many shows canceled or postponed in Paris due to the spread of Covid-19
Prime Minister Jean Castex announced it on Monday, December 26: from January 3, theaters will have limited their gauges to 2,000 spectators for three weeks. Standing concerts will also be prohibited. However, during this holiday season, even the smallest performance halls are linked to the spread of Covid-19 and its variants. Several of them have had to cancel their performances in recent weeks.
“This time of year is very important to us. Our shows are usually full during the holidays. So it’s really heartbreaking to close establishments”. On December 24, at the microphone of franceinfo, the producer Jean-Marc Dumontet does not hide his disappointment. Because of too many contaminations in his teams, he had to interrupt shows for several days. “That of Coquettes (at the Alhambra in Paris, editor’s note), was canceled because a Covid case arose “, he announces: “We were lucky to be able to find solutions immediately, by training new singers. But I have one-man-shows that have also been arrested. The epidemic is too strong.”
After the Opéra national de Paris, which had to postpone its performance in mid-December Don Quixote due to several positive cases, the Châtelet theater has also interrupted its new show Cole Porter in Paris until December 27, for the same reasons.
However, these shutdowns are sometimes prolonged and can lead to significant losses for productions. This is the case of the long-awaited musical The Lion King whose performances have been canceled since December 21. Gwendal Marimoutou, the interpreter of Simba, explained in a video on his Twitter account that the decision was made only an hour before the start of the show. “Nine people of the troop were already isolated at home. Until then it worked thanks to the linings. But for the show tonight, we arrived at a tenth contaminated person and therefore it was no longer possible”, he specifies, facing the camera, while apologizing to the families who had made the trip. A few days later, the young man adds that more than half of the cast is to be that the performance will not touch and will begin before December 31.
#THE LION KING
We will not spend Christmas together, but we are meeting to celebrate the passage in 2022 as it should!Until then, do as we did: TEST YOURSELF, vaccinated or not, as much as possible. With the incubation time, you can be negative today and positive tomorrow! pic.twitter.com/3qjZWF58yo
– Gwendal Marimoutou (@Gwendaloff) December 21, 2021
Faced with these cancellations, some theaters are able to offer new programming. This is the case for the theater of the 13th Art and its dance show. Pixels, choreographed by Mourad Merzouki. Canceled for a week, performances were added in January for unintentionally sanctioned spectators. For other structures, these interruptions represent big losses of money. The Red Mill, also closed until December 31 due to cases of Covid-19, will have to reimburse the 1,300 reservations per day that could not be honored. To pay The Lion King, nearly 20,000 reimbursements will have to be made.
However, artists and employees of cultural spaces have redoubled their vigilance since the theaters reopened. Laurent Bentata, the general manager of Stage Entertainment, the company which supports the Mogador theater, assured that a very strict framework had been put in place to limit as much as possible any contamination, for months. “We do tests every day” he declares on LCI. “There are 14 machines that purify the air and we had launched a vaccination campaign in the theater: 90 people were vaccinated. We could not do more”.
It is the same for the reception of spectators. “Performance venues are safe places”, defends the producer Jean-Marc Dumontet to franceinfo: “the public is greeted with very strict and respected sanitary conditions, so that our theaters are not places of contamination. We put on a mask in a performance hall, we do not talk to our neighbor, we do not exchange” .
Future spectators are also affected by this growth in the spread of the virus and are sometimes forced to claim their ticket because they are infected. For several weeks, the new one-man-show by actor Vincent Dedienne at the Bouffes du Nord theater was sold out until the end of January. Within days, however, it received a wave of cancellations. “The Covid of some is the ticket of others, as the saying goes”, wrote the comedian on social networks, announcing that places were, therefore, available again.
The theaters still hope to be able to take advantage of the New Year’s Eve, already tarnished by the suppression of several events, such as the fireworks above the Eiffel Tower.