Neptune Theatre ‘Fighting For Survival’ After Latest Cancelled Show
HALIFAX — On Nov. 24, Halifax’s Neptune Theatre posted a message to its patrons on Facebook: “With the rising number of cases of Covid-19 in our community, Neptune Theatre has made the heartbreaking decision to cancel the run of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.”
The message, posted at 1:28 pm, came just hours before the show’s scheduled premiere, which would have been Neptune’s first live performance since Covid-19 shut the theatre down, March 13.
Neptune’s Artistic Director, Jeremy Webb, said the decision was “devastating.”
“We came within five or six hours of actually having an audience back in the building watching live theatre, which is kind of poetic,” Webb says.
The show, which has become a holiday tradition for Neptune, was extra meaningful in 2020 because it was being put on as a fundraiser for the cash-strapped theatre.
When Webb and his team conceived of the performance in early fall, Covid-19 cases in the city were nearly nonexistent, and putting on a live show that complied with strict public health guidelines felt possible.
Webb explains how the team behind the show did everything they could to make the performance safe: ticket sales would be limited each night, while the production was limited to “the smallest cast imaginable”—essentially just one actor and one puppeteer, supported by a skeleton crew.
“We took every precaution: we looked at it long and hard, and when we were planning this… the idea seemed possible because we were still in that glorious, now much-fabled Atlantic Bubble,” Webb recalls.
However, as opening day approached and cases began popping up in higher numbers, Webb says the show appeared more and more up in the air. The day they officially pulled the plug was the same day the province announced 37 new Covid-19 cases.
“We looked at it and we couldn’t in all good conscious have a theatre open in the middle of the downtown core [with those numbers],” Webb says.
Just a few hours after Neptune made the announcement, the provincial government put new public health restrictions in place that would have effectively shut the production down anyway.
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Webb says the emotional hit of having the show stopped at the last minute is only part of the pain. The canceled fundraiser also puts Neptune on even more precarious financial footing.
Before A Christmas Carol was cancelled, ticket sales had been brisk since they first went on sale one night in early November.
“Literally, overnight, in 12 hours from 6 pm to 6 am our online box office went absolutely crazy and we sold more tickets in 12 hours than we would sell for a gigantic show… in a couple of days,” Webb says.
“What that showed us was at that point our patrons were feeling okay. They, too, were like, you know what, I think we can do it. So that was quite heartwarming.”
Because of the uncertainty around Covid-19, A Christmas Carol was always intended to be a fundraiser set apart from Neptune’s normal operations.
Webb says the theatre treated money from ticket sales separately and was able to offer refunds to anyone who asked. Many opted to donate the price of their tickets to the theatre or took their refund as gift certificates so Neptune could, at least temporarily, keep the cash.
But Webb says cancelling the show was still a dire financial hit.
“There’s no doubt the financial implications are big,” he says. “Where we had some hope that we would be getting some revenue from theatrical productions for the first time since March 13, that revenue has disappeared again. It came in the door, we were selling well, and now it’s gone back out the door.”
And that’s bad news for a theatre that has already lost millions in revenue over the course of the pandemic.
Webb says the theatre’s financials remain “really bleak” and he worries if Neptune will be able to survive.
When Neptune was first forced closed in March, it had to stop a good-selling show and postpone the rest of its season, including the big, end-of-season musical. The theatre also had to stop selling subscriptions for the upcoming season.
All that lead to Neptune losing somewhere around $2-million in revenue between March and May. Webb says not much has changed since.
“We’ve managed to claw our way forward and drag ourselves into retaining our existence with the assistance of donors, supporters, people not asking for refunds on their tickets,” he says. “But until we can open our doors again and operate at something close to capacity then we will be fighting for our survival.”
Webb says cancelling the show “certainly hit us fiscally” but that “what I think is almost as important is that it hurt us artistically because we had thousands of people who had bought tickets who thought they were finally going to see some normalcy come to their lives and return to the theatre.”
He worries that, as the pandemic continues, the chances of them getting to go back to the theatre gets slimmer and slimmer.
He said Neptune will, however, continue “planning for the unplannable” and, depending on how the second wave shakes out, will see what’s possible for a 2021 season.
Trevor Nichols is a reporter for Huddle in Halifax. Send him an e-mail with your story suggestions: [email protected].