Both the Lebanon Theatre Company and the Middletown Lyric Theatre were in the middle of their 2020 seasons when COVID-19 hit. The Lebanon Theatre had just started its final read-through of their second show, “Assassins.” The Lyric was poised to open their fourth show, Shakespeare’s comedy, “Twelfth Night.”
“Our theater holds 110 people, but in order to practice social distancing, we’d only be able to seat 16,” Dunn said. “We’re also supposed to sterilize restrooms after every use, but that doesn’t work when you have 20 people lined up at intermission.”
The Lyric ultimately decided to officially postpone their 2020 season to March 2021.
“We just got tired of changing dates and rewriting contracts with licensing companies,” said Charley Shafor, managing artistic director at the Lyric. “We have to put deposits down to hold onto the rights and we couldn’t afford to keep pumping money into the ether.”
“Assassins” was originally delayed to late May, then August. The Lebanon Theatre hasn’t officially canceled or rescheduled anything at this time.
“We’re brainstorming,” Dunn said. “It could be next year, it could be longer. We’re trying to keep awareness out there and figuring out how to livestream productions.”
After concluding their final week of dress rehearsal for “Twelfth Night,” the Lyric did just that. There’s a YouTube video of the entire production embedded on the Lyric’s website.
“It had a pretty low percentage (of viewers),” Shafor said. “Livestreaming (theater) just isn’t the same. The cast was excited because we don’t usually archive stuff for financial reasons, and they got to feel all the hard work they put in wasn’t wasted. I really wanted to stage it and kept putting if off, but I was terrified someone was going to get sick, so I finally told the cast (we were canceling it) and they were deflated.”
Dunn encountered similar heartbreak with his “Assassins” cast.
“Usually during the read-through, the actor is still trying to find the character,” he said. “But or ‘Assassins,’ they’d already done that work, and they were singing along the musical tracks, so they knew those already. They were really into it. They had the script and score on their devices. Each ‘assassin’ had a different gun, and we even had a ‘gun wrangler,’ someone whose only job is to keep the guns secure and the actors safe. All told, there were 72 people in our cast and crew. With guidelines banning gatherings of over 10 people, we couldn’t even legally have cast meets.”
The Lebanon Theatre recently purchased the building they’d been performing in since 2012.
“They’ve been kind enough to give us extensions and reduce our loan payment so it’s cheaper than the rent we were paying before,” Dunn said. “We’re just going by DeWine’s guidelines and Warren County guidelines. We’ve written to the Warren County health inspector, but there’s nothing he can do. People who have asked for refunds have gotten them. Others understood and donated that money back to us. Even if we could bend the rules, we don’t want to bear responsibility for people getting too close. We’ve been very frugal, we’re looking at our payment schedule, I don’t know.”
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