| re: Broadway to never re-open? | |
| Posted by: Joe90 08:50 am EDT 04/07/20 | |
| In reply to: Broadway to never re-open? - KingSpeed 07:53 pm EDT 04/06/20 | |
|
|
|
| Whatever happens and however long this shutdown lasts, it will take years for Broadway and for theatres to go back to functioning how they were a month ago. Not just in economic terms, but also in terms of what type of theatre will be staged going forward. The Met are losing millions. They won't be in a position to stage anything for years that isn't guaranteed to draw an audience, so it'll be popular uncontroversial productions of old warhorses for the foreseeable future. Broadway was already risk-averse; nobody is going to finance anything that is remotely experimental or that dares to interrogate form. Finances and audiences will be extremely limited for the next couple of years: nobody will produce anything with a large cast. Fewer musicals. More short runs of star-driven plays with no more than four characters. And it will all have to be geared for a local, dedicated audience - tourists won't return in significant numbers until the latter end of 2021. As somebody mentioned downthread - maybe the Jackman Music Man will buck the trend as it's a sure bet, but there's nothing else in the pipeline that comes close (until Lin-Manuel Miranda decides to write his next musical, perhaps). But in order to survive, Broadway producers will be treading very carefully for a few years. . As work will have to be for a devoted and faithful audience, perhaps there'll be room Off-Broadway for more risk and daring, but the financial risk are even more precarious there than they are on Broadway. Who knows if smaller venues and companies can survive, especially when philanthropy will be curtailed. I also expect that it the coming months, unions for actors, musicians, and stagehands will come under pressure to cut minimum salaries and numbers, in order to make any kind of live performance economically viable. Theatre and Broadway will return; you can take comfort in that. But for it all to achieve some semblance of what it looked like a few short weeks ago? It's going to take us at least until half way through this decade for that to happen, at least. We're all going to have to be in it for the very long haul. Joe. |
|
| reply | |
|
|
|
| Previous: | What, never? Hardly ever. - pcot 10:14 pm EDT 04/07/20 |
| Next: | re: Broadway to never re-open? - mattyp4 11:37 pm EDT 04/06/20 |
| Thread: | |
Time to render: 0.012126 seconds.