Well... there it is.

Feel for ya! Hard especially for our industry to project even into summer and fall what is going to happen.

I have two of six follow spots to compete service for and 6x more to get ready for the season. Getting paid for work already done for one venu, what to do with the others? And another parts were bought for a different venu and the customer has stopped responding to emails about what to do. Much less no tours Have a co-worker booked thru the summer in doing follow spot lamp installs for tours he is loosing out on, and a huge install project now on hold.

Advice from most governors and medical professionals is to error on the side of safety and over compensate. This could become a legal concept for how to proceed as a hopeful but suck! concept in what to do and who gets stuck with what bill, than how to proceed.

If nothing else, not stuck on a cruise ship hoping for a port.
 
Advice from most governors and medical professionals is to error on the side of safety and over compensate.

This x1000. I get that many people aren’t, but I happen to be in the camp that it is not worth ruining the economy for the 0.001% that might die from this illness. I just don’t trust the government and experts when it comes to things like this...growing up on the east coast 99% of blizzards and hurricanes were the ones we were warned “this is the big one folks!!!”. People stopped trusting TV meteorologists. I get that this COULD be that 1% the experts are right about, but to me the risk is low enough that it is worth reopening the economy entirely on May 1st if things haven’t gotten worse. Just my opinion.

We were the first industry to shut down, and probably the LAST that will be allowed to open. Restaurants, hairs salons, and EVERYTHING else will be allowed to open first. Everyone I have spoken to says things will open sequentially by region....most likely tourist- & convention-reliant destinations (Vegas, Orlando, SoCal/Anaheim, etc) will open sooner than other markets if not hit too hard. All we can do is hope at this point! A lot of people’s summers (and further!) dependent on the next few weeks....
 
We are in the same boat, my fear and thoughts is It's going to be a missed summer in planing for and instead hoping and planning for next better future.
 
I get that many people aren’t, but I happen to be in the camp that it is not worth ruining the economy for the 0.001% that might die from this illness. I just don’t trust the government and experts when it comes to things like this...growing up on the east coast 99% of blizzards and hurricanes were the ones we were warned “this is the big one folks!!!”. People stopped trusting TV meteorologists. I get that this COULD be that 1% the experts are right about, but to me the risk is low enough that it is worth reopening the economy entirely on May 1st if things haven’t gotten worse. Just my opinion.

I think we'll be lucky if we come out of this feeling like there was an overreaction. That would mean that the safer-at-home orders worked. There's a critical caveat here to comparing with meteorologists. Weather will happen the way it wants to no matter what the media reports. The forecasts and hype don't influence magnitude of the disaster except for a few more people might drive out of the way of it. In this instance, more media attention now has a direct impact on the magnitude of the tragedy. If the media treated this like it was seasonal flu and hardly covered it, we'd be in for a much worse result because people would not take social distancing seriously.

The projections right now are 50,000 - 135,000 Americans dying. Even if we lose only 50,000 people in a best case scenario, that will be traumatic milestone for the country. That 50k is among the most conservative estimates and the reluctance of states like my own to put effective safer-at-home orders in place will likely prolong the pandemic unnecessarily. By the time this is over, everyone will know people who fell seriously ill or died. Even if the virus was eradicated in 1 month, the psychological impact of that magnitude of deaths will prevent people from participating in crowded live events until they become more comfortable engaging in public crowds again.

We were the first industry to shut down, and probably the LAST that will be allowed to open. Restaurants, hairs salons, and EVERYTHING else will be allowed to open first. Everyone I have spoken to says things will open sequentially by region....most likely tourist- & convention-reliant destinations (Vegas, Orlando, SoCal/Anaheim, etc) will open sooner than other markets if not hit too hard. All we can do is hope at this point! A lot of people’s summers (and further!) dependent on the next few weeks....

This is a false choice for the entertainment industry. If they were allowed to open up tomorrow, hardly anyone would buy tickets for the next 3 months and venues would have a difficult time finding ushers and such to expose themselves to large crowds. Similarly, Broadway wasn't forced to shut down. Equity lobbied for it because their own members didn't feel safe.

Regional sequencing will depend on containment. Ultimately for the economy to reopen and stay open, we'll have to corner this virus into regional pockets of the country and maintain quarantines, contact tracing, and exhaustive testing in those pockets to weed it out and prevent a resurgence. The local governments of tourism-driven areas may be more prone to open up faster, but in the end the decisions will come down to where the virus is lingering and where it isn't. Fortunately rapid testing may make it practical to test people as they enter airports and prevent transmission across flights. That's probably the best thing we've got going for us on the other side of this so far.

Compounding all of this is that hospitals are under-reporting confirmed cases which will likely throw off projections. Failures to have enough testing supplies and expedient results has driven hospitals to unofficially tell patients they have COVID19, go home, and come back if their symptoms worsen. To-date, we've still only officially tested half of what Italy has by relative population size, and one-third less than Spain has. Whatever our improvements in testing are, we are still behind.

Not saying we should definitely not reopen in May, but the only thing that sucks worse than closing the economy once is closing it twice because we reopened too early while too many regions were still acting business as usual with no serious effort to truly stop the virus in its tracks.

I am comfortable though saying we should definitely not reopen entirely. Returning 100% to business as usual everywhere will be a mistake. Some precautions will be needed -- the magnitude of which will vary by hotspot.
 
Last edited:
reluctance of states like my own to put effective safer-at-home orders in place will likely prolong the pandemic unnecessarily.
Ain't that the truth. So much of Florida leadership is reluctant to actually lead. Seminole county is one of the few areas that seems to have their act together. Our school district here in Brevard is doing a great job of being consistent in messaging and dealing with the curveballs that keep getting chucked from our county and state governments.

I keep having clients wanting to reschedule April to May or to June or July. I have no incentive to reschedule anything because there is no reopen timeline and I think after the dust starts to settle public gatherings will be the last thing to be restored. There's no sense in putting 500 people in the same room just for a dance show when one person could infect half the room and spread it around again. I don't see us opening before that gets controlled, either via herd immunity naturally or a vaccine.

The projections in Florida all point to a lot of people getting really sick by May.
 
Florida will have a delayed onset. Between fleeing NY'ers, religious services being exempt and many congregating for Easter, and the Villages being business as usual and generally a petri dish for venereal disease, Florida is in for some trouble in a month from now.

Our local rep theater cancelled their season through July and started a $1.6m fundraising campaign to carry them through this rough patch.
 
We're talking about scheduling nothing more "produced" than staged readings or cabarets this fall (at my University) for fear that we will have to cancel a full production. We already had to cancel the April show, and we don't want to do that to the students twice.
 
We have cancelled our current season and are foregoing season ticket sales for next year. We intend to go show by show with whatever rules are in place at the time for public gatherings. Definitely feeling the pain in the pocket book.
 
Entry level openings in MD, not stage related.
Materials Control Associates. Receiving, warehousing, inventory transfer. Low key team, fast pace job, full time with health benefits. If you have worked live shows you can handle the pace. The importance of data entry accuracy and following established procedures will surprise you if you have not worked in pharmaceutical manufacturing. I don't know the salaries but expect they are better than average.
tps://catalent.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/External/3/refreshFacet/318c8bb6f553100021d223d9780d30be
Many more positions for anyone with a science degree hidden in the closet. I know that all of the jobs posted for Maryland are real.
New numbers out yesterday say >400 openings in MD with business increasing. If entertainment stays virtually closed until we are all immunized that will be December 2021?
 
Last edited by a moderator:
This week there are over 300 positions of all kinds (mostly science) are still open at the Maryland sites. These are real, and need to be filled. (Harmans = BWI) More scattered across the US/World.


There was a recent top level hire in HR that came from the entertainment industry.

Turns out if you go through me, I get a bounty (not necessary and not retroactive). Feel free to PM if you want info.
 
The annual Irvington 4th of July parade has just cancelled along with the entire Rappahannock Foundation for the Arts concert season for the rest of 2020.

After 47 years, this just may be the straw....
 
Hope things work out well as per ours' and industry wide, no we didn't choose the proper career. It's a set back but the pain over a recession I went into the industry was in... It will come back. A Change to it perhaps.
 
Hope things work out well as per ours' and industry wide, no we didn't choose the proper career. It's a set back but the pain over a recession I went into the industry was in... It will come back. A Change to it perhaps.

"I should have been a plumber." - Albert Einstein

If I were giving career advice, I'd recommend becoming an electrician. Plumbing hates me...
 
The annual Irvington 4th of July parade has just cancelled along with the entire Rappahannock Foundation for the Arts concert season for the rest of 2020.

After 47 years, this just may be the straw....
so sorry, Bill - its brutal. Do you have staff to carry and a bldg lease, or can you hunker down in storage until things open back up?
 
The annual Irvington 4th of July parade has just cancelled along with the entire Rappahannock Foundation for the Arts concert season for the rest of 2020.

After 47 years, this just may be the straw....
You have my sympathies, Bill. In the past there were other aspects of the entertainment biz to fall back on but all of them involve putting lots of people together for several hours, and that's before the audience arrives! For the production shop I engineered for and managed all the major work started dropping off the calendar on March 13 (Friday!). Right now a number of concerts have been tentatively rescheduled but only time will tell as to IF they will happen and what shape/form they morph into. One of their big festivals cancelled their July event, another big festival in fall is still going forward as of today, but who knows? I'm holding out hope that The Great Reopening is not the Great Re-Infecting, but my observations of human behavior are not encouraging.

Hang in, Bill. It will get better, we just don't know what it's gonna look like.
 
Friend from another forum has been out with Blue Man Group's new show, shut down in March. Management polled cast and crew to see if anyone was willing to go back out "around the end of August." Company informed everyone today that the tour will not start back up until March 2021.

Did the Smurfs get laid off, too?
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back