Year in review/theater: Budget cuts, cancellations didn't stop theater groups from forging ahead
Area theater companies found ways to keep producing in 2021 by responding to the pandemic with realism, resilience and ingenuity.
As live theater became possible again, touring shows and standup comedians ended their long hiatuses to return to town.
Still, the shutdown took a toll, with local groups making budget cuts and staff layoffs to avoid deficits while canceling shows or entire seasons.
By recent count, the Greater Columbus area boasts more than 70 theater producers, including tour presenters, professional and semi-professional companies, college programs and community theaters. Yet, only a half-dozen troupes staged shows in January, rising to about 20 through the year’s first five months (and mostly online), far fewer than usual.
That raised concerns about whether some groups might fold, but so far, none reportedly has, thanks to their pluck and community support.
How Columbus' theater scene coped with COVID-19 pandemic
Even so, amid ongoing uncertainties, shifting mandates and infection waves, most troupes suffered through cycles of belt-tightening and refocusing, with more recent signs of returning to relative “normal.”
CATCO, Columbus’ oldest professional theater, was representative of the pattern: Operating pre-pandemic on $1.3 million in fiscal year 2018-19, CATCO reduced its 2019-20 budget to $1.1 million after lockdowns began. As the pandemic spread, CATCO reduced its 2020-21 budget to $755,000, and focused on streaming productions. With more theatergoers vaccinated (especially its core of older patrons), CATCO resumed a live-theater 2021-22 season with a projected $1.4 million budget.
More: Actors' Theatre's 2022 season to offer double dose of Shakespeare plus two other classics
By summer or fall, after some streaming experiments, Columbus’ leading professional companies, CATCO, Shadowbox Live and Short North Stage resumed live productions.
So did most other semi-professional companies, such as MadLab Theatre — under new Artistic Director Will Macke – reopening in August with newer plays and a belated Theatre Roulette festival at its 69-seat Downtown home, and colleges (notably, Ohio State and Otterbein universities.)
Yet, some organizations delayed their returns.
Columbus Children’s Theatre, a 59-year-old professional youth company, offered three virtual shows in 2020-21 but didn’t produce its first indoor live show until December, when children could be vaccinated.
Gallery Players, the Jewish Community Center’s 73-year-old resident troupe, offered streaming shows, including “We Just Move On!,” a New-York-based cabaret revue, but didn’t stage live theater until December.
Meanwhile, Weathervane Playhouse, Newark’s 52-year-old summer-stock troupe, offered just one 2021 show, a summer musical, and won’t return to a full five-show season until next summer, while 15-year-old Available Light Theatre, known for provocative and new works, won’t return from hiatus until 2022.
Here are overviews of progress this year by some larger and more-active theaters:
? CATCO innovated under the newer leadership team of Artistic Director Leda Hoffmann and Executive Director Christy Farnbauch. Reflecting an enhanced focus on socially aware works, CATCO offered streaming productions of a new-works festival and the class-conscious musical “Working” and ventured outdoors for the first time with a two-actor adaptation of the Greek tragedy “An Iliad” exploring rage and social division.
CATCO launched its 2021-22 season with the first multi-stage production in the Riffe Center’s Studio complex and perhaps the strangest show in CATCO’s history, “Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play,” an immersive dark comedy, about a pandemic-sparked apocalypse in which theater troupes forge community anew through storytelling.
More: Dispatch@150: Performing-arts scene in Columbus continues to grow, evolve
? Shadowbox Live seemed especially eager to return to its full year-round performing schedule, partly to support its large 46-member staff (set to expand to 50 next year). Yet, shifting health mandates and ongoing uncertainties meant reconfiguring repeatedly its Brewery District space, delaying its return to live theater for 14 months until May.
Even the suggestive title of “Let’s Get It On,” a sketch-comedy-and-music show about sex that ran four months, reflected something more: the troupe’s urgency to perform.
The resident-ensemble troupe, whose 2021 budget of $2.86 million dropped from $3.55 million in 2020, estimates it lost $3.6 million from canceled performances and reduced seating over 20 months since March 2020. Yet, projecting a $3.33 million 2022 budget, Shadowbox ended 2021 confidently with the premiere of the company-created musical “Not So Silent Night” and a new edition of its annual favorite “Holiday Hoopla.”
? Short North Stage, led by Artistic Director Edward Carignan at the Garden Theater, weathered layoffs, budget cuts and canceled shows, but maintained visibility and community support via pioneering initiatives.
An innovator in streaming shows that garnered acclaim but also diminishing returns, the 10-year-old troupe was one of the country’s first professional companies to receive Actors’ Equity Association approval with strict health protocols for in-person pre-filming of a virtual play ("Bad Jews," an off-Broadway comedy).
Live productions resumed with enough appeal to build back budgets (projected for 2022 at $1.1 million, up from $600,000 in 2021). By July, the troupe recovered enough to hire Dionysia Williams as its first associate artistic director, along with two other managers.
Working together, Carignan directed and Williams choreographed a convincing reconsideration of an infamous Broadway flop with “Carrie the Musical,” produced by sister troupe Columbus Immersive Theatre with powerhouse vocals and nifty effects.
Musicals continue as a big draw, from “The Addams Family: Quarantined” and a concert-version “Spamalot” to a vocally strong December run of “Sister Act.”
More: Theater review: Dynamic vocals and star power make up for thin storyline of 'Sister Act'
? Abbey Theater of Dublin, led by Theater Supervisor Joe Bishara, expanded programming virtually every possible way — early on through streaming shows in Bishara’s Virtual Theater Project, then outdoor summer productions (including two sold-out children’s shows) and finally, by returning to live theater in its 200-seat space in the Dublin Community Recreation Center.
The once-underutilized space is becoming better known, thanks to more collaborations, youth and adult productions of plays and musicals, and an emphasis on new works (such as “#Charlottesville,” Priyanka Shetty’s solo one-act about the community response to the violent 2017 rally.)
Most promisingly, Bishara welcomed Columbus Black Theatre Festival, Evolution Theatre Company, Original Productions Theatre and Stage Right Theatrics to the versatile space as their performing home.
? Actors’ Theatre of Columbus, benefiting from its safer outdoor venue in Schiller Park, celebrated its 40th anniversary as one of the few theaters resuming a full season.
The classics-oriented troupe, led by Artistic Director Philip Hickman, plans a 2021-22 budget of $250,000 (up from $169,500 in 2020-21 and a much-reduced $71,240 in 2019-20 after cancelling summer shows).
Rehiring 11 furloughed staff members in May, the company demonstrated resourcefulness by limiting casts to eight actors or fewer to ensure social separation, and ended its season without any illness.
Four plays drew crowds, starting with Shakespeare’s “Much Ado about Nothing,” nicely updated by Hickman and Cat McAlpine, and ending with “The Secret Garden,” Actors’ first co-production with Columbus Children’s Theatre.
? Evolution Theatre Company, a small LGBTQ+ professional company projecting a 2022 budget of $123,000 (up from $86,000 on an abbreviated season in 2021 and $47,500 for 2020’s largely canceled and Zoom-oriented season), smoothly navigated the loss of its former home in the Columbus Performing Arts Center and moved into Dublin’s Abbey Theater. There, Artistic/Executive Director Mark Schwamberger spearheaded two area premieres, a musical and his autobiographical new “The Sissy Chronicles” about growing up gay.
The company connected to Ohio history with the Ohio History Center world premiere of “A Crane Takes Flight,” Schwamberger’s one-man play about gay Ohio native Hart Crane, an American poet.
? Red Herring Theater Company, led by Artistic Director Michael Herring, continued to challenge and build audiences with newer plays in its second year in a converted store space in the Great Southern Shopping Center.
The scrappy semi-professional troupe projects a 2021-22 fiscal-year budget of $240,000 (up from $45,000 in 2020-2021 and $130,000 in 2019-2020), which it aims to balance with a full 2022 season of 10 live productions.
The eight-year-old troupe experimented with almost a dozen streaming productions in 2020-21 with mixed results before resuming live shows, including Columbus premieres of “Vincent,” with Stefan Langer excellent in a double role as artist Vincent van Gogh and his brother, and the well-timed satire “The Thanksgiving Play.”
? Standup tours: Eager to tour after so long away, more than a dozen comedians returned to perform, thanks mostly to the Columbus Association for the Performing Arts (CAPA).
As the Columbus Funny Bone booked visits by D.L. Hughley, Kevin Nealon and others, Nikki Glaser hit the Southern Theatre, Whitney Cummings and Trey Kennedy yukked it up the Riffe Center and Chelsea Handler and Leanne Morgan, among many others, performed at the Palace. Jim Gaffigan, who considers eating and not moving two of his favorite activities, filled the largest venue, Nationwide Arena, with laughter.
? Broadway in Columbus, presented by CAPA, resumed tours in November with “Hadestown,” a pivotal moment in Columbus performing-arts history. Virtually sold out, the 2019 Tony winner for best musical filled the Ohio Theatre with applause, welcoming the first Broadway hit since the pandemic began.
More: Theater review: 'Hadestown' marks a memorable moment in Columbus performing-arts history
Just as soulful Orpheus ventures into the “world down below” to save Eurydice in the musical’s poignant update weaving mythological and newly timely tales of love, life and death, soul-starved theatergoers ventured back in 2021 into the redemptive world of live theater.
@mgrossberg1
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Area theater companies return to live shows after pandemic shutdowns
