Benny Mikula appeared with guitar in hand on Saturday. Before the pandemic he’d usually be found with seven-piece band The Alpaca Gnomes; tonight he was billing himself as the Lone Gnome.
“How’s everybody doing? Thanks for tuning in,” he said. And then sang a song that felt like easier times. “Little bit of happiness after the pain,” he sang. “A little bit of love can go a long way.”
It was part of the Shubert Theater’s Apart Together program, and part of the rollout for its fall programming as the theater finds ways to stay connected to its audience virtually during the Covid-19 shutdown.
“It has been over six months since we’ve had anything at the Shubert,” said Anthony Lupinacci, the theater’s director of marketing and communications. When the shutdown began, he said, “we had all thought that by October, we were going to start presenting things again.” Theater management were then looking at seating charts to figure out how to socially distance within the space and keep the theater clean. “But we do so many Broadway touring shows, and the touring shows depend on Broadway, and every state as its own rules,” Lupinacci said. Broadway remains dark, and “the Broadway tours can’t tour until all the states are functioning again.” The tours “have to know that they have all the cities lined up for a continuous run.”
That means there are no tours, which means — on top of the shutdown rules still in effect — the Shubert remains closed. In response, the theater “had to dramatically reduce the small staff we already had,” Lupinacci said. “We’re really down to a very small, core group of people.” There are still administrative tasks to perform, and building mantenance, and running the box office. But “it’s really down to the minimum amount.”
Provisionally, the Shubert has touring shows lined up starting in June, starting with potential tours of Waitress and Hairspray. “but we still don’t know,” Lupinacci said. It all depends on when the theater world in general is allowed to reopen. Lupinacci reported that the Shubert has been grateful for its audience understanding the uncertainties. “From the standpoint of our Broadway subscribers, we still have a lot of interaction with them, which is wonderful,” Lupinacci “They really want to come back,” and “there’s still a huge amount of support and understanding.”
Financially, remaining dark has taken its toll on the theater, though Lupinacci said the Shubert is “not in trouble” yet. The Connecticut Association for the Performing Arts (CAPA) — the nonprofit that operates the Shubert — has a “huge commitment to maintain the actual physical building.” And “the cost to maintain it is minimal” right now. Once a week, a staff member inspects the building and its various systems. A company came in to thoroughly clean everything. “The building itself is secure,” Lupinacci said.
So “for now, what we’re trying to do is stay in touch with our patrons,” Lupinacci said. That starts with personalized letters and email. “Many venues are saying that they’re going back to the old-school way of mailing letters. They’re finding the patrons are paying more attention to something physical.”
For the fall, the theater is also rolling out a slate of virtual programming. Its Apart Together concerts, which began on Sept. 12 with Fernanda and the Ephemeral, will continue with Phat A$tronaut on Sept. 26.
Oct. 4 will feature Magic for Humans @ Home, — billed as an “interactive hour of magic, comedy, and unexpected surprises” — with Justin Williams. “Patrons are excited about the Magic for Humans show,” Lupinacci said. “It’s something the whole family can participate in at the same time.”
On Oct. 26, the Shubert will hold another Next Stop: New Haven At Home, a fundraiser that doubles as a night of food and entertainment. Before the show, patrons go to the Shubert and receive a box of food and drink to take home. The food comes from downtown New Haven restaurants, tapping into the dinner-and-a-show idea that patrons would be enjoying if they were attending a show at the Shubert. Patrons then partake of their rations and libations at home while enjoying an evening of beamed-in entertainment hosted by the Shubert. The Next Stop held in the spring, Lupinacci said, was quite successful, selling out and generating additional fundraising. “We thought, ‘We really should do another one of these,’” Luipnacci said.
Dec. 23 will then find the Shubert hosting Jim Brickman’s Comfort and Joy at Home Virtually, an evening of holiday music and entertainment. “We were going to have Brickman’s live show at the Shubert in November,” Lupinacci said, so the theater is glad to be able to host him online. “Many of these artists who depend on venues to perform in are not able to do that right now,” Lupinacci said. By touring virtually, “the artists are able to be still be employed,” and venues “get to provide entertainment to fill the gap.”
What happens then? “The hope is, as we get into the end of this year, we’ll be getting more information about the next steps” within the theater world overall, Lupinacci said. The shutdown has had a long ripple effect, as touring companies plan shows years out. Tours have already been pushed into 2022.
“We still are actively looking at having a schedule of shows that will be performed live at the Shubert, so as soon as we get the OK, we’re ready to go,” Lupinacci said. Meanwhile, “we’re talking about what advantages we have, as we stay together while we’re apart.” The Shubert staff are “thinking outside the box — or in our case, thinking outside the theater.”
For Lupinacci, who has worked at the Shubert for three decades, 2020 is shaping up to be the most anomalous year he has experienced. “I don’t ever remember 6 months going by” with the theater remaining dark, he said. He takes comfort in the theater’s history. It survived the flu pandemic of 1917 and 1918; as far as Lupinacci knows, the theater didn’t go dark then, though he has found photos of theatergoers from that time all wearing masks — down to their pet cats. It survived the Great Depression and World War II, and being threatened with demolition in the 1970s. There is strength in its longevity.
“When the touring shows come here, the young actors are struck by looking at our wall,” Lupinacci said, meaning the wall in the back of the lobby showing which shows had their world premieres at the Shubert. When a touring company for The Sound of Music came through, he said, “the actors all came scrambling into the lobby and were touching the words on the wall.” They were, after all, going to perform the show that had its world premiere there.”
Lupinacci has been doing his part to preserve the Shubert’s history through this pandemic, including the shows that were supposed to have run. “I feel like this is a moment that we have to document,” he said. After all, it’s planned that the Shubert will remain running for a long time.
Besides, theater has always carried financial risks, even in the best of times. “Broadway is not for the faint of heart,” Lupinacci said, and CAPA is “really very financially prudent. They plan ahead, and have a dedication to maintaining the theater, and making sure it’s going to be here for a long time” — and “be part of the whole puzzle of downtown New Haven,” supporting “the synergy of how New Haven works. We all have to be here when the doors start opening again, to give people something to come back to. It all works together.”
On Saturday, Mikula followed his first song with one that he said he hasn’t released yet; it was slated for his solo album. “I’ve been working on a solo album for too many years to count,” he said. The song was about how songs came to him: “The muse waits in the darkened corners of my mind,” he sang. “There she waits, silent, waiting for the perfect time / to step out into the light.”
That sense of hopeful isolation even applied to a cover he did of Lyle Lovett’s “If I Had a Boat.” “I’ve been playing this song a lot this summer,” he said.
Mikula used to live in New Haven, and “I wrote a lot of songs” in the Elm City, he said. Before that, though, he’d found himself traveling around out West. “Wonder what tomorrow will bring / Snowcapped mountains and finer things,” he sang, “and never doing what I’m told…. Visiting towns I’ve never seen / I’ve never heard of and I’ve never dreamed / and meeting people just like me / searching for where they’re supposed to be.”
Mikula’s wistfulness for traveling seemed all the more acute now. “Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching,” he said. “Thanks for supporting the arts and the Shubert Theater.” Then broke into his final song. “Why don’t you hop on this train? / You’ll never see the world the same,” he sang. “You’ll find me on the last car on the track / First to leave but the last one to come back/ Sitting back and watching this life roll / The first to rise but the last to close our eyes.”