Broadway to stay shuttered until June at the earliest

Providing a much-needed and handy signifier for all the post (mid?)-apocalyptic movies that are going to end up being made about the COVID-19 era—we’re imagining, say, Ryan Gosling, walking past a series of unlit marquees, the jukebox musicals tragically unplugged—Broadway has announced that it’ll continue to remain closed until at least June 7 of this year. This is per Deadline, which reports that the Broadway League has decided to formally extend its current coronavirus-mandated shutdown of America’s premiere venues for Spider-Men turning off the dark for another two months, at minimum.

Broadway began shutting down back on March 12—i.e., roughly 6,000 years ago—obviously throwing a massive wrench into the plans of any of the 16 or so new productions that were hoping to make a name for themselves this spring. And while some established shows are still selling tickets for dates past that hypothetical revival point—also the date the Tonys were supposed to happen, before they got squashed, too, by the by—there are plenty of indicators that this latest extension in the shutdown will only be the first of many. Given that there’s still a whole summer and fall Broadway schedule—complete with all sorts of fights about who gets what theaters, and how many trombones Hugh Jackman will be selling for the big parade—on the books (for now), even this delay is going to have some huge effects on the theater industry, potentially for years to come.