I was on Broadway the day Cuomo declared the city to be in a state of emergency. My friend Melanie and I had ditched campus on Titus weekend, took a long drive through the mountains and packed onto a train from Poughkeepsie to New York City. We were seeing The Cursed Child, as nerds do, skipping the most iconic party of the spring semester for a mediocre play and a few stolen hours at the MET (side note: if anyone reading this doesn’t humbly say ‘fuck JKR’ please exit my article). We spent two nights in The Lyric Theatre, over-sanitizing our hands but still rolling our eyes at the tourists that were wearing masks. That was seven months ago.
Broadway first shut down on March 12th and was scheduled to reopen a month and a day later on April 13th. It’s been 197 days since 42nd street went dark.
Since the first dark, I’ve been terribly worried. Devastated, sure, but mostly concerned for the performers and how they’re getting on.
I’m fairly active in the theatre community. I’ve paid an arm and a leg to take masterclasses with Tony award winners and donate monthly to 54 Below—Broadway is important to me, I feel indebted to the strangers that sing on all the cast albums I’ve cried over. My Instagram is story after story of cast members interacting and updating fans on the state of their closed shows, of what they’re doing to pass the time. I see people who have never been paid insanely well to perform their craft move in with their parents, revert back to high school jobs, and say goodbye to the city and the life that allowed them to pursue their passion.
Since Broadway closed I have watched more Instagram Lives and Zoom plays then I really would have liked to. The community has mourned the closed theatres, cried about the plays that won’t get to have a final call, and silently watched as billboards and posters are scraped off theatre fronts for plays that people still have tickets for.
The wait doesn’t seem long, it’s not what’s bothering me. A few more months and a hopeful vaccine later and Broadway should be running again. I feel most for the performers and composers and hopefuls that have been set back for months. They’ve been deprived; many have taken to campaigning for support over TikTok and some have given up all together—“not the right time”, they say. This industry moves quick, we know, it’s all about being in the right place at the right time. But where do you go when time stops? How does live theatre evolve and grow when audiences are banned?
I cannot help but feel the space left by the stories we won’t get to hear, because that void is a bit wider than the wait to January of 2021. I can only hope that 2021 is the last scheduled re-opening, and until then, I’ll be praying to the goddamn matriarch Patti LuPone that Six! will still be selling tickets in 2021.