A new masking policy for Broadway’s “Kiterunner” was devised in the clinic.
One of the show’s producers, Tracey McFarland, was taking her son to a theater-loving pediatrician. A pediatrician told her he would have liked to see her play, but she wouldn’t attend if a mask was an option since most of her shows are on Broadway these days. I thought as follows. Why couldn’t the mask do the required performance and the mask optional performance? She brought up her idea with her colleague.
McFarland recalled one of the conversations that led to the show’s decision to start requiring masks on Friday, saying, “Everyone on the phone was like, ‘I had a friend who asked for it.'” I realized that there really is an unserved audience out there.”
Coronavirus continues to pose a dilemma for art presenters entering their second season after a long pandemic shutdown. They know some audiences will be deterred by the mask requirement when they’re disappearing from so many other settings, but they know others are reluctant. If you don’t want a mask, go to an indoor performance. Whatever they decide to do, they risk alienating some ticket buyers.
When live performances first resumed, the initial unanimity that governed mask and vaccination rules was supplanted by a variety of approaches. Broadway theaters (with a few exceptions) dropped their vaccination requirements on May 1st and mask requirements on July 1st. But audiences who went to Park His Avenue His Armory this summer to see “Hamlet” and “The Oresteia” were both asked to wear masks. and present proof of vaccination.
The Public Theater will share the difference this summer with free Shakespeare in the park, with people required to show proof of vaccinations before entering Central Park’s Delacorte Theater, but to wear masks during outdoor performances I am not asking you to.
Some of New York’s most venerable classical music institutions do the opposite.
Deborah Borda, president and chief executive of the New York Philharmonic, said the orchestra was guided by audience research and consultation with infectious disease experts. Included in the toolkit are masks. ”
“People are saying, ‘Well, sports venues have stopped using masks,’ but it’s a very young audience,” Borda said. “Our audience may not be that young.
The same is true of the Metropolitan Opera, where a recent audience survey showed that an “overwhelming majority” wanted mandatory masking to continue, according to general manager Peter Gelb. But Metropolitan Airlines has decided it no longer needs to do the vaccination tests that have been burdensome by delaying admission to the Opera House.
“There will be mavericks who don’t want to come to the Met because they don’t want to wear masks,” Gelb said. But he said he believed there was a relative “masked harmony” among opera fans. “Older viewers feel safer wearing masks, and our younger audience respects that.”
some organizations including San Francisco Opera, still holds both mask and vaccination requirements. Opera’s general director, Matthew Silbock, has admitted that “life around us is becoming more and more mask-free,” but the company feels the protocol is still necessary.
“If a singer goes out with Covid, they could be out for 10 days and lose three performances,” he said. It showed a very strong desire.”
Masks are a thing of the past in many concert venues.and Madison Square Gardenwhere Harry Styles has been performing for 15 nights, masks have long been an option, and among the many boas his die-hard fans have worn to concerts, there has been little evidence.
“The Kite Runner” isn’t the only show experimenting with offering both mask-only and mask-optional performances. It offers performance that requires a mask in space.
Allyn Burrows, Artistic Director of Shakespeare & Company, said: “And you never know where that split will occur.”
Burroughs said his company, which previously required masks, began hearing complaints about masks shortly after the Broadway League announced they would be made optional. Some patrons wrote that they would never come to the theater again if masks were required. Others said they would stay away indefinitely if masks were an option. He said.
Burroughs said Shakespeare and Company got the idea from the Hartford Stage in Connecticut to require masks at some performances. He said he could count “on one hand or two” the number of people who said they would not have come to the theater if officials had not offered a mask-mandatory performance.
“There are people who feel very strongly about it, but it’s a minority,” she said. I am planning to go another route.
In “The Kite Runner,” the decision to require masks on Fridays received very positive feedback, and the show decided to add mask mandates to Wednesday matinees as well.
At last Friday’s mask-mandatory performance of “The Kite Runner,” staff scanned tickets just inside the theater and again asked patrons who arrived without masks if they had one. They had black masks for those who weren’t ready. Further back in the theater, staff wore buttons that read “MASK UP,” and signs in the aisles urged people to wear masks during the performance.
“We wear masks on Friday,” an attendant said to a woman who managed to enter the theater without a mask on her face. .
Lina Park, a 26-year-old Bronx resident, said when she and her friend bought tickets for “Kite Runner,” they didn’t know they were required to wear masks for the performance. But when the show announced masks would be required, they were relieved, partly because one member of their group lives with someone who is immunocompromised.
“We are very safe,” Park said of her and her friends. “I still wear a mask indoors all the time.”
So far, performances of “The Kite Runner,” which require masks, are going well, the producer said. One of the producers, Victoria Lang, said adding mask requirements to some performances still doesn’t seem to affect ticket sales for those performances.
But the show did sell at least one ticket to a patron who otherwise wouldn’t have come. The show urged producers to request masks.
Encouraged, Dr. Weiger emailed the producer of another Broadway show for children he cares about, saying that “Kite Runner” now requires masks for certain performances.
“Maybe you want to do that too,” he wrote.