A Broadway Reset: the Shutdown of Performing Arts during COVID-19
Michael Campayno teaching his ‘We the Collective’ class in Pittsburgh, PA
Walking through Zuccotti Park the evening of Dec. 12, after departing the Staten Island Ferry, I stopped to take a photo of the white Christmas lights twisted around Zuccotti’s trees when my out-of-date iPhone X dinged with an email notification.
The subject line read: “Offer for Kings College Original Zoomsical.”
“Congratulations! You have been offered a role as a cast member and songwriter for the Spring 2021 Kings College Zoomsical,” the opening line of the email read.
Every year the Media, Culture, and the Arts department of The King’s College put on a musical, sometimes in the spring, sometimes in the fall. This year, despite the COVID-19 outbreak and regulations, the show will go on, albeit virtually. Not only will the show be performed via Zoom, but it will also be completely written by the students at The King’s College.
“That will be the appeal of this show,” Virginia Pike, a Musical Theater Professor at King’s, said. “It’s not going to be, ‘We’re trying to recreate Broadway on Zoom,’ but we’re seeing the beauty in each one of these individuals who are going to participate, and that’s what excites me about it.”
A “Zoomsical” is just one of the ways that people are trying to keep performing arts alive amidst the trials and tribulations of a global pandemic. Shortly after the first confirmed COVID case in Manhattan on Feb. 29, New York City went into lockdown and theater doors began to close.
“When it first happened we were all thinking, ‘Okay this will take, like, a month or two,’ and when it kept dragging on I was like, ‘Oh my gosh,’” Pike said as her computer dinged in the background.
On March 12, 2020, Broadway abruptly shut down, preventing 16 shows from opening and closing over 41 theaters. According to The New York Times, the initial shutdown was only supposed to last until April 12, but the opening date kept being pushed back. Now, Broadway is scheduled to keep its doors closed until May 2021.
According to Broadway League, more tickets were sold to Broadway shows in the 2018-2019 year than the 10 professional NYC metro-area sports teams combined, including the Mets, the Yankees and the Rangers. On top of the number of tickets Broadway sells, they contributed another additional $14.7 billion dollars to New York City’s economy.
“The industry shutdown didn’t affect me directly in the sense that I didn’t have work in, you know, live theater,” Pike said. “But as far as Broadway, oh my gosh, my heart broke. My heart is still breaking for my friends who this is their whole livelihood.”
While Pike still had a job teaching at King’s, the theater shutdown hit closer to home for one of her friends/colleague and two-time Broadway star, Michael Campayno.
Campayno and I have only ever been acquainted via Zoom. The first time I met him was in Pike’s Musical Theater Studio class earlier this semester; I performed a rendition of Jonathan Reid Gealt’s “Lovable,” to the camera on my desktop, knowing Campayno, Pike and the other four students in my class were watching and listening as I belted and cried.
“Your voice was insane,” Campayno said to me, later recalling my performance. “When I heard you sing I was just, like shocked.”
The second time I met Campayno was, once again, through a webcam. It was late on a Saturday morning, and he sat in front of his bed in his New York apartment as we discussed how he fell in love with musical theater.
His story starts with a torn rotator cuff.
“So, I was a swimmer, and I was like, ‘This is it. I love swimming. This is perfect,’” Campayno said, reflecting back on his 12-year swimming career. “It was just so much work and in high school, we would swim like 4 am before school and then we would swim after school too and have meets. And, I just couldn't handle it.”
Even though Campayno loved swimming, his rigorous swim schedule and shoulder injury caused him to hang up his goggles. With no ticket to the Olympics and nothing to lose, Campayno started down a new path.
“So, my sophomore year of high school I was going to try out for the play, my shoulder was busted, like, I’m just going to try out for the musical,” Campayno said. “I was so nervous. I never even sang really before. I wasn’t one of those child prodigies.”
Child prodigy or not, Campayno was successful in his musical theater endeavors. During his senior year of high school, he won a Gene Kelly Award for Best Supporting Actor, an award that highlights high school musical theater excellence in Pittsburgh.
“I won this award and I was like, ‘Oh, maybe I could do this for real,’” Campayno said.
After high school, he planned to attend Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and study Musical Theatre. His attendance was short-lived, but it was impactful nonetheless.
“The minute I got there freshman year I feel like I was asked so many things about who I was, and my opinions, and all that stuff, and it really forced me to grow up and become an individual,” Campayno explained as he raved about the teachers he encountered and education he received from the private college.
However, his time at Carnegie Mellon was cut short as he landed the role of Rolf in “The Sound of Music Live!” He left the university in Oct., halfway through his first semester.
“So, I just left school, which was a crazy decision too, it was really hard,” Campayno admitted. “My family was really upset, and I was just in between two places because I wanted to get my degree.”
After he performed the musical theater classic, “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” for national television in 2013, he had another choice to make regarding his education. He could either go back to school or stay in New York and audition for NBC’s pilot season.
While Campayno wanted to get his degree, his manager reminded him that when opportunities arise, they must be seized. So, Campayno stayed in New York City and took jobs as they came.
“I wanted to have a Broadway credit,” Campayno confessed. “It was just a goal of mine.”
His chance at a Broadway credit came when he was asked to audition for the role of Fiyero in “Wicked.” However, his journey to dawning the stage of the Gershwin Theatre did not go as planned. His understudy for “The Sound of Music Live!” was awarded the role, and Campayno was Broadway credit-less.
His manager tried to explain that the casting directors for “Wicked” just wanted to find the right Elphaba to his Fiyero and that he still had a shot at the role, but it would be further down the line.
“I was like, ‘That’s bullshit. I’m done with that. I’m never gonna get the show.’”
Campayno teaching his ‘We the Collective’ class in Pittsburgh, PA
Little did Campayno know that two years later, he would get a call. His Elphaba was found, and he was joining the cast of “Wicked” in 2016.
“It was a really cool community, it was a really special show,” Campayno said. “Everybody felt that it was really special and we enjoyed doing it, and I think the biggest joy from it was just everybody loving it. Like you would go to the stage door and people were just like, ‘This was— this touched me,’ and I was like, ‘Oh this is why I do theatre, I forgot.’”
Prior to COVID-19 hitting, this was the feeling that Campayno was coming to terms with—actually enjoying the work and his love for theatre rather than focusing on his reputation and career path.
“When COVID hit, I was doing a TV show, and I started taking acting class again and I felt really good. I was really reconnecting to what I wanted as opposed to what everybody else wanted.” He said. “So, I felt really strong. I felt really a part of myself again.”
Campayno’s show was put on pause when lockdown began and intense regulations were put into place, but Campayno did not see this as a door closing, but rather as an opportunity to further his love for acting and share it with others.
“I had been teaching for like seven or eight years, and I always wanted to start my own school, I just love teaching and I was like this is a perfect time.”
Campayno took the plunge and headed back to Pittsburgh to begin his own school for acting and musical theatre called The Collective. This past fall he taught students from ages 14-18 acting, monologuing and singing, in class sizes of four to six people. He felt passionate about spending a semester with his students, developing their skills and giving them a firm foundation to build their talent upon.
“It takes so much longer to really learn foundations and really train,” Campayno explained. “It’s like any athlete, you have to take time to really focus and train. And that’s what helped me in my career, so I was like, ‘This is what I want to recreate.’”
As Campayno recalled the events of his time teaching, he began to express something that seemed unconventional for performers during a national theater shut down.
“I think people think, ‘Broadway is gone, art is dead,’ which is just, to me, the total opposite,” Campayno admitted. “I think we are in a rebirth of art and how we are going to communicate it and mediums that we are going to communicate it in.”
This sentiment expressed by Campayno is similar to one expressed by Chris Cragin-Day, an Associate Professor of English and Theatre at King’s and successful playwright. Some of her work includes “The Unusual Tale of Mary and Joseph’s Baby” and “The Burn Vote” (working title).
“One of the producers I’m working with on a project is, you know, optimistic that, you know—what he says is that theatre was in need of a reset button anyway because it was so deeply entrenched in, kind of, the structures that had been holding it up for so long,” Cragin-Day said.
“What I hope is that when it all comes back there will be like more equity for women and people of color, and that because everyone is getting a chance to restart that maybe that will allow people to do things but haven’t been able to because all of the structures that were already in place that were kind of holding them back.”
Cragin-Day tries to remind herself that even amidst all of the struggles for people working in theatre and the other tragedies that COVID-19 has brought with it, that maybe there is more progress waiting on the other side of the pandemic than there was before.
However, regardless of the potential progress waiting on the other end of the distant, COVID finish line, many works in progress fell through the cracks with the arrival of the disease, and nobody really knows when the play button will be pressed again.
“There are so many things I’m thankful for, but I do real—sorry, I’m, like, crying,” Cragin-Day said, trying to laugh off the tears that were welling up in her eyes. “But, I do really miss being in the rehearsal room.”
The tears that Cragin-Day sheds are different from the millions of other tears that are spilled in response to COVID-19. As Americans have mourned the loss of their jobs, favorite pastimes and time spent with their families, the musical theater world is mourning the loss of all of these with the closing of theater doors.
Performers of all backgrounds are left wondering when the spotlights of the stage will shine upon their faces once again.
“There is one aspect of it that I think is actually very advantageous,” Pike said, chiming in on the need for a Broadway reset. “We don’t have the pressure of the industry telling us who we are supposed to be as artists right now, and I think that’s huge.”
The need for a Broadway reset is Pike’s inspiration for this year’s musical. Instead of asking for students to fill roles, she wants them to write the roles, tell their stories of unprecedented times and let them shine the best way they know how.
“I am excited for the new wave of theatre because I think people are going to appreciate regional theater more,” Campayno said. “I think they’re going to appreciate smaller theatre more, and they’re going to realize that the storytelling that they can get, you know, can be anywhere.”
While the reality of sitting in a theater might seem far away, Campayno believes that performing arts magic can still be made, and Pike intends to bring that magic to a Zoom link near you.