Broadway Delays Comeback Until…
Today’s Artist of the Day: Karlye Hayes
What's up everybody? Broadway has announced that they're shutting down until May of 2021. What does the economic impact of that look like? I'll tell you the numbers are pretty ridiculous, let's go...
Let's talk about Broadway.
I'm gonna go ahead and let you know right now, this is a bloodbath of numbers, and you're not gonna like it if you're involved in the Broadway community at all, that said it is rather revealing about how crazy this pandemic has totally ruined the music industry short term, so let's get into a show... The initial shutdown for Broadway happened back in March, I believe it was around the 12th of this year, and the governor Como came in and said, Hey listen, we're not doing this anymore, it's too unsafe. People being close together, en mass, we gotta shut this thing down and probably rightfully so. At the time, we just didn't know what we were dealing with or what we were getting into. Shutting down seemed like the right move.
It was just, Let's just wait til April before we do anything. And then it was June, and then it was the fall, and now here we are in October, and they're already announcing they're not gonna open until May of next year, by far the largest jump that they've made so far. This means that for the first time in who knows how long, Broadway will be closed for an entire year.
So how bad are the numbers... I'll tell you about that. Approximately 97,000 people are involved in the Broadway industry alone. So this isn't talking about all the local theaters you'd like to go to or any of the other theaters across the world, this is just in New York City. The economic impact is 14.8 billion. Now remember, New York was initially hit really hard by the pandemic, they had like 11,000 cases reported in early April per day, and eventually now that's dropped from down to 1% or so, from that large number, it's decreased to basically less than 1% of the population in New York City per day, which is good. And obviously, if they were to even open right now anyway, attendance would be so low based on fear and consumer lack of confidence that they would be really spending more money than they'd be making, and that's not a good business model. And I don't understand all the answers to the questions, I don't... I'm not an epidemiologist, I'm not any sort of disease or virus expert. I am not a doctor. But if you want your Performing Arts to come back and you wanna go back and enjoy concert experiences without putting people's health at risk, it might be time for all of you to be wearing a mask, and also consider, if you wanna go back to a concert that wearing a mask in the short term might be the only way you get to do so faster.
That's a lot of money, folks. 14 point, blah, blah, blah, billion dollars lost because of this pandemic just in New York City alone, pretty insane, and I just wanna give it up to all my musicians and everybody involved in the music theater community. Keep holding strong. We love you. And if you're the general public still has a nine to five job, consider finding an artist to donate and subscribe to and give money to help them continue to pay the bills doing their art, just like they did before this pandemic, that they had absolutely nothing to do with, they make the world a better place, and they make the music or the art that is the soundtrack or the visual of your life, so to speak, and it would be really cool if you would find a way to support someone, so do that. If you're out there means a lot.