The Broadway League announced this week that its theaters, which have been dark since March 12, will not reopen at least until Labor Day. This was the third announced date of a possible reopening—following the earlier ones of April 12 and then June 7—and it’s anyone’s guess whether Broadway will really be back by Sept. 8 or not.
“While all Broadway shows would love to resume performances as soon as possible, we need to ensure the health and well-being of everyone who comes to the theater—behind the curtain and in front of it—before shows can return,” Broadway League president Charlotte St. Martin said in a statement issued on Tuesday. “The Broadway League’s membership is working in cooperation with the theatrical unions, government officials and health experts to determine the safest ways to restart our industry.”
The move by the Broadway League follows by a week an announcement by the Society of London Theatre that London’s West End, which has been shut down since March 16, will stay dark at least until June 28.
Broadway’s shutdown has already caused the indefinite postponement of this year’s Tony Awards, and the cancellation of such highly anticipated shows as a starry revival of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the Broadway debut of Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen. Some shows that had been scheduled to open on Broadway this spring, among them Caroline, or Change and How I Learned to Drive, have tentatively been announced for the fall, while a revival of Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite, starring Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, has been pushed back a full year; it is now expected to begin performances on March 19, 2021.
Broadway and London’s West End aren’t the only theater venues impacted by the coronavirus pandemic, of course. All around the U.S., major regional theaters have indefinitely closed their doors, with the influential Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis announcing last week it would not reopen until March, 2021, with a truncated three-play season, and the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven, Ct., recently deciding to cancel its entire 2019-20 season.
But the show continues to go at some theaters. Last month, the Public Theater in New York live-streamed the debut of *What Do We Need to Talk About?, a Richard Nelson play written explicitly for Zoom. And this Thursday, the Old Globe Theater in San Diego, often an incubator for Broadway shows, will live-stream on its website the premiere of In-Zoom, a 10 minute play by the two-time Tony winner Bill Irwin.