The Shows Can’t Go On

The live entertainment business bleeds money as the coronavirus pandemic offers no end in sight

The live entertainment biz has been hard hit by the ongoing pandemic.

IIt had been a grueling few months for John Benjamin Hickey. Not only had he wrapped up a long run playing a pivotal supporting role in Matthew Lopez’s two-part AIDS epic “The Inheritance,” but Hickey was also making his Broadway directing debut with “Plaza Suite,” a romantic comedy starring real-life couple Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker. The Neil Simon revival had finished a smash tryout in Boston and was shaping up to be one of the season’s hottest tickets when it opened in April. As he juggled his work, Hickey started feeling sick. “I felt awful, but I thought it was just the stress of getting through that final dress rehearsal,” he says. Opening night never came. With the coronavirus spreading across the country and cases rising exponentially in New York, Broadway dimmed its lights and lurched into an indefinite shutdown. Hickey left the Hudson Theatre, where “Plaza Suite” was in previews, and soon visited his doctor’s office, where he was tested for COVID-19. Like hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, he had the virus. What followed were days of fevers, chills, labored breathing, a loss of taste and smell and a litany of other symptoms that have become the well-known harbingers of a disease that has capsized American civic and cultural life. From restaurants to retail, film production to professional sports, the U.S. is in the process of reopening for business. But one sector of the economy is destined to be among the last to welcome back customers. Forms of live entertainment, such as theater and concerts, that depend on attracting large gatherings in contained spaces will mostly remain on hiatus until 2021. It’s not clear when they will be able to return, barring a medical breakthrough. That has many who make their living on the Great White Way calling for government support to help a devastated community survive what is sure to be a period of protracted limbo. But there’s skepticism that assistance will be forthcoming. President Trump doesn’t strike them as a theater aficionado and the Senate is controlled by Republicans, who wouldn’t love the optics of throwing a financial lifeline to one of the most left-leaning parts of the very liberal arts sector. Local help isn’t likely to be coming, either: Both New York state and New York City face massive budget deficits brought on by the coronavirus. “The chances that Broadway gets a bailout are slim to none,” says Charlotte St. Martin, president of the national trade association The Broadway League. Given those bleak prospects, Broadway power brokers believe their best and only option may be to devise a way to reopen safely, even if there’s no vaccine yet. Plans are in place to test casts and crews before every show, to implement contactless ticketing, to outfit HVAC systems with better filters and to have orchestra members play offstage or at a social distance from each other. Producers are also discussing mounting more one-person shows and looking at productions that have run times of less than two hours, so audiences won’t be exposed to one another for as long. One thing that’s not being considered, however, is playing to houses that are a quarter to half full. Plays cost roughly $300,000 a week to run, and musicals typically cost just under $600,000 to operate weekly. Turning a profit would be impossible without filling seats. That’s an even harder proposition given that tickets may have to be discounted initially to lure audiences back. “We won’t be doing social distancing, at least not on purpose,” says St. Martin. Broadway took in a record $1.8 billion in 2019 and supported an estimated 96,900 jobs. Concert industry trade Pollstar’s 2019 Top 100 global tours grossed $5.55 billion in ticket sales alone. As the historic Broadway shutdown stretches into its fifth month, anyone who had plans to work in theater this year has had to confront the harsh reality that the pandemic has wiped out job prospects through at least early 2021. “I don’t know how we’re going to be able to perform unless real progress is made in how we fight this thing,” says Hickey. “What does that mean? There either has to be a vaccine or people have to feel safe going back into a crowded room and sitting elbow-to-elbow. People aren’t going to see plays if they feel like they’re taking their life into their hands.” That’s left the thousands of people Broadway employs to design costumes, take tickets, choreograph dance numbers and perform eight shows a week suddenly forced to seek alternate work in a terrible job market. “The abruptness of the damage is so hard,” says Caesar Samayoa, a cast member of the musical “Come From Away.” “People work all their lives to get to Broadway, and then something like this happens and everything stops. You’re left trying to figure out how to make it a year with zero income. No one can make it that long.” There’s an emotional toll as well. “The theater is my second home,” says Kenny Nunez, house manager of the Longacre Theater. “It’s weird not taking the train every day and pushing through all the people in Times Square. It’s sad not to witness the look of awe in an audience member who is about to go to their first show. To have that taken away is devastating.”

“People aren’t going to see plays if they feel like they’re taking their life into their hands.”

JOHN BENJAMIN HICKEY

that involve mass gatherings, the live music industry — the financial engine of the music business, which Pollstar had projected would generate $12.2 billion in box office this year — was flattened by the pandemic in a matter of days. All major concert tours and festivals have been scrubbed or postponed indefinitely; layoffs, furloughs or pay cuts have hit every major live entertainment company; the SXSW conference, a vital showcase for new talent and the primary gathering point for industry professionals, was canceled outright. Pollstar has since estimated the concert industry could lose as much as $9 billion in 2020 alone — and that figure doesn’t include the losses of income by musicians, technicians, dancers and others in its sprawling supply chain. While streaming is often cited as the savior of the music business — which lost half its value in the early aughts as CD sales plummeted due to illegal downloading — it was actually the concert industry that brought it back to health, spawning multiple nine-figure-grossing tours each year for the past decade. The relationship is a symbiotic one: People rarely pay to see acts they don’t know, and streaming drastically reduced the cost and effort of discovering music. Thus, artists came to accept that the small amount most musicians earn from recorded music is a fair exchange for drawing audiences to the place they really make their living: concerts, where fans not only buy tickets but merchandise. That model is on life support because of COVID-19. Singer-songwriter Brian Fallon — former frontman of the Gaslight Anthem — is an independent solo artist who was set to launch a 10-week tour of North America and Europe and drop a new album the week the coronavirus took hold in the U.S.