Exit, stage left

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This article was published 05/10/2020 (2059 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If the 2020-21 theatre season was a noir novel, it would be called The Big Intermission.

And at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre, the intermission may have just got a little longer with the cancellation of six shows that had been in the works for 2021, a move that could cost RMTC in the neighbourhood of $500,000.

It was a little more than three months ago when artistic director Kelly Thornton announced “Season 2.0,” which effectively scrapped all the fall and early-winter shows in the hopes of a reopening in 2021, retaining six previously scheduled plays including Burning Mom, The Legend of Georgia McBride, Calpurnia and The Three Musketeers at the mainstage and Warehouse shows Yaga and The Wolves.

Now those six shows have also been cancelled, a heart-breaker for the newly installed Thornton, whose first season of programming has now been completely jettisoned.

In a phone interview, Thornton said she knew there was a possibility of a complete cancellation of the announced season when she made that announcement in late June.

“I (told) our subscribers we want to make a commitment to this, but we also need to be realistic and we would assess this in the fall,” she says. “And because the COVID numbers have increased, it’s all just pointing in the wrong direction.

“A subscription season is based on a full house of audience members and everybody in their subscriber seats, and also the scope and scale of the productions we are known for — the glorious large-scale productions on our main stage.

“And it’s not feasible financially, but even beyond that, we can’t safely gather 20 artists in The Three Musketeers sword fighting,” she says. “It’s just an impossibility.”

Yet the RMTC will still produce theatre this year, including an upcoming series of mini-plays to be performed at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, commencing in November.

The project is dubbed Tiny Plays, Big Ideas: A Festival of Human Rights, featuring work by playwrights including Waawaate Fobister, Primrose Madayag Knazan, Cherissa Richards, Jordan Sangalang and Liam Zarrillo.

The promenade-style event consists of five socially-distanced, 10-minute plays taking strolling audience members on a journey through the museum in cohorts of up to 10 people, with staggered starting times. The show is scheduled to be performed Nov. 19-22.

RMTC will also schedule more shows for its mainstage space. But because of all the cancellations they have had to announce in the past six months, these shows will not be revealed until closer to their scheduled opening.

“We’re not unveiling anything because we’re tired of cancelling,” Thornton says. “We don’t want to make promises that we can’t keep.

“But the plan is, in replacement of our winter-spring mainstage season, to deliver three to four small-cast shows that can safely be staged for full production.

“They’ll have the production values that we’re known for, but small casts — one-handers, two-handers or three-handers — for socially distanced audiences,” she says. The first show may arrive in time for the holidays.

“We’re hoping to deliver some kind of little holiday treat on our stage in December. And from late January to the spring, we’ll try to deliver at least three socially-distanced mainstage shows,” she says. “There’s some amazing classic shows that are out there when you think of Pinter or Beckett in the canon. There’s some really interesting small-cast plays, but they will fill the mainstage with ideas and also our production values.

“We want to deliver high-quality art. We just can’t do it with 17 cast members.”

The audience size of a socially-distanced mainstage show, using 30 per cent of the theatre space as dictated by provincial regulations, is still being calculated, according to RMTC executive director Camilla Holland.

“We are continuing to measure and model and we think we can maybe get close to 200 but we’re not there yet,” Holland says. “We’re assuming it’s going to be closer to 120 or 150.”

Holland says the financial hit RMTC is facing this season is in the neighbourhood of $500,000, although that number may be diminished when factoring in money coming from a federal wage subsidy program.

“So it’s a moving target but it’s a sizable hit on our bottom line and we’re working to mitigate that with fundraising and support from the community,” Holland says. “In the absence of substantial earned revenue, it’s going to be very hard to balance our bottom line.”

That said, RMTC is in a better position than most Canadian theatre companies due to its many years in the black.

“We are fortunate to have a stabilization fund that will help us absorb last year’s challenging financial results and will help us with this year’s challenging financial results,” Holland says. “But I can assure you that cushion will be eroded by a few more challenging years.”

“In the meantime, we feel so blessed by a dedicated audience and volunteers and sponsors and donors who have really stuck with us through this time and it’s a real light at the end of this tunnel to think that we will emerge from this,” Holland says.

“We are determined to navigate not hibernate,” Holland says. “We are really trying to find a way to bring audiences and artists together again safely.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing