Exactly a year ago, when Australia’s theatres all abruptly went dark, Michael Cassel, executive producer of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in Melbourne and the upcoming Hamilton at Sydney’s Lyric Theatre, started planning for his worst-case scenario.
“We thought, OK, let’s hope it’s a couple of weeks – but maybe it’s a month,” he says.
As a result of the pandemic, they had already cancelled their Lion King international tour scheduled to open in Wuhan, of all places. Now “there were zero dollars coming in to pay the cast and crew on production, zero dollars for our company [Michael Cassel Group] to keep everybody employed”.
From left, Tom Wren as Draco Malfoy, Debra Lawrance as Professor McGonagall, Gareth Reeves as Harry Potter and Lucy Goleby as Ginny Potter. Credit:Matthew Murphy
“The financial implications were the greatest concern for us. The longer the shutdown continued, the more expensive it would be to relaunch the show. We never thought it would be 12 months.”
Those same thoughts were going through the mind of Sydney Theatre Company chief executive Patrick McIntyre when the company’s production of Dario Fo’s No Pay, No Way! closed abruptly on March 14.
“My first reaction was, ‘Oh my God. If we have to close this down for two weeks we’ll never make budget on that show’,” he says. “Then, within a week I’m like, ‘Oh, OK it’s going to be considerably worse than that’. We’ve been right to the bottom and come back to relative normality over, I suppose, 12 months. It’s incredible.”