Theatre and Sandy

So hurricane Sandy was not a friend to the theatre. Because I’m crazy in the matters of my theatrical work (which probably isn’t shocking by my name), I had a show at NYU that I was dramaturg for up before the storm hit, and after that first weekend of performances, I went into tech for that amazing production of “Waiting for Lefty” I’ve mentioned before, and that run was supposed to during the 2nd and last weekend of the run of the show at NYU. Hurricane Sandy knocked out a few of  those plans.

As a start, NYU sadly went completely down from Sandy. Almost all of downtown Manhattan did for that matter. Even NYU medical center, one of the biggest hospitals in NYC and where my sister was born quite some time ago, both the generator and the back-up generator went down. NYU is completely shut down until at least Monday the 5th. Therefore the show is done only halfway through the run (and we can’t make new dates since there’s other events to take place in that same theatre).

So as if that wasn’t bad enough, tech for Lefty has been completely altered and cut short since it was supposed to be while the hurricane was in effect. So what was supposed to be our first performance in front of people ended up being our quickie tech time. The good news is that since that show is uptown Manhattan, it’s still going to run as normal from here on out, but since there was only about 1/3 of the tech time we originally planned, it’s a bit more rushed.

To add one more thing to my theatre list, a staged reading I was supposed to start working on (also connected to NYU), rehearsals are now only going to be 2-3 days at most instead of the 10 days we had originally planned.

Most people already know how Sandy affected NYC and the tri-state area, we don’t hear as often how Sandy affected theatre. Hopefully we will be able to have extra performances at some point of my shows so we can almost get back the time we lost from Sandy.