2021 now looking bleak for potential U.S. theater reopening- Page 2

[HogansHero]

Posted: 11/10/20 at 9:05am

@OlBlueEyes Everything you say is accurate. I just want to add one thing about the early death rate, which is that it was hugely affected by nursing home deaths, something that will not happen again. When you add that to the advancements in medical knowledge (beyond the vaccine but including other treatments which are expanding exponentially, especially at the critical care level as well as far more acute diagnostic savvy), it appears we will have less severe (but still sad and horrific) statistics from the second wave.

@golbinau I have not seen anything that reliably answers that question but what I have seen suggests it will not be broad enough by then to translate into herd immunity, and that's even with aggressive efforts by a new administration (that will undoubtedly have this in the rear view mirror sooner than the current one would). Also worth mentioning, because it is hard to fully appreciate from the outside, is that New York is really a bubble within the US, with much lower current statistics, an aggressive protocol for those arriving from other parts of the country, and its own vaccine timetable (within the context of products becoming available generally of course). This latter could mean that the NY region will be prepared to have theatre again by July, but not at the Broadway level where tourists are (with few exceptions) essential.

[OlBlueEyes]

Posted: 11/10/20 at 9:47am

Yes, Hogan. We like to say that the death of any person, regardless of age or health, is of equal importance, but in reality the law in cases of wrongful death values the death of a younger person with many years of earnings potential ahead of him or her as far, far greater than that of one in a nursing home.

This Times article gives the time schedule for deployment of the vaccine if everything goes well. 

The rest of the safety data handed over to the FDA within two weeks. FDA issues emergency approval. Large scale administering of vaccine to begin in December. Two doses required. Full protection a week after second dose, or about  a month.after the first dose. Enough vaccine to protect 15 to 20 million by the end of the year.

I guess all of us are important enough to be among the first to receive it? 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/health/covid-vaccine-pfizer.html

And here are spoilsports who have to bring up things that can go wrong. Like probably none of us on the fast track to have the vaccine administered this year. Possible safety problems could still appear.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/health/pfizer-covid-19-vaccine.html

There has been a world wide race to produce a good vaccine. Although I know we all really trust the greedy drug companies, they may have cut some corners with billions of dollars at stake.

Oh, and when I mentioned above that no one in the theater community was likely to receive the vaccine this year, I forgot that Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster are likely exceptions.

Also, the many fans of Jeremy Jordan have started a petition.

 

                                                                                                                 

Updated On: 11/10/20 at 09:47 AM

[HogansHero]

Posted: 11/10/20 at 10:56am

just to put this in context a little: there are 18 million healthcare workers, and there are about 50 million seniors. When you add to that other people who are at high risk and move to the front of the line, plus Hugh, Sutton, and possibly Jeremy, a lot of the potential herd will be waiting. (And let's not even get started on the refusers.) 

[Mr Roxy]

Posted: 11/10/20 at 3:12pm

Waiting for the next Wildhorn show or at.least a revival.of Wonderland Wink Wink

[EDSOSLO858]

Posted: 11/10/20 at 3:17pm

Mr Roxy said: "Waiting for the next Wildhorn show or at.least a revival.of Wonderland Wink Wink"

Well... the Marquis was free before the shutdown. The Britney Spears musical did not officially announce a B'way transfer/theatre/dates to my knowledge. This could work???

Ha ha ha, just kidding. We all know Blunderland was a disaster in every way, not unlike You-Know-Who's other shows. Are you sure he isn't ghostwriting Lloyd Webber's Cinderella?

[LesWickedly]

Posted: 11/10/20 at 3:40pm

Obviously nothing is official yet but according to  this

"Azar forecasted that there would be enough of the vaccine to inoculate at-risk nursing home residents, health care workers and first responders by the end of January and that there should be "enough for all Americans by the end of March to early April to have general vaccination programs." NBC News

I don't see why Broadway couldn't possibly come  back fall 2021 if this all comes to fruition. 

Updated On: 11/10/20 at 03:40 PM

[Mr Roxy]

Posted: 11/10/20 at 4:09pm

Just kidding. Our theatergoing days were over long before Co Vid. See no way it can operate with current restraints. Add to that getting something eat before will.be.an issue with the restaurant industry descimated by Mr Cuomo.People will sit it out for awhile and tourists will be slow in returning .

All in all picture is bleak. Hope for all who will still be able to go it does return soon in some form . Have enough cast albums, videos legal and boots etc and memories to.last a lifetime , By the way Cuomo has already said he will.not let it be distributed until his team verified it safe  His hatred of Trump will cost more lives busy as with the nursing home fiasco he proves he is ok with collateral damage  Wants Biden to get credit for ending it  So glad I am done with politics  . Sorry to rain on anyones parade .

Updated On: 11/10/20 at 04:09 PM

[Sutton Ross]

Posted: 11/10/20 at 4:23pm

So glad you are done talking politics as well! Your opinions about our incredible Governor is based on Fox News and the NY Post. And also, how many times do you need to tell us your days of going to the theater are over? That you have tons of cast recordings to last forever? That you are done going to Manhattan? And eating in restaurants? We get it. You can stop now. 

[HogansHero]

Posted: 11/10/20 at 8:09pm

"Add to that getting something eat before will.be.an issue with the restaurant industry descimated by Mr Cuomo."

Let's try to sort this out rationally. Since you have not been in the city during this pandemic, you perhaps do not know that we have had a pretty cool restaurant scene over the summer and it will continue to have vitality until it is too cold or (hopefully not but it is not promising) a second wave lockdown is necessary. Moreover, to the extent the restaurant industry has been harmed (it has, though not descimated or even decimated), the cause was not Cuomo but Covid. What Cuomo has done is made NY one of the few sane places in the country, one of the few places where the risk of catching the virus -- even now -- is very low. Especially in Manhattan. Data is your friend. Science is your friend. Psychopaths are not.  Make that your mantra; it will heal you.

[BroadwayNYC2]

Posted: 11/10/20 at 8:34pm

“ So glad I am done with politics”

You were never smart enough to begin with

[Jordan Catalano]

Posted: 11/10/20 at 9:41pm

If Faucci is now saying the general public should be able to get the vaccine in April, a summer start date doesn’t seem as far fetched as it used to.

Updated On: 11/10/20 at 09:41 PM

[OlBlueEyes]

Posted: 11/11/20 at 2:52am

Cuomo was heavily criticized in the spring for overconfidence

“Excuse our arrogance as New Yorkers — I speak for the mayor also on this one — we think we have the best health care system on the planet right here in New York,” Mr. Cuomo said on March 2. “So, when you’re saying, what happened in other countries versus what happened here, we don’t even think it’s going to be as bad as it was in other countries.”

and by the head of the CDC during the Obama administration:

“Flu was coming down, and then you saw this new ominous spike. And it was Covid. And it was spreading widely in New York City before anyone knew it,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and former commissioner of the city’s Health Department.

Dr. Frieden said that if the state and city had adopted widespread social-distancing measures a week or two earlier, including closing schools, stores and restaurants, then the estimated death toll from the outbreak might have been reduced by 50 to 80 percent.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/nyregion/new-york-coronavirus-response-delays.html

I don't think that this criticism holds up given that almost everyone who has tangled with the virus has lost. The 50-80 percent seems unrealistically high.

[HogansHero]

Posted: 11/11/20 at 9:52am

@Jordan If that timetable holds up, I think we could well see SOME theatre in NYC during the late summer/early fall, but (as I have said before) Broadway presents its own challenge because of the tourist dependency. There is not going to be national herd immunity by then, and New York is still going to be cautious in protecting its borders. Right now, Manhattan has numbers that are a small fraction of the national numbers and I suspect we will remain well ahead of the curve on vaccination immunity as well. If I had to guess, I would say that The Music Man is looking a lot more like the kick start of the new normal for Broadway. 

OlBlueEyes said: "I don't think that this criticism holds up given that almost everyone who has tangled with the virus has lost. The 50-80 percent seems unrealistically high."

I think one of the benefits of hindsight is that we now recognize that experts are just giving their best guesses, and in the case of covid 19 the virus outwitted everyone. (You will recall that the WHO and others advised masks were needed only for the sick, a deadly notion that has of course been fully repudiated.) The epidemiologists's hospitalization models for NY, you may recall, were in the range 3-7 times higher than reality. Those guesses had consequences because much time and effort and money was expended trying to head off the catastrophe of those models. Also, those death stats in the early days of the pandemic, horrific as they were, were largely driven by nursing homes, so "closing schools, stores and restaurants" would not have had a noticeable effect. I respect Dr. Frieden, but what he thought in early April was naive, and I'm sure he'd be the first to tell you that. 

Updated On: 11/11/20 at 09:52 AM

[OlBlueEyes]

Posted: 11/11/20 at 10:55pm

I came across a book today by the late historian Barbara Tuchman, best known for The Guns of August. 

This book is entitled A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century. It was indeed calamitous for Europe, as the Black Plague, carried by rats on ships, arrived in the first half of the century and killed off one third to one half of the population. And the deaths were extremely unpleasant.

I was thinking typical thoughts about  how fortunate we are in that in 600 years our science has become so advanced that something like that pandemic could ever affect us in the same way.

But wait. In the last decade we have found viruses sufficiently lethal to kill most of those infected. These viruses did not spread easily. Now we have a relatively non-lethal virus that you can seemingly catch if an infected person just looks at you.

Impossible that a virus might appear with the best of both worlds? I was disappointed that our own science took the better part of a year to finally come up with what we hope will be an effective treatment.

[HogansHero]

Posted: 11/12/20 at 12:20am

I loved that book. I hadn't thought of it in years but I'm sure I still have it around here somewhere. As you know, one of her theses is a parallel between that century and the 20th (especially the part in which she was most interested). She has several other books focused mostly on the period before WWI, all very interesting, though Guns is obviously the masterpiece.

[OlBlueEyes]

Posted: 11/12/20 at 3:45am

Loved it when the French knights, stuck in France, were looting the French countryside. So the French king paid a visit to the Pope and they agreed on a new crusade designed to get the knights out of France so they could terrorize people other than the French. And the knights, who committed every kind of evil during their lives, before they died paid a large sum to one of the local monasteries in exchange for daily prayers that would keep them on the fast track to heaven.

[Owen22]

Posted: 11/16/20 at 5:57pm

Tourism May Not Fully Recover in NYC Until 2025 Due to Coronavirus Pandemic

https://nyti.ms/32MIxT6

Updated On: 11/16/20 at 05:57 PM

[Sutton Ross]

Posted: 11/16/20 at 6:14pm

I mean the economy was still recovering from 2009 when this hit so....optimistic. 

[hk2021]

Posted: 11/17/20 at 12:47pm

how many more times can they keep postponing certain shows? I have Music Man for June of 2022 which seems possible right now. 

[OlBlueEyes]

Posted: 11/18/20 at 2:02am

HogansHero said: "I loved that book. I hadn't thought of it in years but I'm sure I still have it around here somewhere. As you know, one of her theses is a parallel between that century and the 20th (especially the part in which she was most interested). She has several other books focused mostly on the period before WWI, all very interesting, though Guns is obviously the masterpiece."

Over the years I've read Guns of August twice and listened to the audiobook twice. I still have no idea why a basically peaceful and prosperous Europe decided that a horrific, bloody slaughter of millions would be a good thing. 

Well, that's not quite true. I have an inkling that the generals want to try out their latest strategy and weapons. Without a war they are of no consequence to their country and they always convince themselves that it will be a short war with few casualties.

The Zimmerman Telegram. An unlikely military alliance between Germany and Mexico? Why should Mexico be sore at us. Just because Polk decided to hurry along Manifest Destiny by occupying Mexico until they handed over California and New Mexico? 

Oh, I go too far off topic.

[Theater3232]

Posted: 11/18/20 at 6:29pm

Too many unknowns for anyone to say whether or not Governor Cuomo will allow theaters to reopen for Fall 2021.  Also, even if they do open, will there be enough people who feel comfortable coming back to make it profitable to reopen? Are theaters getting ahead of themselves in announcing their Fall 2021 seasons now?  Perhaps they should wait until June/July when we know how things are progressing.

"Failures and delays could stretch out the timeline for slowing the virus’s spread to 2023 or beyond".  "Rollout of any shots will take time, so masks, distancing and testing and contact tracing will still be vital." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-09/pfizer-vaccine-results-leave-questions-about-safety-longevity

[Jordan Catalano]

Posted: 11/18/20 at 6:34pm

If the majority of people will be vaccinated by April/May as is projected now, why wouldn’t theaters be able to reopen?

[Sutton Ross]

Posted: 11/18/20 at 6:52pm

April is when they think they will start to give the vaccine to the general public. It will take months for millions and millions of people to be vaccinated. 

[Jordan Catalano]

Posted: 11/18/20 at 6:56pm

Im hearing it should be available to everyone “else” (last phase), in April/May. Yes it will take time but the doctors on the task force are saying that’s the timeframe when the rest of America should be able to get vaccinated. So the whole “broadway won’t reopen until 2025 and New York is dead” posts are a bit tired at this point. Thousands of people now have hope about being able to return to work and that’s something we didn’t have a few weeks ago.

[Sutton Ross]

Posted: 11/18/20 at 7:02pm

Agreed.