02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
I Used to Think ‘The Show Must Go On.' Then Came the Pandemic.
From time immemorial our mantra in show business was: The show must go on. You're sick? Get into your costume. You're scared? Get onstage. The brilliant actress Kathy Chalfant was once wounded by a sword fight in my play 'For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday,' and her flesh was literally dangling from her arm, and she was bleeding while flying. She went to the emergency room after the show and got stitched up, accompanied by the actor playing Captain Hook.
This is how show people have existed for hundreds of years. And then came Covid. And we learned that sometimes the show must not go on. This reversal was wild and hard to metabolize. Two years of the show not going on at all. Around the world, actors fled their dressing rooms and went home. Two years of quiet, isolation, patience, despair.
