By Nikki Suzani
Town Crier Editorial Intern
Due to the COVID-19 crisis, Los Altos Stage Company has canceled its youth production of “She Kills Monsters” and postponed “Sunday in the Park with George” and “Steel Magnolias” to next season.
In the meantime, the company is providing virtual theater classes for youth on an array of topics, from accents to the history of Shakespeare.
“Right now we’re focusing primarily on the education courses, the youth courses,” executive artistic director Gary Landis said. “We don’t have a catalogue of recorded productions, so while some companies are putting past productions online that they video recorded, we weren’t set up to do that. What we’re doing right now is classes, and down the road we’re looking at whether or not we’ll try to bring artists together virtually to do readings of shows.”
One of the major challenges for the company is figuring out when to announce its next season. The timing is crucial because ticket subscriptions are an important piece of its revenue.
“This is the time of the year where we’d be announcing our season and pushing out our season subscriptions, which we’re a little delayed in doing,” Landis said. “It creates a tremendous amount of uncertainty in how people are going to respond to purchasing season tickets for next year.”
When it comes to summer shows and camps, the company is making decisions one at a time while ensuring it follows county guidelines.
“We’re trying to kind of make decisions as they need to be made,” Landis said. “We’ll make the determination by the end of this month and finish our conversations about the summer and decide whether or not the ‘Matilda’ show will go forward in the summer, then whether or not in-person youth summer camps for June will go forward or not. If that’s not going to happen, we’ll make a plan to adjust the camps to just take place in July, and that’ll buy us time to figure out what’s going on before we just outright cancel them.”
Financially, the theater is taking a hit – already losing approximately $70,000 in ticket revenue from the youth production and postponed shows, according to Landis – even with 98% of the tickets being donated back to LASC. He added that the company has a cash reserve, but the longer the crisis goes on, the smaller it gets.
“The real challenge is as we use our cash reserve, it makes it more and more difficult to relaunch the organization,” Landis said. “We do need support in this interim, and even more so we’ll need community support through subscription donations when we are able to relaunch and bring audiences back into the theater.”
Still, Landis understands the difficult situation the crisis has put everyone in and looks to the future, hoping theater will help people get back to the lives they led prior to the pandemic.
“We’ve been here for 25 years, (and) we’re hoping to continue to be a presence in Los Altos,” he said. “We understand that this is a challenging time emotionally, physically and financially for everyone, and hopefully, as we kind of navigate this, the community will continue to support the theater and we’ll be able to come back and socially interact at the theater and play an important role in that activity.”
To support LASC and for more information on the company, visit losaltosstage.org.
