When it was announced on Sunday, March 12, that Broadway would be shutting down for a month, theatergoers everywhere lost their minds. Those 30 days soon became three months, then seven months and then ten, and right now the fate of theater is in the hands of COVID-19. Broadway is expected to open back up in January 2021, but at the rate that our country is tackling the pandemic, we may not see live theater until much later. This time away from live theater has exposed a lot of cracks in its foundation, which only adds to the already-major issues within the industry. In short, Broadway is a mess and it’s only getting worse.
Before the pandemic hit, the problems within the theater industry already ran deep. The lack of representation both on the stage and behind the curtains has been a constant issue, with white actors and workers making up the majority of people within the industry. According to the Asian American Performers Action Coalition Visibility Report, in the 2017-2018 Broadway season, “61.5% of all roles on New York City stages went to White actors.” Every year theater fails to show some real representation, they bring a whole new meaning to the name “The Great White Way.”
Without bright marquee lights to distract us from these major issues, theatergoers have begun looking at Broadway under a magnifying glass, revealing the major imperfections below its already cracked surface. A real shock to Broadway fans was the record-breaking number of Tony nominations for “Slave Play” playwright Jeremy O. Harris. “Slave Play” was nominated for 12 Tony Awards for this year’s very delayed award season, making it the most Tony-nominated play in history. Harris is expected to sweep at the Tony Awards, and if awarded he will be the first Black playwright to take home the Tony Award for Best Play since August Wilson won for “Fences” in 1987.
Beyond its many problems with racism and a lack of diversity, this year’s Tony Award nominations revealed just how elitist and consumer-driven Broadway still is. With many of this year’s expected contenders for a Tony nomination out of the running because of the early shutdown in March, there were very few shows eligible to receive nominations. As beautiful and well-produced as these productions are, there is less originality on stage, it seems, than ever before.
For this Broadway season’s Tony Awards, only four musicals were eligible to be nominated. Of those four shows, three are jukebox musicals, with one outlier in this group: “The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical,” which has a completely original score. With only four musicals eligible, many expected all four to receive that nomination; however, “The Lightning Thief” received a grand total of zero nominations across all categories. The Tony Awards Administration Committee would rather have Aaron Tveit (“Moulin Rouge”) as the sole nominee for Lead Actor in a Musical than even acknowledge Chris McCarrell, who played the titular role of Percy Jackson. This year’s Tony Awards will be the most confusing and chaotic we’ve ever seen it.
When Broadway opens back up, we’ll be left with a handful of productions that are lucky enough to survive after the shutdown, but until then we are left patiently waiting for live theater to return. As tough as it is for fans to wait for the return of Broadway, theater workers, both on and off the stage, are struggling during this pandemic. Theater is just as much about the experience as it is the production and talented actors. Actors and stagehands can’t practice their craft, and theater workers who have served as ushers or ticket sellers for years are unemployed with their return back to work creeping further and further away. Without a steady income or much government support, many actors and theater workers have moved out of the city because of the high cost of living and it is unlikely that everyone will return once theater opens up again.
As we anxiously wait for the day we can watch live theater again, it’s important to see how unstable the entire theater industry is at the moment. If space is not made for people other than the same copy-and-pasted white cisgender lead, if productions are going to be ridiculed for not pandering toward the audiences and theater organizations who look for the same vanilla content, if the people who keep theater alive are barely keeping themselves alive with the lack of support during the pandemic – what is the point of opening Broadway again? Theater needs to take this time off for some self-care, so when it opens in a few months – or at this rate a few years – we won’t need to pick up the shambles that it has left behind.
