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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

How the show can go on

March 12, 2020 by Terry Teachout

I’ve written a special “Sightings” column for The Wall Street Journal in which I consider the potentially devastating effects of coronavirus on theater in New York—and suggest a remedy. Here’s an excerpt.

*  *  *

The performing arts are facing a crisis of the highest seriousness—and theater in New York may be in the biggest trouble of all. Shortly after Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera announced that they would be closed in an attempt to slow the inexorable spread of the new coronavirus, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo put in place a ban on public gatherings of more than 500 people. That includes Broadway, whose smallest theater seats 597 and all of which went dark at five p.m. on  Thursday….

Yet there is a way for the show to go on without putting the public at risk. That way is online live-streaming.

Starting with the Metropolitan Opera in 2006, a fast-growing number of performing-arts groups have been using digital technology to beam their shows into movie houses on both sides of the Atlantic, and many older performances can also be viewed online….

According to City A.M., a London-based financial and business newspaper, a dozen English theater troupes are hard at work on contingency plans to live-stream their shows should they be closed by the coronavirus.

Not so Broadway’s producers. “We have not really discussed [live streaming] as an option,” Charlotte St. Martin, president of the Broadway League, told the New York Daily News. But why not seize the opportunity to leap forward into the 21st century and make live-streaming an integral part of theater in New York, in the same way that some New York jazz clubs routinely webcast performances for free as a way of promoting the unique experience of hearing live jazz?…

*  *  *

Read the whole thing here.

A scene from the PBS “Great Performances” telecast of the 2017 Broadway revival of Noël Coward’s Present Laughter, starring Kevin Kline. I was in the theater when this performance was taped:

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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