KYW Newsradio is taking a look at Philadelphia’s entertainment scenes this week with a series of special reports called “The State of Entertainment.” Taking center stage today is this look at how live theater is finding its way after years of setbacks.
🎧 Listen to the Feb. 15, 2024, special broadcast "Streaming Wars: The End of Content's Golden Age?"
PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — The public health restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic forced Philadelphia-area theaters to do something catastrophic: close their doors, cutting off all revenue from live, paying audiences and pushing live theater in the region to the edge of disaster.
Four years later, the industry is still finding its feet, as theaters continue to explore new ways of attracting audiences back to live performances.
The Arden Theater in Old City was sold out on Feb. 2 as a new play opened — “Ladysitting,” written by local author and social activist Lorene Cary. It was good news. The Arden is currently in its second performance season since grinding back to life when the pandemic ended.
“We are at the two-year mark, and I would say we're at about 85% of where we were. Maybe I'm being a little generous. Maybe it's 82%,” said Amy Murphy, Arden managing director.
“I have said over the past two years, every day, I feel like I'm dragging a bag of rocks over uneven ground, right? But as long as we keep going forward, then, you know, that's what we're after.”
Theater executives across the city say, since the pandemic, they have had to replace talent — particularly backstage talent — because many among the backstage technical staff pursued more lucrative jobs in construction while theaters were shut down.
Murphy estimates the Arden lost as much as 50% of their staff. “Because people had to do other things,” she said.
“We had a technical director who had been here, like, 25 years, who said, ‘I'll be back when it's time to build play.’ And then, when it was time to build play, he had been doing construction and home renovations and realized: ‘Well, I can make more money this way.’ So we had to rebuild younger, newer, less experienced — and staff over the past two years.”
Cultivating a new generation of support
No one wants the theater community to just go away, says Deborah Block, producing artistic director of the nonprofit Theater Exile, in East Passyunk. “We don't want our whole society to crash and burn. So what do we need?”
One thing they identified is a need to educate the next generation of audiences. Several area theaters now have programs that connect them to city schools.
However, another glaring need they identified — rebuilding funding from major donors — may be harder to satisfy.
Block says the theater’s funding community did rally during the pandemic — “which is why I'm sitting here talking to you — because our funding community supported us at that time.” But she says, 41% of their audience members last year were new to theater. That’s both a challenge and an opportunity.
“The audiences are coming back, and we need time to cultivate not only new audience members, [but also] new paths of philanthropy and new models,” said Block.
The pandemic forced quick pivots, placed a premium on innovation, and took some theaters into unexplored territory. Block says Exile, as a smaller venue, is relatively nimble and can embody that spirit of boldness.
“Staying smaller does allow us to be more experimental, more challenging, engaging, daring,” she said.
Go digital; go ham
Leigh Goldenberg, managing director of the Wilma Theater, says she started her job on March 9, 2020.
“I came to the office twice before the entire industry and world shut down,” she said.
So, when all the world’s doors are closed, what options remain for a theater that depends on live audiences for survival? One answer: Go digital.
While live audiences were impossible, the Wilma instead recorded live productions and streamed them online. That season the Wilma presented two full productions. One of them was playwright James Ijames’ “Hamlet” adaptation, “Fat Ham,” which won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in drama.
“We reached almost all 50 states with those two pieces, and many countries around the world,” she said. “And ‘Fat Ham’ went on to win the Pulitzer Prize off of that filmed production.”
Tyler Dobrowski, artistic director at the Philadelphia Theater Company, says they, too, have had to get creative about finding new audiences. Digital isn’t the only path forward.
Their current production of Martyna Majok’s play “Cost of Living,” a 2024 Pulitzer winner, has at its center a man who has cerebral palsy. The production has drawn attention from Philadelphia's disability community, helped by a new partnership with ArtReach, a nonprofit that connects people with disabilities to the arts.
The company has also tried some elements of interactive theater, when it works with a performance. She described how their production of “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill,” about one of Billie Holiday’s last performances, recreated a speakeasy environment that the audience could occupy.
“And so we sort of made that an immersive experience. And that did very well for us,” she said. “That sold like crazy, and we made a lot of money at the bar — which we didn't even expect, really.”
🎧 SPECIAL BROADCAST FEB. 15
