The hits just keep coming to the Arvada Center – and not in the good way.
Today the decision was made to cancel the remainder of the run of its hit musical “Kinky Boots” after another three members of the fully vaccinated cast and crew tested positive for COVID over the past 24 hours, spokesman Marcus Turner confirmed.
That wipes out the final seven scheduled performances, which will mean an estimated revenue hit of $130,000, Turner said. The actors will be paid for the lost performances.
In December, the Arvada Center canceled the final nine performances of its holiday musical “Elf” after the Omicron spike tore through the creative team. That revenue loss came to $230,000. In March, another outbreak prompted the company to cancel the first two weeks of the play “Stick Fly.” All this after the Arvada Center posted a loss of just under $1.2 million at the end of the first pandemic fiscal year.
On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that positive COVID cases have increased 43 percent over the past two weeks, even though many public testing sites have been shut down. This latest spike comes at a time when governments and most area performing-arts organizations have relaxed nearly all audience COVID protocols.
Anecdotally, COVID appears to again be ripping through the local performing-arts community to varying degrees. Ten days ago, one local theater company held auditions for an upcoming musical. A week later, its producer reported that eight of the estimated 50 people who attended had tested positive within one week.
While mask mandates and vaccine cards are quickly becoming a thing of the past just about everywhere, the Arvada Center has continued to follow strict, required union backstage protocols, including the regular testing of all actors and crew.
Turner admits that the Arvada Center's ongoing battle with COVID has strained the company’s two competing priorities: “We want to fulfill our mission to create and present art to our audiences, while holding the health and safety of our artists as our primary concern,” he said. “That has become a tough balance to strike, frankly, and the strain is starting to show.”
If there is good news in all of this, Turner said, the Arvada Center should be able to weather the financial hit. “Because we were able to secure federal funding through the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant, we went into this season with a cushion that we knew would sustain us should this very thing happen – and it has,” Turner said.
Barring further developments, the Arvada Center will continue with scheduled performances of the plays “Animal Farm,” “Stick Fly” and “The Liar,” playing in repertory through May 24.
One additional casualty of all of this is The Center on Colfax, a safe and welcoming place for Colorado's LGBTQ community. The “Kinky Boots” cast and crew have been collecting donations that, going into the final week of performances, had reached $5,500.
