Monadnock Ledger-Transcript
Published: 9/7/2020 5:50:29 PM
With the summer coming to a close and the Park Theatre’s original projected opening date come and gone amidst COVID-19 restrictions, the theater has been getting creative with its virtual content to fill the gap until an in-person opening is possible.
The theater, built with a huge effort of community fundraising, was originally set to open in June. While the construction of the building is complete, major donors put their funding towards other emergency situations resulting from the coronavirus pandemic, slowing down the final phases of outfitting the building, Board Chair Caroline Hollister said during a tour of the nearly-completed theater on Thursday. However, some of those gaps have been filled with additional grants from the state’s nonprofit emergency relief fund, and a grant from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, putting them back on track to still open this year – if details can be hammered out about how to do so safely.
The funds are raised and the final outfitting is being done now, said Park Theatre CEO Steve Jackson. But it’s still up in the air as to when the building will be fully open for business. In the meantime, the theater has been curating some virtual movies, as well as launching Monadnock Tonight, a weekly show featuring discussions with various artists.
During a recent Monadnock Tonight segment, the theater launched its next virtual foray, the Route 124 Bandstand, which features taped music performances given by local high school and college-aged musicians, duos, bands or DJs.
The performances are taped on the Jaffrey common, in the gazebo, using the theater as a backdrop, and produced by Andrea Cornelius. Upcoming is a presentation of the music by Peterborough musician Patrick LaCroix.
Jackson said it’s a way of introducing the region to some new and up-and-coming talent while the theater figures out its next move. Because while large-scale performance venues like the Park Theatre have a lot of restrictions to wade through before they can consider reopening, Jackson said he still hopes to see the theater have some sort of opening before the end of 2020.
“The arts are so good for helping the economy of the local community, and it’s tough not to be able to use that,” Jackson said. “Theaters are testing ways to reopen with stringent protocols, and you have to make decisions – do you have a partial audience, do you do temperature checks, do you have people fill out forms for contact tracing, cleaning between performances, monitoring bathroom – these are all questions theaters, including ourselves, are going through. But there isn’t a theater in the country that doesn’t want to reopen.”
“I know there’s a way to make it work,” Hollister said. “It’s a little bit based on what the governor’s orders are, and a little bit based on common sense.”
Hollister said the challenges presented by the pandemic are just one last obstacle to opening the doors to “the little theater that could.”
“We are busting at the chops to open. It’s taken longer to do these last bits of finishing up than we originally anticipated, but we are finishing up,” Hollister said.
0 Response to "Jaffrey's Park Theatre starts new virtual program, plans soft opening before year's end - Monadnock Ledger Transcript"
Post a Comment