The COVID-19 crisis is creating a new performing arts and cultural industry—perhaps for the better.
Theaters and other performance venues were among the first businesses to close in March 2020 and some of the last to re-open in 2021. Now, many are closing their doors yet again in early 2022 due to the Omicron wave.
By early December 2021, thirty-three plays and musicals were playing on Broadway but, by December 23, only around sixteen productions had performances due to COVID-19 positive cases among company members.
During the 2018-19 season, musicals generated around 80 percent of Broadway ticket sales and $1.43 billion in gross income, an average of $27.5 million per week. In contrast, weekly gross revenue in 2021 for both plays and musicals ranged from a low in October of $14 million to $32.5 million in November before falling again due to canceled performances and show closings as the pandemic resurged.
The arts and cultural sector is reliant on federal funding as well as on people working in close proximity to each other to create what it makes and sells. In turn, ticket sales are dependent on an audience’s willingness to gather in close proximity with strangers.
Worse still, before grocery and hardware stores had a supply chain problem, artists were struggling with a bottleneck of their own: Theater managers confronted an increased cost and limited availability of steel used to build scenery, while a shortage of front of house and box office employees continues to be a challenge. To make it worse, some foreign built stage sets were stranded on shipping containers in the Pacific ocean.
Overall, according to a report by Americans for the Arts, 63 percent of artists experienced unemployment at the height of the pandemic and 95 percent lost creative activity income. Arts, entertainment, and recreation jobs dropped from 2.5 million to 1.2 million between February and April 2020. By December 2021, jobs in the sector had rebounded to 2.24 million but were still down by 11 percent.
Many arts workers remain in a precarious position and others have left the field entirely because they cannot live on the full-time wages paid in the industry.
The closing of arts organizations over the past two years has put many artists and cultural workers out of work, forcing them to find innovative new ways to generate revenue, such as selling tickets to online archival recordings of prior years’ productions, panel conversations with fellow artists, and teaching online acting classes for students of all ages.
Despite this, many arts workers remain in a precarious position and others have left the field entirely because they cannot live on the full-time wages paid in the industry.
The workforce at not-for-profit theaters, for example, decreased significantly from 145,000 in 2019 to 93,000 in 2020. In the same period, there was a decrease of more than half in the number of artists employed.
Among arts workers, there is growing concern about working conditions and the disparity in pay between leaders and front line staff. In the theatre and the film industry, performers, including older women, are organizing around gender discrimination and working conditions.
While isolated at home or in small studios nearby, artists are collaborating digitally to create quarantine concerts, plays, and films and distributing them via the Internet to international audiences that often far surpass their pre-pandemic reach.
In New York City, a new law starting in April will require companies with at least four employees to list salary ranges in job postings, a measure that could help reduce pay inequity on Broadway.
And a group of theater designers in Chicago recently released “On Our Team,” three checklists covering transparency, working conditions, and accountability to create more equity in design fields and between workers covered by union and non-union contracts.
Theater designers working in professional and academic theaters, with the “no more 10 out of 12s” campaign, are also demanding an end to the scheduling of ten hours of technical rehearsals in a twelve-hour workday, that can easily expand to fourteen or sixteen hours of work in consecutive days throughout “tech week.”
In direct response to COVID-19 restrictions and fears, theater and museum owners have invested significant resources to upgrade ventilation systems that will improve air quality and flow long-term. The seasonal ebb and flow of COVID-19 surges has caused arts organizations to cancel, delay, and reschedule performances, productions, and even entire seasons.
While many theaters have taken a pause from full seasons of programming, a handful have used this time to focus their energies on raising funds to renovate or build new performance venues that are scheduled to open post-COVID.
Chicago-based Timeline Theatre and Definition Theatre, along with Northlight Theatre, located just north of the city in Evanston, Illinois, are continuing to raise money while other theaters struggle to stay alive.
The hope is that artists—along with the arts and cultural industry as a whole—will emerge on the other side of the COVID-19 crisis with a renewed clarity of purpose. This is a reckoning that deserves applause.