Hello, readers! It’s been a long while again, but it’s also been a long while since I had something to say here. I am fully vaccinated (yay!), work on the podcast continues at a slow but steady pace (more about that here and on Twitter), and, as you may have guessed from the title of this post, I’m still formulating post-COVID plans for my work in theater. You’ve seen two of the three I hope to execute on this blog already, and while I’m keeping the third under my hat for now, as I began plotting it out in Word just to concretize it a little on paper, I began folding other ideas into its structure that I realized had an application for the broader theater world outside of that concept. Thus, this post.
In all honesty, they were prompted to some extent by a — now-deleted, no clue why — Tweet at the end of May which posed the question “You wake up and you’re the head of Broadway, what’s the first thing you do?” (With a little sleuthing, I learned it was inspired by a similar tweet about Lucasfilm that had gone viral.) Though the “head of Broadway,” fun as it’d be, is an almost-impossible-to-exist position, I had several answers at the ready:
- Convert all existing theaters into modular venues.
- Institute a new hybrid model which combines live performances and streaming to increase accessibility and generate fresh revenue.
- Create “instant recordings” of select performances as a one-of-a-kind souvenir for those who pay to see the show in person.
They sound great as sound bytes, but let’s break ’em down one by one to explain them in a little more detail, shall we?