www.forbes.com: Last night, September 1, 2020, venues large and small throughout the United States lit up their exteriors with red lights. The lights were to show support nationwide for the Restart Act which is currently pending in Congress. The Restart Act (Reviving the Economy Sustainably Towards A Recovery in Twenty-twenty) proposes to amend the federal PPP lending program and creates a new loan program specifically for businesses with less than 5,000 employees.
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In a free market economy, all businesses must make money to survive. Today, one of our businesses, venues and theaters, cannot make money due to COVID-19 restrictions. Although one day they will be able to return to full operation, this day may not come anytime soon. Venues and theatres are run on tight margins which do not allow for the space to sit empty often, like they are now. So these venues will have to go out of business. This will put the whole entertainment industry in jeopardy as comics will not have a place to go preform nor actors a place to act. The Restart Act would allow all of these venues to temporally go on government assistance so that they will still be open once the pandemic subsides. Although this may not be the optimal solution for our venues, this may be the most convenient way for them to stay open. My personal belief is that the way our venues operate is inherently broken. It is a very expensive to rent a venue or a theatre for even a single night. I believe that we should rework the way renting a venue works so we can drive the cost down for the smaller creators.
On September 1st, buildings and venues across the country were lit with red, including CMU’s own Hunt Library, CUC, and Purnell Center for The Arts, in support of the Restart Act which is pending in Congress. It would provide crucial funding to keep small venues and theaters open and able to continue business once the pandemic has faded. This act is so important in supporting the arts, the venues, the employees at those venues, and the artists who utilize those spaces to share their work and make a living. These spaces have long made the arts accessible to the general public community, and that is what art (in all of its many forms) thrives on. Without these venues, artists will struggle to continue to create their works and communities will become deprived of the beautiful pieces that are created. While the show of support and the call to action is needed and good, hopefully Congress will be able to pass the bill and provide the funding to keep these venues alive for a little while longer.
Overall, I thought this RESTART movement was a great way for theatres and other live event venues around the country to band together towards a common goal. It is no surprise that COVID has hurt a number of industries but as someone in the live event industry, it really feels like we will be the last to recover from this pandemic. Regional and Community theatres do not make a lot of money as it is, therefore it will be so much harder for these smaller companies to stay afloat throughout this pandemic. While donations and other contributions certainly help, during a time of economic and social depression people are not going to be as willing to just cut a check out of the niceness of their hearts, family and personal budgets are so much tighter now. I really appreciate Forbes for publishing this article because of the lack of national coverage this event seemed to have from the muggle world.
The whole premise of live events is getting a bunch of people into a room to experience an event happening in that moment. I mean a key aspect of live entertainment is the element of time, so all of these venues which are designed to house these gatherings for specific time periods are incredibly high risk, particularly because many of them profit off their ability to hold thousands of people at once. It is already a struggle for most theatres to break even each year, so being able to pay all of their bills and as many salaries as possible without being able to profit off of sales and the participation of many donors is a debilitating blow for these companies. I was surprised to see such a well put description and recount of these events in a publication like Forbes. I feel like a lot of the media I see about theatrical and live entertainment is because I am a part of that community, so seeing it in a non-theatrical publication is really nice.
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