Plans for PNC Broadway in Pittsburgh continue to evolve; ‘Hamilton’ confirmed for 2022
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There’s good news and bad news about the PNC Broadway in Pittsburgh series, currently on hiatus due to pandemic restrictions.
“I want to promise you and assure you that Pittsburgh will see Broadway again,” said Pittsburgh Cultural Trust CEO Kevin McMahon on Tuesday, during an online town hall meeting for series subscribers.
“I have no doubt that the challenges that we all face now will eventually be overcome,” he said. “Throughout history, some of the greatest work has emerged through crises.”
That’s the good news. The bad news is that there’s no clear timetable for the series to return.
“Nobody really knows exactly when that’s going to be,” said Mark Fleming, PCT vice president of marketing, communications and Broadway programming.
New York’s Broadway theaters currently are closed through May 31, he noted, adding that “Hamilton” is confirmed to return to Pittsburgh in early 2022.
Among those joining trust representatives during the meeting were Lauren Reid, COO of The John Gore Organization, which owns Broadway Across America; Meredith Blair, president of The Booking Group, which represents national show tours; Broadway producer Sue Frost; and Dr. Joseph Allen, associate professor in the Harvard University School of Public Health.
The discussion was moderated by Joanna Obuzor, operations manager of the Benedum Center, home to the series.
Reid said the logistics of coordinating a traveling Broadway production are complicated even under normal circumstances — including traveling in “a geographically smart way” from city to city, while coordinating among venues and with directors, choreographers and other creative team members.
As America begins to open up, the process “will be like putting pieces of a puzzle back together as the landscape keeps changing and the timing keeps changing,” Blair said. “We have no consistency in what states are open (and) when.”
Challenges include keeping cast and crew members safe during travel, in hotels and in crowded spaces backstage and onstage — along with insuring audience safety.
“One of the reasons it’s going to take a while to come back is, we need to come back to full houses,” Frost said, for both financial and artistic reasons.
“Our financial model requires full houses,” she said. “Socially distanced audiences are not going to create anywhere near the same feeling that a house full of people laughing, crying, clapping does.”
Even when venues are allowed to open to large audiences, Allen said, “The only way it works is with a large degree of social trust and shared responsibility.
“Consumer sentiment is down about doing anything, going out to a restaurant, going to the theater again, and that’s totally understandable,” he said.
Public education and a layered defense strategy, like that employed in hospitals, will be needed to make people feel safe, he said. That includes mandatory masks, hand washing, queuing rules and maintaining social distance in lobbies, along with building sanitation, ventilation and air filtration.
“This won’t be theater as usual — it can’t be, we’re in the middle of a pandemic,” he said.
Evolving conditions are monitored by the Trust’s reopening task force, which continues to work on a “road map to reopening,” Obuzor said.
PNC Broadway in Pittsburgh subscribers will be informed as more information becomes available, Fleming said.
The Trust continues to offer online programming. Information is available at trustarts.org.