
dining, religious services, sports,” he said. “We’re not really fulfilling our
mission if we’re sitting here closed.”
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