Musicals are out, one-man plays in

Broadway gets creative waiting for show to go on

Television can fake it, movie audiences can wear masks, but a live theatre performance like “Romeo and Juliet” needs real actors kissing and fighting rivals in front of real people.

Theatre, especially largescale 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 per cent of those questioned would go to a theatre performance when venues reopen, while 51 per cent 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.

The U.S. branch of Equity has hired an epidemiologist to come up with protocols for actors, stagehands, and costume and makeup 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.