Summer Cancelled

We've had a smattering of advance cancellations impacting this summer, including the Toronto Fringe and the Driftwood Tour, which usually stops in Withrow Park for a couple of evenings.  Those were pretty hard to swallow, but I've just heard that Stratford is cancelling the entire season.  This is a fairly major blow, though not exactly unexpected.  And even if they had run a few plays, they probably wouldn't be running the bus over to Stratford.  One thing that is frustrating is that they are playing hardball with refunding the money (which runs into hundreds of dollars) saying that it will be a credit towards 2021.  I've had mixed feelings about other places doing this, but generally they were more open to asking how you wanted to deal with the funds (except for Canadian Stage).  I don't know if Stratford will more or less port this season over to next or what they plan on doing.  I was quite looking forward to The Rez Sisters, and I'd say that is one that they almost certainly will just reschedule for 2021.

The TSO just recently admitted that they will be cancelling all the May and June concerts, which really bites as there were a few very nice concerts, including I was planning on taking my son to see Beethoven's 5th Symphony for the first time.  Given the timeframe, they (the TSO) still thinks they will be able to salvage most of the 2020-21 season, but I don't see how that is possible between the seats far too close together and the fact that the average attendee must be about 70 (and they won't even be allowed out of the house).  Basically, until a vaccine is successfully tested, I don't see how any arts organization can actually afford to put on any shows to houses that are only 20% full due to social distancing.  We are basically looking at 2-3 years lost in the arts, and I simply don't see how most of these organizations can survive under those conditions.  I think the museums are a little bit better able to weather the storm, and they probably can find ways to spread out visitors in a way that would prevent them from completely closing down, once the restrictions start to lift ever so slowly.  That said, I'm not too hopeful about the Picasso Blue Period exhibit actually making it here in the late summer/early fall.

And on that cheery note, let's move on to summer concerts.  In this case, there were 2 or 3 concerts I was pretty interested in, though I had only actually booked tickets to see Squeeze and Hall & Oates.  Because these concerts aren't officially cancelled (though they will simply have to be), they aren't even beginning to talk about refunds.  In fact, one promoter had the nerve to add a new concert to the line-up at Budweiser Stage(!), when this clearly won't be going forward.  It's just a really hard thing to process with all this disappointing news.  I know a lot of artists are basically optimists (or they would be in a different profession), but I don't see any positives (other than these kind of janky Zoom sessions) for months and months and months.  I'll just leave it at that, since there is no point in trying to cheer myself up with false hope.