Post 118 - July 7, 2020

Day 118…

It looked like they were loading out Frozen yesterday.

Like the end of a relationship, the main thing that happens when a Broadway show closes is the moving out.

The set goes into storage if you think that the pieces might be useful for a future tour, or they just end up in a dumpster. The lights and sound equipment are returned to the rental company, costumes and wigs are sold to a rental shop or, again put into storage for a future tour. The crew gets an extra two weeks of work while this is going on. At the end of it, the theatre is restored to a an empty four-walled space ready for the next show. The marquee is taken down and… that’s it.

Usually when a show closes, there is a mad rush among other producers to grab the empty theatre for the next show. If anybody is fighting for the St. James Theatre right now, they are likely to be holding onto it for a while.

Disney closed Frozen in anticipation of New York opening back up slowly. Their feeling was that as the first wave of people started returning it would be better to funnel them into fewer shows rather than have them spread them out among many. They are banking that Aladdin and The Lion King will attract more people without Frozen to compete with them.

Jaw-droppingly, Disney is planning on reopening Disney World in Florida on Saturday, a mere four days from now.

43 hospitals in 23 counties around Florida are at 100% capacity.

32 other hospitals only have 10% of their ICU beds still available.

In the last two weeks, the number of patients requiring ventilators has gone up 127%.

There are multiple reports that seem to show that contact tracing measures there have largely failed. The numbers are too high.

Testing facilities are being overwhelmed and are now experiencing long delays. In many places in Florida there is often a wait of up to a week to get a test. Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp are saying that once they get the tests that their turn around time can be as long as five days. This means that it could take nearly two weeks for infected people to find out if they have the virus. Two weeks that they can freely move through the population spreading the virus.

Orlando, which is about half an hour away from the parks, has the second highest case rate in the state after Miami-Dade. In the last few days, Florida hit and surpassed the 200,000 mark of new cases.

This is all still the first wave. We never flattened the curve nationally so, as Dr. Anthony Fauci said yesterday, we are still “knee deep” in the first one.

Governor Rick DeSantis said in response to those raising the alarm, “I have no doubt that it’s going to be a safe environment.”

Kate Shindle, the president of Actors Equity Association, the union who covers many of the performers in the park, disagrees. “I can’t imagine that anyone thinks it’s wise to reopen a theme park this week.”

As of two weeks ago, about 10,000 of the Florida park’s 78,000 employees had signed a petition asking the reopening to be delayed. These are people who desperately need their jobs to resume but who are more concerned about the danger of contracting this virus.

Disney is reportedly creating a quarantine bubble around its NBA players who will remain on the company’s resort property for the duration of the scheduled three-month playing season. It all seems fine until you take in to account the fact that about 5,800 workers will be commuting in every day from areas that have become COVID-19 hotspots to take care of them.

To try and beef up the non-participatory arms of its earning generators, Disney spent $75 million to be able to stream the hit musical Hamilton on its Disney + channel. Will enough people sign up and continue to pay the monthly access fee to make that investment worthwhile?

As a company, the majority of Disney’s revenue streams come from businesses that require people to gather. Broadway shows, movies, theme parks, sporting events are all group activities. Yes, they can earn money from online streaming, but nowhere near the same level. If you decide to hold onto your Disney + account, it will only cost your entire household $84 for the year.

If you go to a park, each individual admission ticket costs more than that. You’ve paid for parking. Perhaps you are staying in one of the property’s hotels. You are going to buy food. You are going to by souvenirs. The money you spend at the park.is going to pay the salaries of 78, 000 people and still leave the company with a sizable profit.

People streaming at home are not going to spend any more than $84 for an entire year. It is no wonder that Disney is so desperate to reopen in Florida. Unless we start being able to congregate again, they are not going to survive.

When cases in New York were finally starting to trend down a few months ago, the general sense that I was getting from producers was that Broadway would likely start to reopen this coming spring. The big fear, of course, would be to reopen a show too soon and then have to close it again.

Reopening a show is going to require a sizable financial investment. Some shows have already thrown in the towel knowing that they won’t have that cash on hand to be able to do that. Most of the other big shows may be able to afford to reopen once. They won’t be able to afford to do it twice.

When New York hit its peak of new cases, hospitalizations and deaths it was several weeks AFTER we had shut everything down. The coronavirus takes a while to establish itself before symptoms start occurring. Hospitalizations typically happen a week or two after the initial infection.

The spikes that we are seeing in Florida, Arizona, Texas and other places are still rising. None of those places have shut down so it is only simple basic common sense to deduce that those horrific numbers are only going to continue skyrocketing. None of those places are anywhere near their peaks yet. I don’t know how bad things actually need to get before any of those Governors start taking some radical action, but I fear we are just about to find out.

If those numbers across the country don’t start moving down, nobody here in New York is going to reopen a Broadway show. The second that Broadway shows start performing again, people from outside the state will start traveling in. Nobody is going to want that if all those people are bringing the virus in with them.

The process of reopening is going to take a couple of months of advance work - marketing, rehearsals, possible recasting. Until it’s clear that we are going to be OK, I don’t think that anybody is going to start that ball rolling.

We are all facing the end of our $600 supplemental unemployment payments. As of now, there are only four more of them and then that’s it. Regular unemployment will continue but will it be enough?

In my business, when we are unemployed, which can be often, there are many ancillary jobs that we can take to make up the shortfall. Many of those jobs aren’t there now, either.

The White House is betting on the fact that Americans will grow inured to the dangers of COVID-19. Staffers have said that they are hoping that the country simply grows “numb to the rising death toll” and that we learn to “live with the virus being a threat.”

OK. So, before everyone just jumps out of a window, I do realize that I have painted a pretty bleak picture here. Watching the guys outside the St. James yesterday on 44th Street loading out the show and seeing the darkened marquee was truly a bit of a gut punch.

Yes, we are all facing some difficult times, but we all have the ability to remain safe and well. We can wear masks. We can keep socially distant. We can protect ourselves and each other.

Financially? We are ALL in a similar boat.

Something is going to have to be done. The government, both federal and state KNOW that.

My friends and colleagues in Britain have been watching their cultural institutions teeter on the edge of total ruin. On Sunday night Prime Minister Boris Johnson finally announced about a $2 billion arts bail out.

The same is going to happen here. In some form.

It’s not going to happen because of some existentially moral reason.

It’s not going to happen because of why many of us respond to the arts. The financial and legislative sectors of our country don’t particularly care about the transformative power of the arts on the human psyche. They don’t particularly have any interest in our souls.

It’s going to happen because the economy requires it to happen. The arts make money. That’s it.

Broadway brings in more annual revenue to our state than all of our sports teams combined. Theatres all over the country as well as smaller theatres here in the city help pump billions of dollars into our country’s economy.

We do not need to behave like beggars in a house of plenty.

We do not need to hope that some governmental agency will look down upon us kindly and take pity on us and throw us a few bones.

The Arts are one of the main financial engines that run this entire city. Countless thousands of businesses can only operate when we are up and thriving. New York City simply cannot survive without the arts.

So, people, to quote Cher and John Patrick Shanley (again), “Snap out of it!”

I’m slapping myself as much as anyone else. Watching Frozen load out may have sent me into a temporary spiral but only because I didn’t think it through.

God knows this all sucks. We don’t know how (or when) we are going to get through this, but I am telling you that we WILL get through this.

New York City and, by extension, New York State, cannot afford to let us fail. The money is behind us, so even in this soul-sucking political climate, we will prevail.

In the meantime, grab some popcorn and watch Hamilton on Disney + and remember the amazing things that we accomplish when we do what we do.

Then, call your city and state representatives. Remind them of who we are and what we need.

As much as we may need the government to take care of us now, they truly need us more.