The Chattanooga Theatre Centre is moving its entire 2020-21 season, which was set to begin this September, to the same time next year.
"There's a delicate balance in creating a season, and we didn't want to cherry-pick shows and upset that balance," said Julie Van Valkenberg, marketing director for the Theatre Centre. "The season was selected before the crisis hit, and the majority of the shows could not be staged with the necessary safety precautions we need for our actors onstage."
Shows planned for the season included several musicals, such as "The Sound of Music," "Something Rotten," "Aladdin Jr." and musical adaptations of "Little Women" and "The Color Purple." The singing involved with those productions would put actors at greater risk of contracting the coronavirus, which is primarily transmitted from person to person through respiratory droplets.
"We have to consider the safety not just of our audiences, but of our volunteers on stage and off. So that's a sacrifice we had to make," Van Valkenberg said of the decision to move the shows to next year.
This fall and winter, the Theatre Centre is looking at opportunities to produce nonmusical plays with small casts to allow for social distancing, and also is considering hosting community arts performances on the property's riverfront lawn space.
Van Valkenberg says the Chattanooga Theatre Centre is confident it can provide a safe experience for its performers and audiences by taking measures such as reducing audiences by 30%, doing temperature checks, using contactless ticketing and redirecting foot traffic, as well as by installing touchless faucets in its restrooms and rehabbing its HVAC system.
"But just because we can doesn't mean we should," she said. "We'll enact those protocols when the time is right, when it's safe and ethical to open our doors again."
Contact Emily Crisman at ecrisman@timesfreepress.com or 423-309-3071. Follow her on Twitter @emcrisman.