Produced and directed by Akisa Omulepu
[The Great Performances presentation of “The Arts Interrupted,” a look at the toll taken on the performing arts in New York City and around the country by the coronavirus pandemic, premièred on Friday, 14 May 2021, at 9 p.m. on WNET, Channel 13 in New York City (and on various schedules on other PBS stations around the nation).
[The transcript for this hour-long broadcast us too long to publish on Rick On Theater in one post, so I’ll be putting it up in two parts. Part 1 below will be followed by Part 2 on Sunday, 6 June.]
Take an inside look at how arts organizations nationwide are surviving the pandemic and how they are maturing during the country’s reckoning with systemic racism, featuring interviews with artists and performances made during lockdown.
ANNOUNCER: Next, on “Great Performances”. . .
During pandemic times, how have performers survived the arts interrupted?
OSKAR EUSTIS [Artistic Director, The Public Theater, New York City]: I went into the hospital on March 12 with COVID. And when I came out five days later, the theaters were shut down and it’s been shut down ever since.
ALEJANDRA DUQUE CIFUENTES [Executive Director, Dance/NYC]: The way in which arts and dance and cultural workers make a living disappeared with it.
DANNY BURSTEIN [Tony-nominated actor, “Moulin Rouge”]: We’ve missed the exchange of dialogue. We’ve missed love on a very deep level.
I think what I miss most is that sense of community that can only show up in that exchange of storytelling between artist and audience.
(vocalizing)
VANESSA WILLIAMS [Grammy, Emmy, and Tony nominee]: Isolation and harmony, fragility and resilience, oppression and hope. These are the emotions of our time.
I’m Vanessa Williams, your host for a look at how performers during the pandemic survived the loss of the arts.
ANNOUNCER: Join us when “Great Performances” explores “The Arts Interrupted.”
♪♪
Major funding for “Great Performances” is provided by. . .
. . . and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you. Thank you.
Major fund (horns honking)
Good evening, and welcome to “Great Performances.”
I’m Vanessa Williams. Like all live theatrical events, “Great Performances” looked very different this past year.
JANE KRAKOWSKI [Tony for Nine, 2003] (on tape): I’m at home. Unlike you, my seats are numbered because the theater is my life. And right now, I’m seriously missing the live theater experience.
WILLIAMS: Broadway stars Jane Krakowski, Daniel Dae Kim [The King and I, 2016], and others introduced special encore presentations of their shows from their homes.
DANIEL DAE KIM (on tape): Good evening, I’m Daniel Dae Kim. Welcome to “Great Performances,” and tonight’s “Broadway at Home” presentation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The King and I.”
WILLIAMS: “The Grammy Salute to Music Legends” was produced in dozens of different locations and all remotely.
– ♪ Time after time
WILLIAMS: Stars appeared on Zoom for “Movies for Grownups” [an annual award by the American Association of Retired Persons for entertainers over 50 and films that address viewers of that age].
HODA KOTB [broadcast journalist, television personality, and author] (on tape): Let me be the one to congratulate you on your big award here. Just tell me what it means to you, George [Clooney], to be recognized by the A.A.R.P. [Clooney (then 56) received AARP: The Magazine’s Movies for Grownups Awards 2018 Career Achievement Honor.]
CLOONEY: I suppose the most important thing I could say is thank you very much to all of the people and to A.A.R.P. for this distinguished honor, and I can use the word “distinguished,” because you have to be distinguished to be in A.A.R.P.
Scott Yoo [conductor and violinist; host of PBS 2019 music miniseries Now Hear This] invited us to “Now Hear This” with the orchestra socially distanced.
YOO: A once-in-a-lifetime feat today was every performance for the genius that was Mozart.
I’m Scott Yoo and I hope you can “Now Hear This.”
(playing softly)
WILLIAMS: And a new “Romeo and Juliet” was performed in a theater, but not on stage. [Shakespeare’s play was performed backstage at London’s “shuttered” (due to COVID) National Theatre; Great Performances, April 2021.]
♪
All performing artists were forced to adapt to a new way of reaching audiences when the COVID-19 pandemic struck the world and the lights turned out.
Tonight, I’m coming to you from New York’s legendary Apollo Theater in Harlem. Again, things look very different. Although I’m feeling right at home onstage, the seats here at the Apollo, like seats in most theaters around the world, are empty.
This special edition of “Great Performances” will take you on a journey through the events of this past year that brought us here.
We will never forget 2020. From the COVID-19 crisis to the Black Lives Matter movement, with its rallying cries for social justice, it was a year that profoundly changed our lives.
It’s also how art and performance inspired us, keeping us going through the dramatic highs and the devastating lows.
While ghost lights, like this one, kept burning in theaters, artists have pointed us to an even brighter light—the light at the end of the tunnel. [See “Ghosts, Curses, & Charms: Theater Superstitions – Part 1,” on Rick On Theater, 14 August 2020, for an explanation of what a “ghost light” is and how it got that name.]
Our journey begins with a question: What do you do when the lights go out? We’ll find out together.
But first, let’s go back to what so many of us call the “before times,” when the arts were in full swing and Broadway saw the debut of a much-anticipated musical, “Moulin Rouge.”
(fingers snapping)
(“Lady Marmalade” playing)
DANNY BURSTEIN: The opening night of “Moulin Rouge” [Thursday, 25 July 2019] was one of the most exciting nights of my life.
I’ve been in 18 Broadway shows. I’ve never experienced anything like it before. There’s, there are so many different people who contribute to a Broadway show: costume designers, lighting designers, set designers, painters, the stage hands . . . . They’re artists in their own way. You walk into that theater and everybody is on the same page.
This particular company was very close, and it’s also easily the most talented group of people that I’ve ever worked with: actors, singers, dancers—people who could do anything.
[Karen Olivo and Aaron Tveit singing]
SATINE: ♪ Suddenly the world
♪ Seems such a perfect place
– ♪ Come what may
– ♪ Come what may ♪
BOTH: ♪ Come what may
(holding note)
♪
♪ Come what may
(song ends, cheers and applause)
WILLIAMS: But then, the applause stopped.
(applause stops abruptly)
March 12, 2020, just hours before the curtain was to go up on the matinee performance of “Moulin Rouge,” performances were canceled. The show became ground zero for COVID, as 25 members of the company, including leads Danny Burstein, Aaron Tveit, and Karen Olivo, contracted the virus.
And on that same night, all of Broadway went dark.
BURSTEIN: We’ve missed community. We’ve missed the exchange of dialogue. We’ve missed love on a very deep level.
And that isolation, I’m hoping, you know, abates very, very soon.
WILLIAMS: The Metropolitan Opera closed, along with Carnegie Hall, the Blue Note, and across the country, the Kennedy Center, the Troubadour in Los Angeles, comedy clubs, concert arenas, and nightclubs—every place where performers unite a group of strangers with their unique talents—shut their doors.
EUSTIS: To me, it was like the opening episode of “The Walking Dead,” because I went into the hospital on March 12 with COVID, and I was actually in the hospital when the theaters shut down.
And when I came out five days later, the theaters were shut down and it’s been shut down ever since.
It took me probably longer than it should have to recognize that this was going to be a long haul, and every step along the way, um, it has posed new challenges.
WILLIAMS: The impact has been immeasurable, devastating an entire industry with financial losses in the billions.
Likewise, support industries were also hard-hit. Restaurants and bars, both in New York’s Theater District and near performance venues around the country, shuttered.
Most performers make barely enough to survive, and now their day jobs in dance studios and gyms were also gone.
KAMILAH FORBES [Executive Producer, Apollo Theater, NYC]: So the pandemic has truly rocked the artistic community, um, not only from the institutions. I mean, we saw immediately overnight that we’re facing eight, close to $8 million in revenue losses, like, within the blink of an eye, when we had to close our doors.
But truly, who really became impacted were the individual artists.
CIFUENTES: We in New York City, being a city that is so dense in activity for dance and the arts in general, but also so dependent on a[n] international audience and on a healthy local audience, when the city shut down, the way in which arts and dance and cultural workers make a living disappeared with it.
EUSTIS: When the shutdown happened, every single person who worked in the New York theater—every artist, every actor and designer, director—was instantly a hundred percent unemployed. Everybody lost their jobs.
The nonprofit theater had the additional issue . . . . We had a staff of about 250 people, and all of our earned income vanished overnight, and trying to figure out how to live up to the responsibilities that we had to our staff, as well as to the freelance artists who make up the bulk of our workforce, um, was incredibly challenging and difficult.
WILLIAMS: So, what did they do when the lights went out?
Brilliant, creative people were not to be held back. No matter what the challenge, singers gotta sing, actors gotta act, and dancers got to dance.
(“The Music and the Mirror” [A Chorus Line, 1975] playing)
So they dance in the streets.
♪
Artists forged on, finding new avenues for their amazing gifts. Performers surprised us in a different way. And played music in their living rooms.
♪
(singing in Spanish [“Chan Chan” by Los Angeles-based Afro-Cuban band Changüí Majadero])
♪
(singing in Spanish)
♪
WILLIAMS: Leave it to performers to invent new ways to touch our emotions.
(distant applause, objects clanging)
(car horns, applause)
(singing operatically [Brian Stokes Mitchell singing out his window])
We were inspired by the 7:00 clap and how we could really charge our community to stay strong. [For the “7:00 clap,” everyone went to his or her window, balcony, or front yard at 7 p.m. and clapped to thank the healthcare and essential workers during the early days of the pandemic.]
And so we called on artist friends and we did a social media campaign, which was called “Humanity in Concert.”
ROSEANNE CASH [singer-songwriter and author; daughter of Johnny Cash]: Hi, Roseanne Cash here along with John Leventhal [musician, producer, songwriter, and recording engineer; married to Roseanne Cash].
Thanks to Lincoln Center for putting this together and inviting us. Um, we wanna dedicate this song to the maintenance crews and cleaning crews at all the hospitals across New York City and across the country, actually. They, um, risk their lives right along with the healthcare workers.
– Amen.
– We really appreciate them.
This is a traditional Scottish song called “The Parting Glass.”
(playing slowly)
♪ Of all the money e’er I spent ♪
♪ I spent it in good company
♪ And all the harm I’ve ever done ♪
♪ Alas, it was to none but me
♪ And all I’ve done for want of wit ♪
♪ To memory now, I can’t recall ♪
♪ So give to me the parting glass ♪
♪ Good night and joy be with you all ♪
♪ Of all the comrades e’er I had ♪
♪ They are sorry for my going away ♪
♪ And all the sweethearts e’er I had ♪
♪ They wish me one more day to stay ♪
♪ But since it fell unto my lot ♪
♪ That I should rise and you should not ♪
♪ I gently rise and softly call ♪
♪ Goodnight and joy be with you all ♪
♪
♪ Goodnight and joy be with you all ♪
(song ends)
WILLIAMS: While performers had to find new ways to share their work, New York’s Public Theater was one of the first to put that work in front of an audience. Playwright Richard Nelson reunited the actors who had portrayed his fictional family the Apples in four earlier plays for a brand-new play, created specifically as a Zoom production. [From 2010 to 2013, Nelson wrote and directed four plays centered around the Apple Family; all four plays premièred at the Public. On 29 April 2020, the Public live-streamed a new Apple Family play, What Do We Need to Talk About?]
Oskar Eustis found it difficult to contemplate this at first.
– That’s just the starting point.
– You know what it’s about.
– Actually, I don’t.
– Richard, it’s people telling each other stories while they wait out a plague hundreds of years ago in Italy.
EUSTIS: I spent about two weeks after I got out of the hospital in this ridiculously self-righteous theatrical pose.
“We are a theater company, we’re not a film studio.
“We’re not a television station, we’re not a radio station.
“We will produce theater again when audiences can come together and we won’t be,” and it was just a joke.
It was a terrible response.
And after about two weeks, I realized that essentially what I was saying is that, “Well, as long as there is a pandemic, I’m relieved of the obligation of fulfilling our mission.”
And of course, that isn’t true. Just because there are really difficult circumstances doesn’t mean we get to stop trying to fulfill our mission.
The first idea that came to me was Richard Nelson’s idea of bringing the Apple family back together to do a Zoom play.
And Richard came up with this idea within two weeks of the pandemic hitting. And it led to our first digital production, “The Apple Family’s What Do We Need to Talk About?”
– All right, this week I was Skyping with Gideon, he’s my friend at Bard [College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York], and a writer friend of his, and we’re commiserating about canceling the play this summer.
– The musical.
– Right, so they were, they were trying to figure how to do something to keep going, do theater somehow to just kind of, you make the point that we’re not done, we’re not finished.
– Mm-hm.
– So we quickly, we think of something like this, what, you know, what we’re doing on Skype or Zoom. We stream it, we put it on YouTube, it’s . . . . You know, they’re not the same, of course, but it shows that we are not giving up.
So, what to put on?
I suggest, maybe, “Skin of Our Teeth”?
– I don’t know that.
– It’s sort of about the end of the world.
– Oh, that’s a good idea.
– (chuckling)
EUSTIS: And I’m so proud of that show, because Richard is an extraordinary artist who brought together this company of actors who he had worked with over a decade and created the Zoom play.
The play wasn’t a film of a play. The play was a Zoom call, so actually was the medium that it was transmitted in. And it was seen in 37 countries, all 50 states, I got fan mail from Kazakhstan.
It was a fantastic success and was the beginning of our digital efforts, which have continued to this day.
WILLIAMS: Innovation and experimentation was to be found all over the country, in theaters and concert halls large and small. Away from the biggest cities, the arts, tourism, and community often intersect—in places like Great Barrington, in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts, where one theater company made a valiant effort to still put on a show.
Oh, yeah!
♪ Oh, bless the Lord, my soul
♪ Oh, bless the Lord, my soul ♪
IVETTE FELICIANO [shoots, produces, and reports on camera for PBS NewsHour Weekend]: Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the stage actors’ union, Actors’ Equity Association, has only approved two theaters to resume live performances in the U.S. Both of them were in the Berkshires.
The first was Barrington Stage Company, which staged the one-man show “Harry Clarke” in early August. The second, Berkshire Theatre Group, is now performing the musical “Godspell” through September 20. The actors in Berkshire Theatre Group’s “Godspell” talk about their dilemma at the beginning of the play.
– The COVID-19 pandemic took away everything I worked my whole life for.
– I felt alone, abandoned, unessential, and just completely unnecessary.
– My entire business relies on human connection.
– When theater shut down, so did I.
RALPH REMINGTON [Director of Cultural Affairs, San Francisco Arts Commission]: What this time has showed us is that, how resilient our artistic community is. And how creative, even in their own lives, artists are.
JANICE SINDEN [President & CEO, Colorado Center for the Performing Arts]: The resilience of our artists and our performers is amazing. They have, at every turn, figured out ways to lean in, whether it’s through virtual programming through the classroom and our education outreach or whether it was finding ways to do play readings, workshops, lots of heavy work thinking about what the future of theater is.
And there’s been lots of engagement and telling the stories of the people in our community, and there’s no one better than local artists to really depict those, those tragedies, as well as those stories of resiliency.
CIFUENTES: When we think about artists and their role in society, and we think about what we cannot return to, is, we cannot return to seeing art as simply the thing that we engage with when we have a little expendable income.
SIMONE ECCLESTON [Director of Hip Hop Culture and Contemporary Music, Kennedy Center]: This moment has definitely been, um, a prime example of the democratization of art. The Kennedy Center really leaned into the fullness of its identity as the nation’s performing arts center and the nation’s cultural center.
WILLIAMS: Since many major arts organizations also have an education mission, they quickly identified the unique challenges that come with in-home learning. Many stepped up to help fill the gap between schools and students under lockdown.
JORDANA LEIGH [Senior Director of Artistic Programming, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts]: The first thing we did was, we ended up doing pop-up classrooms, um, which were performances and concerts for kids, and those were performances really geared towards young people, because we realized parents were at home and that their kids all of a sudden didn’t have school, didn’t have that structure that they were relying on, so what could we do to support our community immediately?
– For this next part, I want everybody to join in.
– I think you all should beatbox with me.
– Hold on, I promise you, it won’t be hard.
– We’re gonna start off using two words: boots and cats.
– We’re gonna go slow and speed it up.
– On a count of four, here we go.
– One, two, three, four.
WILLIAMS: The lessons introduced kids to diverse art forms, from beatboxing to playing guitar and singing in Spanish.
– I’m Sonia De Los Santos [bilingual singer in Spanish and English, born in Monterrey, Mexico], welcome to “In Casa Con Sonia.”
(singing in Spanish)
WILLIAMS: Once more, performers turned to emerging technology to share their talent.
♪
♪
WILLIAMS: For every challenge, there is a solution, and with every crisis, there’s an opportunity to shine. This crisis provided a chance for artistic innovation. Performers and their companies refused to be hampered by barriers and created new forms of performance: dance on a video screen, virtual theater, and even opera—in a Detroit parking garage.
YUVAL SHARON: Hi, I’m Yuval Sharon. I’m the artistic director for Michigan Opera Theatre and I’m the director of “Twilight: Gods.” I am delighted to welcome you to this performance. It is a performance in which you are a very active participant in the event.
This is how you’re gonna be experiencing the opera: behind the wheel of your own car, because you will be driving from level to level of the parking garage to see the scenes on each individual level.
WOMAN (actor): So . . . Siegfried is dead?
Siegfried is dead.
♪ Build his pyre
♪ Like a strong grove
♪ The riverbank
♪ Now a pile
♪
♪
WILLIAMS: Let’s see the visual ingenuity of a ballet performed by real dancers with animation [Scribble by Ballet X (Pennslyvania)].
♪
♪
♪
♪
♪
♪
♪
♪
♪
WILLIAMS: Let’s enjoy the dazzling ensemble of the Juilliard School with their unique performance of Ravel’s “Bolero.”
(playing “Bolero”)
♪
♪
♪
WILLIAMS: Young artists found ways to perform on all kinds of social media, from Instagram and Facebook to YouTube and TikTok.
ENSEMBLE: ♪ And we will come back home
♪ And we will come back home
♪ Home again
♪ And we will come back home
♪ And we will come back home
♪ Home again
♪ And we will come back home
♪ And we will come back home
(singing warm-up)
♪ Spend a day warm on the sand
ENSEMBLE: ♪ I bet you that sand is hotter ♪
– ♪ I bet you on land they understand ♪
♪ Bet they don’t reprimand their daughters ♪
ENSEMBLE: ♪ I bet they don’t do that
– ♪ Bright young women ENSEMBLE ♪ Oh, yeah
– ♪ Sick of swimmin’
WOMAN: Run, run, run, run, run, tendu, derrière, fifth.
Plié and stretch, plié and stretch.
Glissade, royale, glissade, royale. [ballet movements]
Glissade, royale, glissade...
(“Attack” by KERIMKAAN playing)
(woman vocalizing)
(“From Now On” from “The Greatest Showman” [2017 film about P. T. Barnum; music and lyrics by Benj Pasek & Justin Paul] playing)
♪ From now on
♪ And we will come back home
♪ And we will come back home ♪
♪ Home again
[As I announced in the introduction above, I’ll be posting “The Arts Interrupted” in two parts. Please come back for Part 2 on Sunday, 6 June—there is much of interest to come.
[The program will be streaming on the PBS website until Friday, 9 July 2021 at 11:59 p.m. EDT. It can also be viewed on video at https://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/pbs-for-the-arts-about/12512/. The performance samples that Great Performances has selected for this program are well worth seeing and hearing; I recommend catching them.]
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