With no plans to hold performances until 2021—and that’s at the earliest —Broadway and other iconic performance venues are tackling how to make ends meet during their extended shutdown.
Executives on Tuesday detailed those plans, which have involved turning away from once-lucrative ticket sales and toward digital reproductions, educational initiatives and civic efforts completely outside the art world, in a panel discussion hosted by Crain’s.
As the rest of the city's economy reopens, albeit tepidly, performing arts venues are remaining dark for the rest of this year.
The Broadway League on Monday said the industry would not reopen until 2021. Previously the Metropolitan Opera and Lincoln Center canceled their fall seasons, pushing back their earliest reopening dates to next year. That leaves artists, theaters and producers facing the better part of a year without their traditional income.
“The one thing that we as producers regret is not gathering content of all of our productions in my 16 years of producing,” said Stephen Byrd, founder and producer at Front Row Productions.
Byrd produced Ain’t Too Proud: The Life and Times of The Temptations, which grossed more than $1 million in ticket sales the first week in March. All told, it brought in $75.7 million in its 404-show run.
Broadway closed less than a week later. Now the only way to show plays—some that once fetched four-figure ticket prices—is through digital reproductions.
Broadway long resisted digital reproductions being used for commercial purposes, fearing they would cannibalize ticket sales, said Bonnie Comley, owner and founder of BroadwayHD, which creates those reproductions.
But now commercial reproduction has become essential. Roundabout Theatre Company, which manages Broadway venues such as American Airlines Theater and the Steven Sondheim Theater, partnered with BroadwayHD before the pandemic, said Julia Levy, Roundabout's executive director. That’s allowed it to preserve other parts of the business, such as post-performance discussions about its plays, she said.
Reproduction likely will continue even after theaters reopen; social distancing may reduce the number of people the venues can allow in and manage.
Selling works digitally could help make up the gap that is lost in ticket sales, Byrd said.
“I think this has taught us a big lesson, in going forward, that we now have to hard-wire" filming content into production budgets, Byrd said. “That’s going to be another way of opening up the market until we can really get people back into seats.”
While the shutdown continues, arts institutions are looking outside of art altogether as they look for ways to use their spaces that are likely to be shuttered for months.
Lincoln Center, the city’s sprawling, 16.3-acre mecca for theater, ballet and opera, is now a polling site, said Clive Chang, chief of staff and innovation. Later this month, Chang said, it will open as a food distribution site as well.
“Something unique to Lincoln Center is that we have the privilege and responsibility of stewarding 16 acres of real estate in Manhattan,” he said. “We’ve really begun in earnest" to activate the outdoor spaces in a phased, controlled kind of way, he said.
The center also will hold artistic displays in its plaza, Chang said. Its arts programming, which has been digital during the pandemic, has included a high school graduation video with music from Juilliard, the New York Philharmonic and New York Chamber Society, and a weekly Sunday night concert to memorialize those who have died from the coronavirus.
Since Roundabout can’t hold its flagship productions until spring of 2021, it is instead focusing on education, Roundabout's Levy said.
It helped principles and teachers from 18 city schools get tools and support for students to learn online. It continued its after-school theater programs virtually, as well as its workforce program, which teaches young adults the technical aspects of a production, such as set and costume design.
While there's was a stay-at-home order in place, the students worked from their homes on training for technical theater, Levy said.
The reality facing New York’s performing arts industry today would have been unimaginable at the start of the year. Broadway was a $1.8 billion dollar industry in 2019, and ticket sales raked in as much as $45.7 million in a single week.
Sales like that bankrolled the exorbitant cost of putting on a Broadway production, Byrd said, but that expense may no longer be viable post-Covid-19.
“With a $25 million production, can we afford to sustain those tickets now?” the Front Row founder said. “I think it's going to be a very, very big challenge for producers and the unions to come to some reconciliation as to how we can resolve the expense of bringing a show to Broadway. Which is, compared to the West End in London, very, very, very expensive.”
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