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[0:00] Jackson Klein: You're listening to The Ensemblist, the only podcast that shows you Broadway from the inside out. I'm your host, Jackson Klein.

[0:25] Jackson Klein: On March 12, 2020, the Broadway League suspended performances for all Broadway shows through April 12 amidst rising coronavirus concerns and bans on large gatherings. Six months later, most industries are reopening, television and film productions resuming, and many office employees are settling nicely into remote work routines. Yet, staying masked, practicing social distancing, and avoiding large crowds remains crucial in the fight against COVID-19. As a result, Broadway and many theaters across the country remain closed until at least January 3, 2021. So much remains unknown for our industry. But there's hope, as live performances begin sprouting up at venues such as Berkshire Theatre Group and Weathervane Theatre, as Broadway's Diana prepares to be filmed for Netflix, as theater artists find ways to create work digitally.

But what did the future look like for actors at the beginning of the pandemic? During the month of March, we released daily conversations with actors performing in Broadway shows, national tours, and regional productions, as they first adapted to workplace changes, unemployment, and the uncertainty. Six months later, we're looking back at those conversations to see if anything from the past can teach us about the months ahead.

[1:51] Jackson Klein: Sometimes your dreams get broken in pieces, but that doesn't alter a thing. As businesses across the country began shutting down and transitioning to remote operations in early March, live theater continued. However, many productions began taking precautions, as we heard from Jason Kappus, in rehearsal for a production of Sister Act at Seattle's Fifth Avenue Theater, Tina's Jessica Rush, and Frozen's Adam Jepsen.

[2:25] Jason Kappus: We got an email from company management that sort of outlined the 20-second hand washing that of course, you know, we're all supposed to be doing in life in general. We had some discussions about, you know, what people may or may not want to do with, you know, props, and we've had moments in choreography, you know, where we're all supposed to be holding hands, where, you know, we've just kind of been foregoing that for right now, you know, until we need to actually do the choreography properly. They did encourage us, you know, to stay home if sick, which is, was sort of nice to hear in official capacity, because, you know, as we all want to be the people who are dependable and show up, and we had last week, during our last week in the rehearsal hall, we had multiple days with five or six people out of rehearsal.

People who just had cold symptoms, a couple people had the flu, so, you know, everybody was taking it seriously, and we were managing as best we could. We're disinfecting the armrests and the back of the seats between every show. We are not allowing backstage guests. There's no line at the stage door, and anyone who's traveled, you know, vendors aren't allowed backstage, so they were trying to keep it really separate, front of house and behind the curtain, just so, because we can control us, you know, anyone who feels sick don't come to work. In fact, on Sunday, I had a sore throat and a cough, and normally I would have gone to work, but I thought, well, I don't know, so I called out, you know, because I was like, I had a sore throat Saturday and then a cough on Sunday, and I thought, well, who knows what this is, so I called out on Sunday.

[4:13] Jason Kappus: Well, it first started off with Sharpies for signing, so they were like, don't accept Sharpies or pens from audience members to reduce, I guess, contamination, right? I think that started late last week. Early this week, we're going to provide Sharpies for you guys in this box. Please do not take any photos. Please, like, remain kind of far away from audience members, and then two days ago, or maybe it was even yesterday, they said there will be no signing at all, and then also yesterday, where Brooke, of course, is with a Broadway usher at the Booth Theater and the Brooke Atkinson's Theater, I believe, and that was kind of the first time that management came to each of the dressing rooms. That happened last night, and they said, this has hit the Broadway community, in terms of an actual human being.

[5:09] Jessica Rush: Around this time, many performers, including Jessica Rush and Come From Away tour standby Jane Bunting, sensed that a shutdown was imminent.

[5:18] Jane Bunting: Well, I'm a mom, clearly, and so I've already been paying attention to things. I'm immunocompromised because of medication that I'm on, and so, and also just in general, I like to know things. So, I've been, like, keeping track of it for a while now, and thinking, this can't keep, this can't go on. They're going to have to do something. I'm the person who, when we got to the theater on, like, Tuesday, people were like, do you think they're going to cancel Broadway? And I said, absolutely. Absolutely. It's a matter of, I said, we will not be here by the weekend. I guarantee it. So I walked out into the house to watch, because we did have a standby on that night, and I walked into the house, and it was, it was light.

It was, we've been playing a lot of bigger houses on the road, so for what we're used to, it was a bit smaller. And it, I mean, there was a bit of a, you know, an interesting energy on stage. Like, I mean, people, we had actually a company meeting right before half hour to just kind of address what was going on, and we were told, we're not canceled as of yet, but obviously this is an ongoing situation, and we have, we're finding out new information every hour. In fact, on Wednesday night, as everything was being canceled, NBA season, you know, Houston Rodeo, I have relatives in Texas, and they're like, the Houston Rodeo is canceled, all these things are being canceled. And Wednesday night, I went around at work, and I was like, y'all might just want to take home anything that you would want to have at home if you can't come here for a couple weeks.

And they're like, what? No, Jess. I was like, I'm telling y'all, you should pack things up. I was like, I'm going to be the mom here and tell you, take home what you're going to want. And looky, looky, look what happened, who was right.

[7:10] Christopher Henry Young: Among the first productions to officially shut down were the San Francisco-based And Peggy Company of Hamilton, featuring Christopher Henry Young, and Fifth Avenue Theater's Sister Act. So the first thing that we got was that the health crisis had hit, that there were movements happening here in San Francisco. Wednesday morning, we get information that we're meeting at half hour to discuss what was announced that morning. And it was that gatherings of over a thousand people were now not to happen. And we found that out all through the news. And we found out at that meeting, and in the email that followed before half hour, that our company management had only been informed about that at the time that it dropped via the news outlet.

So they weren't even given necessarily any heads up, which we were all quite shocked at. Because I guess the assumption is that the things affecting specific companies would get some sort of, hey, this is happening, but I guess there really wasn't the time, if I'm making an assumption about it. So that Wednesday, we all meet at half hour before our matinee, where they inform us that, and this is our company, the they is our company management, along with Broadway SF's higher ups meet to inform us.

[8:29] Christopher Henry Young: Yes, Broadway San Francisco at the Orphan Theater. And they all meet to tell us that there is this thing going out that the mayor has put a ban on non-essential public gatherings over a thousand people. And our theater is close to 2,000 people. And so we weren't sure what that meant because of how it all lined up timing wise. But the news that we had at the moment was that the actual bill paperwork of whatever it is hadn't been signed yet. So we were going to go forth with the matinee and see when that all came about. We then find out at the end of the matinee, they tell us at intermission that we'll be having a second meeting once the show comes down, get out of costume as quickly as you possibly can, come meet on stage. And so we get there and that's when they inform us that we would be canceling performances for the next two weeks.

[9:20] Christopher Henry Young: Last night at about 10 p.m. in a tech rehearsal that was going until 11:30 when we were on a break and saw that it was expected that the governor of Washington was going to be issuing a statement today on Wednesday canceling any gatherings of people of 250 people.

[9:44] Jason Kappus: Broadway followed soon after, with an initial four-week shutdown planned.

[10:03] Jason Kappus: It is a massive call to make. I mean, that is, I knew it wouldn't be taken lightly, and I knew they would try to get by as long as they could, because what it means for the economy, what it means for us, what it means for shows that haven't opened, also just tourism in general, what that puts out to the world, but at the same time, New York City, you know, everything they keep talking about is the community spreading and populations where it's really dense, you know, like areas with density. And, my God, there's nowhere more dense than Manhattan, you know, in the United States, I think. So, that was just, that was something that I knew. I was like, they have to call it. They have to. I did not expect a month, to be honest.

I expected a couple weeks. I was like, okay, well, a couple weeks, and then we'll come back. So, a month was, when I got that text yesterday, when the news broke that they were in a meeting to talk about a month-long, you know, stoppage, I was like, oh, that's definitely intense.

[11:06] John Tupy: Meanwhile, tours had a rather unique experience shutting down. Often, individual venues made calls to cancel tour stops before the producers did, resulting in information being discovered in unusual ways, as Chicago's John Tupy explained. Our Roxy Hart, Molly Downs, she was doing an interview with one of our theaters that we were performing with in Canada, and she calls in for this interview, and they're pretty much like, you know, you're not still performing here in two weeks. And she was like, that's news. We're not super surprised to hear it, but that was the first we were hearing of it. Just because it's all happening so fast, and the venues are the ones in control of all of this. It's not, the producers aren't canceling the shows. The venues are saying, we're not going to be able to do this. Then they have to tell the producers, that's like the line of communication.

[12:02] Jason Kappus: Life during the early weeks of the shutdown was filled with unknowns, from compensation and unemployment claims to return dates. So one of the things that came up as a question for a lot of us actors was, with the new tax law, a lot of people incorporate. And when you do that, you cannot collect unemployment. For certain shows that are specifically closed, I think some regional theater performances aren't so much postponed as kiboshed and kind of ended in that way. And some off-Broadway shows have closed. Some shows that were about to close on Broadway closed early, like so on and so forth. And so for some of them, they are genuinely closed, unemployed. They can apply for unemployment. We don't necessarily know the status of our employment.

As a show that wasn't intended to close, we were going on tour later this year. This company was moving from San Francisco onwards and upwards. To not really know or understand what our employment status is means that we can't necessarily apply for unemployment because we don't believe ourselves to be unemployed.

[13:20] Jason Kappus: From what I do understand, we do have overages still coming in because those are hitting us a month after we play a city. And so I do know that I have an overage check coming in on Thursday. Otherwise, I mean, we don't know anything. We have absolutely no idea whether or not we're still going to be compensated, which I know it's a very complicated situation. And I fortunately have been saving a lot over the last year and a half, so I'm not worried. But I also just don't know how long I'm not going to be able to go back to work and how much of my savings I'm going to have to dip into.

[13:55] Jason Kappus: Something specific about our company here in San Francisco is that we're a point of origin company. And for people who don't necessarily understand what that is, it's essentially they make San Francisco your point of origin, which contractually means that you aren't necessarily guaranteed per diem. It's kind of similar to being housed in New York. Shows in New York don't typically get per diem because that's your point of origin. And so for us out here, the Hamilton producers have given us so much in a way of kind of helping live in this very expensive city for so long. But being on a point of origin contract just brings up a mountain of other questions.

[14:34] Jason Kappus: We are most definitely canceled this week and next week. So we were supposed to finish out our run in Dallas this week, and then next week we were supposed to be in Naples. What some of us have done is that we have started looking at the individual websites of each venue that we have an upcoming run at. So the week after Naples is West Palm and the website, as of yesterday, said that we're still on. But the following week would be the first of a two week run in Fort Lauderdale. And that week has been canceled. But that's not something that has been necessarily announced to us by the producers. So that's something that we have all kind of sleuthed. I am assuming that we're going to be off for longer than two weeks, especially hearing that the CDC has been recommending that there are no gatherings of more than 50 people, which obviously doing a Broadway tour, usually we do it to more than 50 people. Ideally, we do it to more than 50 people.

[15:32] Jason Kappus: So I'm assuming that it's going to be a while and I am just trying to prepare for that as best as I can from being stocked up as possible where I'm staying to setting up a regimen every day so that I don't go absolutely insane. We don't really know when the tour is actually going to pick back up. We don't know how bad this is going to get. It seems like every single day we're getting a new piece of information. And I think that's the scariest part of it is like you never there's this huge if you don't know what's coming next. And so you can only make plans for so long.

[16:17] Jason Kappus: With a long road to recovery ahead, many found moments of lightness through community and creativity, as they still do months later. I'm trying to, as I think all of us are, focus on the positive things right now, which is that I wasn't expecting to see my family for the next six months. And now I get a chance to go back. So I have a beautiful guitar that has been sitting in my storage unit because it's just too big of a thing to take with me on the road. I'm planning on walking over to my storage unit this afternoon and just getting busting that baby out and just reteaching myself how to do that.

[16:54] Jason Kappus: I have a lot of friends that are offering, as I'm sure we all do in this community, which is amazing, offering a lot of digital content. I have some choreographer friends that are doing that. I'm going to try to learn routines. I have a girlfriend in the show who's in our band, and she has the idea of making a bunch of music videos, and she wants to include some choreography in them. And she sent me a bunch of recordings and stuff. And so that's a project that I have an infinite amount of time to work on. So that's something that's going to be really nice. I mean, I feel like I'm not going to be able to handle this unprecedented stretch of time without figuring out a way to be creative. I will not survive. I will go nuts.

[17:39] Jason Kappus: Moments like these remind me of why I think our community is so special, be it from the Instagram videos and posts of people finding humor and heart in this really stressful time. I think it's important. The workshop of Aida made this kind of funny spoof on a gospel song about being out of work. Laura Benanti making a call out to young musical theater actors in their kind of high school years to still put out the versions of their high school musicals just to let that be seen. I think those moments are really important and just remind the world why the theater community is so important, why expression in art is. And so I hope people remember that. And I hope we band together as a community, even more so than we already were.

[18:39] Jackson Klein: Thank you so much to all of you for allowing us to reshare their stories this week. The Ensemblist was produced today by Mo Brady and me, Jackson Klein. There are two great ways you can be helping the Ensemblist right now. One is by leaving us a rating and review on Apple podcasts. The second is by becoming a Patreon member at patreon.com slash the Ensemblist. Please follow the Ensemblist wherever you listen to podcasts, whether that's on Spotify, on Apple podcasts, or at bpn.fm, the home of Broadway Podcast Network. You can also follow us on Instagram. Wear a mask. Stay safe. Thank you for listening. Until next time.

[19:26] Jackson Klein: Bye.