We zero in on one moment in New York City’s cultural calendar that’s been wiped clean — what it means, what it looks like, what it cost and what’s ahead.
Ah, New York. The city where, this coming weekend, Hugh Jackman will make mischief out of marching bands in Broadway’s “The Music Man”; Anna Netrebko will pine stirringly as Aida for the Metropolitan Opera; and Nick Cave will command the stage with the Bad Seeds at Barclays Center.
The whole world seems to be here: Acts from Egypt, Morocco and Lebanon join an Arabic music festival at Joe’s Pub. Performances and parties herald the opening of a new $60 million home for the Irish Arts Center. And the reimagined Next Wave Festival draws adventurous artists from around the globe to BAM.
That’s not hypothetical. That’s the actual arts calendar for this weekend, Sept. 25 to 27, 2020.
Or at least, it was.
The coronavirus pandemic has shredded the schedule, silencing New York’s stages. Now Jackman is taking online dance classes. Netrebko is being treated for Covid-19.
Even as culture vultures return to museums, students to schools, and diners to restaurants, the performing arts remain indefinitely dark. (There are exceptions, of course, mostly small and outdoors. And there is streaming — so much streaming.)
So what happens when the performances pause, seasons are suspended, and stages go dark? We look at the toll the shutdown is taking through data (jobs vanished, revenues gone), visuals (picturing the season that isn’t) and personal stories (22 arts workers who should have been working this weekend, and what they’re doing instead). One weekend, lost, but also, so much more.
22 PEOPLE WHO SHOULD BE CLOCKING INTO WORK RIGHT NOW • Matt Doyle, a 33-year-old actor, expected to be on Broadway in a gender-bending revival of “Company.” Instead, “it’s hustle in any way imaginable”: singing on Cameo, teaching on Zoom, gaming on Twitch, writing comics on Webtoon, even renting out his car via Turo. Said Doyle, “The world fell out underneath us.” • Jesse Malin, 53, a rock singer and co-owner of clubs like Bowery Electric and Niagara, would have been touring across the Northeast in anticipation of a new album in October. Lockdown meant more than 100 lost shows, losing the musician up to 75 percent of his income. “$1,000 now is like $10,000 pre-Covid” for musicians who live week-to-week, tour-to-tour, he said. • Sutton Foster, 45, was slated to be starring opposite Hugh Jackman in a Broadway revival of “The Music Man.” Instead she has been holed up with “a wonderful variety of sweatpants,” and is leading dance cardio workouts for charity on Instagram Live. She and Jackman are planning a two-week choreography rehearsal, after which she will film the seventh season of “Younger.” “I’m excited to work,” she said, “but I know it’s going to be a completely different environment.”
• Lindsey Jones, 30, a freelance dancer who performs with John Heginbotham and Pam Tanowitz, expected her September to be full of rehearsals. She has no plans to stop performing, but in June she started an herbal medicine program and landed a job in garden design. “I have the body awareness that it requires because we’re doing so much heavy lifting,” she said. “Dance prepared me to do this job.” • Nick Catchdubs, 39, a DJ and co-founder of Fool’s Gold Records, would have been preparing for his independent label’s annual festival. About a quarter of his own income has evaporated, and the label shuttered its downtown location. “It’s phantom-limb syndrome,” he said of not being able to DJ. “And I don’t think anybody wants to go to a nightclub with ten people in circles.” • Frank Huang, 42, is the concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic. He lost a large part of his income when the Philharmonic’s musicians all agreed to accept the same reduced pay (about $2,000 a week). He has put off purchasing a car and some items for his daughter, born in May, and has been more frugal at the grocery store — “things I would never have thought twice about in the past” — while playing lawn concerts for his Scarsdale neighbors.
• Andy Jean, a costume designer who goes by “Qween Jean,” expected to be in previews with Tori Sampson’s “This Land Was Made” at Off Broadway’s Vineyard Theater. As the shutdown began, Jean read — James Baldwin, Nikki Giovanni, Maya Angelou. Then Jean became a Black Lives Matter organizer. “I kept waiting for someone to honor and uplift trans lives,” Jean said. “I felt obligated to speak out.” • Omar Vélez Meléndez, a 27-year-old playwright, was getting ready for his first New York production: an absurdist two-character drag show called “Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members” at Soho Rep. Now he is living on unemployment and grants, and revising his play in the anticipation that some day Soho Rep will stage it. • Val Menz, 43, has been a stagehand with “Wicked” for 17 years. An electrician and a follow spot operator, she worked all eight shows each week. But Menz also had a second life: on a farm in New Jersey. “I’ve tried to tighten the belt — luckily I don’t eat much,” she said. “I have eggs, I have a garden, and I’m not commuting, which was a huge expense.”
• Maggie Wrigley, 61, spent her nights working in what she calls the “happy mayhem” of the Mercury Lounge, the Lower East Side club where she served as a doorwoman for more than two decades. “For New York to not have live music — it’s like the ground has gone out from underneath us,” she said. • Quentin Earl Darrington, 42, expected to be featured in the Michael Jackson musical “MJ,” playing both the singer’s father and his tour director. “It’s been very hard financially,” he said. “I went from what would have been a pretty substantial income this year to absolutely zero.” Now what? “There’s unemployment. I’m coaching acting and voice over Zoom — that’s enough to buy groceries. I’m making a strategic push to TV and film. And I’m leaning more toward prayer and God.” • Yannick Nézet-Séguin, 45, would have been opening his first official season as music director of the Metropolitan Opera. Now he’s had to imagine different ways of making music — virtually, socially distanced, recorded, with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Orchestre Metropolitain and, he hopes, members of the Met Orchestra. Personally, playing piano has helped get him through: “My only salvation during these stressful times.”
• Dean Jeudy, 47, has a day job as a receiving clerk at Lenox Hill Hospital, but he spent most nights at the Joyce Theater, where he has been a lobby attendant off and on since 1993. “You know how much fun I had this year working at a health care facility,” he said. “It’s a complete 360.” • Peri Mauer, 67, a cellist and composer, was scheduled to premiere her latest piece — a duet with a recording of the water dripping from her defrosting refrigerator — at Drom. Her annual royalties check from Ascap, the music publisher, and an unexpected grant from the organization Composers Now have provided a cushion, as has conducting lessons. • Georgina Pazcoguin, 35, would have been dancing as a soloist with New York City Ballet, and readying a Gwen Verdon tribute for City Center’s Fall for Dance Festival. Instead, she has been cast in the new Justin Peck ballet for City Ballet’s digital season, for which she got to rehearse in a studio. “I have been relegated to taking class in my tiny studio apartment,” she said. “To have a 40 foot ceiling again — I don’t think I’ll ever take it for granted.”
• Jessica Rush, 39, was in the cast of “Tina.” When Broadway shut down, her husband, the actor Eric Anderson, was in San Diego doing a musical called “Fly.” The La Jolla Playhouse offered to let Anderson stay in his housing, so Rush and their 6-year-old daughter flew out, and they’ve been there since. “We’re living on unemployment and savings, which will run out,” Rush said. Now she and her daughter are selling beaded bracelets online. “Our industry has been decimated — overnight it just evaporated.” • The Baryshnikov Arts Center should have been launching its 15th anniversary season, now happening digitally. Its founder and artistic director, Mikhail Baryshnikov, 72, slated to be in Tokyo rehearsing a new project, will instead take part in a virtual chat with Cynthia Harvey of American Ballet Theater’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School and her students. “They don’t have a space where they can safely train,” Baryshnikov said, “so she thought a group Zoom with me might cheer them up a little.” • Michelle Whitaker, 51, the head treasurer at Broadway’s Walter Kerr Theater, knew where she would be: selling tickets and reconciling receipts in the “Hadestown” box office. Instead, she’s home in the Bronx, grateful that her husband is still employed as a construction worker. “Anybody in this business knows you save your money for a rainy day,” she said, “but we didn’t know it was going to rain this long.”
• Miguel Gutierrez, 49, is a choreographer-in-residence at Princeton University where he’s teaching and creating work, while logging time at Brown to finally finish his undergraduate degree — all virtually. “I don’t know yet what I want from performance again,” he said. “I’m trying not to just shove out a bunch of content for the sake of making it.” • Petrina Bromley, 49, not only portrays a Newfoundlander in “Come From Away,” but is one, and when Broadway closed, she grabbed her two terriers and fled to St. John’s. She is not collecting unemployment in either country, but she does have publicly funded health care; she is teaching, working on a TV show and dipping into her retirement savings. • Yacine Boulares, 39, a French-Tunisian saxophonist and composer, had spent months planning the inaugural year of an Arabic music festival at Joe’s Pub. Instead, Boulares will make his first international trip since the pandemic to Tunisia in October to perform the commission he has been working on during the slow pandemic months. • Anya Sapozhnikova, 34, the co-owner and creative director of House of Yes, a club in Bushwick, Brooklyn, always looked forward to the venue’s busiest month. The club’s payroll last September was $450,000; this year it will be under $30,000. She’s been learning to edit video and interning at a furniture studio while trying to keep House of Yes alive.