In the last week, despite Pamela Anderson stepping into Chicago (and getting good buzz! Good for her!) the word on everyone’s lips has been COVID. As shows clamor to open before April 28, cases have been on the rise in New York, and more and more performers have tested positive. It all feels like déjà vu for Broadway after the omicron spike last winter, with the spread of the disease all the harder on the new shows, which don’t have a bank of talent to fill in when leads get sick, or are relying on stars to get audiences through the door. The League, meanwhile, is still figuring out its plans from the audience’s side, announcing on Friday that it’s extending the masking requirement till May 31, but dropping a blanket requirement for proof of vaccination after April 30.

Plaza Suite had the one-two punch of having Matthew Broderick test positive, and then a few days later, Sarah Jessica Parker, making the play delay a return to performances until Broderick could come back last Thursday alongside Parker’s standby Erin Dilly. Michael McGrath went on for Broderick before his wife tested out. Dilly and McGrath have been well-received separately, but you can’t put on a show with just the two of them when SJP and Broderick’s faces are a story high on the marquee. (I would have gone, but I wouldn’t have spent nearly enough on the Hudson Theater’s stemmed wine glass options to make it profitable to the producers.) Macbeth, meanwhile, is finally back on as of April 12 after Daniel Craig’s COVID absence, but other positive tests in the cast led to its director Sam Gold filling in as Lennox while holding a microphone (to be fair, without this context, Sam Gold onstage holding a microphone does feel like it could just be A Sam Gold Directorial Choice). A Strange Loop was out till April 14, and Paradise Square reported on Wednesday that “a principal actor tested positive as have the two understudies for the role,” extending its dark period till April 19. Paradise Square’s grosses had already been suffering after unenthusiastic reviews (leavened by enthusiasm for Joaquina Kalukango’s lead performance, which could stand out awards-wise for being so committed amidst the murk around her) and the shutdown makes its future seem all the more precarious.

The question, as one woman whispered to me at an event this week like she was hitting a break in case of emergency glass, is, “Won’t they have to change the Tony schedule?” In a world where all is normal and yet still tightly-wound: shows have their month or so of previews, open before the end of April, and the nearly 800 Tony voters get a buffer month through May to catch up with everything and log their votes on the American Theatre Wing’s online portal before the ceremony in early June. The compounding effects of COVID delays pushing back the starts of many new show’s previews and virus-related absences cutting out performances and rehearsal has squished everything together like an accordion. Assuming nothing more goes wrong and nobody says the name of the latter show inside a theater, A Strange Loop and Macbeth will have about a week and a half before critics start coming in to render judgment upon them. On the other hand, Broadway’s clinging to the wealth of advertising that CBS awards show time slot provides, and there’s not much wiggle room there. I brought that generalized anxiety to a rep for the Tonys, who said that nothing has changed schedule-wise, but “they are obviously monitoring the situation carefully.” As are we all.

Also being watched closely is David Mamet, who’s decided to launch into an increasingly far right-leaning media blitz for his book Recessional right as a revival of his play American Buffalo premiered. The capping moment for Mamet was an appearance on Fox News where he asserted that teachers, and especially men because they are predators, are inclined to pedophila – a nasty thing to say, informed by the homophobic thinking behind Florida’s Don’t Say Gay bill, and as many have pointed out, something that contradicts the premise of Oleanna. Mamet focused on his new book and didn’t talk up this revival of American Buffalo on Fox or on Bill Maher, nor have the producers of the revival had anything to say about those rants. (That mutual silence revived a rumor, written up back in 2008, that Mamet doesn’t support revivals of his earlier plays like Buffalo because the proceeds go to his ex-wife Lindsay Crouse as part of a divorce settlement, but he’s popped up in this show’s press campaign in the past. Scroll back far enough on its official instagram, where the most recent posts have comments turned out, and you can still comment on this group shot of Mamet, Criss, Fishburne, and Rockwell posted in January; Mamet himself has of course not responded to my email about this rumor.)

In hope of getting at least getting some sort of new perspective on the weirdness of staging a revival of a hallowed play when the playwright himself has gone tinfoil hat, on Thursday night I journeyed to the opening night at Circle in the Square to see if anyone would be willing to express their thoughts on Mamet’s latest diatribes on the red carpet. Then, unsurprisingly, I watched as, one by one, each celebrity guest skipped over not just me, but the whole interview portion of the carpet, posed for a photo or two, and slipped into the theater. On the sidewalk across from the carpet, two men held signs that read things like “Mamet: Stop Smearing Teachers!” and occasionally shouted “shame!” and “Mamet scares teachers!” and “this is a shit play!” as people arrived for the opening (the fact that there were also large groups of families and teens heading into the Gershwin to see Wicked added another layer of absurdity to the evening). The celebrities who appeared included Angela Bassett, Billy Crudup (who signed a Doctor Manhattan photo for a fan), Becky Ann and Dylan Baker, Josh Brolin, Bryan Cranston, Tony Goldwyn, and Gummer #3 Louisa Jacobsen with the guy who plays a footman who talks like a Newsie in The Gilded Age in tow. Once everyone started to head into the theater, I wanted to at least talk to the protestors, but they had left the scene. A few policemen milled around in their wake, and it had started to rain. Down the street by the 50th St. C/E stop, you could still see the remnants of one person’s statement on Mamet in chalk before the storm washed it away:

James C. Nicola, the artistic director of New York Theatre Workshop since 1988, is stepping down on June 30, and so his slightly limelight-averse presence was at the center of their spring gala this year. His retirement marks the end of an era for the non-profit that’s neatly bracketed by their breakout successes of Rent and Hadestown, around the beginning and end of his tenure, respectively. Near the top of the event, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Anthony Rapp, and Wilson Jermaine Heredia came out and sang, of course, selections from Rent, while there were also performances from Once, Hadestown, and even a NYTW-friendly Golden Girls reenactment with Stephanie Berry, Randy Danson, Mia Katigbak, and Rubin-Vega. Whitney White, Rachel Chavkin, and a loquacious (but of course) Tony Kushner all made speeches, as did Nicola himself. Attendees were encouraged to give money to support NYTW’s risk-taking efforts in the theater, and also to bid on the chance to hang out with Daniel Radcliffe after a performance of their upcoming Merrily revival. It made me think about Nicola’s own comments about how non-profits have become, to his mind, too dependent on commercial enhancement money in his exit interview the Times, though that was also because I was sitting near some people who started discussing the details of some recent NYTW enhancement deals and then shut up when they realized I was also there.

The thing that has stuck with me most from the gala, however, was a tapped appearance from Patti LuPone filmed backstage at Company in which she cheerily called Nicola a show queen. Behind her, she had a large map of Italy, which she did not address in the video. If you know more about Patti’s large map of Italy, please write in to Stage Whisperer at stage.whisperer@nymag.com.

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