On July 3rd, 2020 the smash-hit Broadway musical ‘Hamilton’ was released on Disney+, in brilliant HD and boasting the original cast too, for thousands of fans around the world to enjoy. Instead of rushing to buy overpriced tickets and squeezing into tiny seats with poor visibility, audiences were able to enjoy the show from the comfort of their own homes, for the low, low price of a $6.99 a month subscription to the streaming service. (In the past years, tickets for ‘Hamilton’ have been priced well above the thousands of dollars, and in the height of its success the prime center orchestra seats were going for over $3,000 each.)
While it seems like a victory for theatre fans everywhere that hope to see their own favorite shows on-demand someday, the release of the musical comes at a time where the state of theatre and the performing arts everywhere is precarious, to say the least. ‘Hamilton’ is truly an outlier. After Disney outbid competing studios for the rights to the film— in a 75 million dollar deal— it announced that it would forgo a theatrical release scheduled for October 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic. Besides the viral success of this one show, there is little to be said about any other production, as tourism has ceased and shows have closed down, actors, writers, and backstage workers have lost their jobs. The industry has been one of the most affected by the pandemic, with governments offering little support or slashing arts budgets entirely, as theatres and productions are left scrambling to stay afloat.
The La Scala Opera House in Milan, for example, narrowly avoided greater losses by issuing vouchers for future performances or offering patrons the option to donate their ticket amounts to the theatre. It has only recently reopened after 4 months of lockdown, operating at under a third of its capacity to allow for social distancing, with an audience of just 600 people. In New York, The Metropolitan Opera announced an emergency fund-raising effort aimed at covering an anticipated loss of up to $60 million due to the cancellation of performances until the end of the year, including the American Ballet Theatre’s 80th anniversary season.
Though there are still many months ahead before we will see any sort of real improvement to this situation, organizations and actors have been finding new ways to share performances, both to offer some financial relief to artists and to fill the void for entertainment that audiences crave. Adapting to the pandemic and social distancing rules, they have begun exploring the possibilities of “distributed” theatre on platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, Zoom, and even through virtual reality. Streaming initiatives such as ‘The Show Must Go On’ on YouTube make available complete recordings of musical performances such as ‘Cats’ and ‘The Phantom of the Opera’ for a 48 hour period every week, with links to charities provided to support ‘worthwhile arts causes’.
In Toronto, the theatre company DLT (DopoLavoro Teatrale) in collaboration with the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, has started a Theatre On-Call: a service where people submit their phone number and receive live one-on-one performances or interactive experiences over the span of a few days.
Other initiatives have begun blurring the lines between audience and performer, such as the Arlekin Players Theater’s digital production of ‘State vs. Natasha Banina’ that reimagines the utility of the online meeting service ‘Zoom’ to create a unique theatrical experience. It appears to be a blend between an artistic experiment and a performance, as viewers are encouraged to introduce themselves to each other through the chat feature, and participate in a poll to be selected as jurors to a trial of a young woman. As she tells the story that led her to commit her crime of passion, the audience is held accountable to reach a decision, and the experience becomes even more intimate, as she calls out the names of each juror and pleads with them as well.
Even virtual reality shows have popped up. Katelyn Schiller is an actress who specializes in immersive work and has begun performances of a version of Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ where she is the sole performer, director, wardrobe specialist, and tech coordinator. It is an event where audience members gather in a virtual space by wearing a headset, and Schiller guides them throughout the performance and then to a final dance party. Perhaps due to its more immersive qualities, where the viewer is able to frame their own perspective in a 360-degree view, it appears to be the most similar to a theatrical performance, so much so that even the National Theater and Royal Shakespeare Company in England have attempted to create their own projects with this technology.
It seems to be an exciting prospect to observe these new hybrid performances and their potential to develop even beyond our current global situation, but in many ways, we still mourn the physical collective experience that seems so distant to us now. We take what appears as the closest substitute at the moment, but even an expertly recorded show or a virtual performance can’t capture what really is the soul of theatre, and what so many crave at the moment: the physicality of the experience and the simplicity of the occupation of a common space where performer and spectator feed off each others’ energy. It is only up to us to continue supporting these new initiatives while also advocating for the importance of adequate artistic funding if we wish to avoid having fewer opportunities to watch live theatre collectively in the future, and only have their digital reproductions left.
