![]() More than 250 coronavirus cases have now been confirmed as connected to a COVID outbreak in Provincetown, including at least 35 in Boston residents. Charlie Baker discussed the rise in COVID cases in Massachusetts, saying he does not plan on bringing back any restrictions.īack from a recent trip to Colorado, Baker was holding two news conferences Thursday on Cape Cod, where several recent COVID outbreaks are contributing to a sudden uptick in cases across the state. She had been in rehearsals for the Off Broadway revival of “Assassins” when the pandemic hit.Gov. As she explained, it was her first time onstage, in front of an audience, since December 2019. For a flickering instant, she seemed on the verge of being overcome by emotion - and no wonder. Kuhn, whose fourth and most recent Tony Award nomination was for “Fun Home,” walked onto the stage and looked powerfully moved to be there. THE LAST PERFORMANCE I saw was the one that ripped me gloriously, unexpectedly to pieces: Judy Kuhn and Seth Rudetsky in one of the pianist’s Broadway The Art House shows. Even through the masks, she could hear the laughter of her crowd. Still, she did grouse about the audience’s masks she likes to be able to see people respond to her jokes.īut those four walls did their job, acoustically. Two nights later, 15 minutes before showtime, Gold glided up on her bike in front of the Art House, where she is glad to have four walls around her again after performing outside at the Crown last summer. Like Broadway with its vaccine requirement, like towns everywhere, this place is trying to find the secret to keeping doors open and workers and visitors safe.ĪN ARTSY, CRUNCHY, shaggy-gentrified beach community, at once remote and cosmopolitan, Provincetown is known for its friendliness to outcasts and oddballs. “Provincetown is experiencing what other places will be experiencing, earlier.” “Covid, unfortunately - and I think it’s depressing for many of us - isn’t going away anytime soon,” the town manager, Alex Morse, said at an emergency meeting on July 25 that resulted in an indoor mask mandate. During my visit, as usually packed parking lots failed to fill and businesses took what the weekly Provincetown Independent called “a nosedive,” I saw a community waiting worriedly for the customers its economy relies on to return en masse. The frightening part of this story is that Provincetown’s charming little ecosystem of restaurants, inns and performance spaces is a microcosm of the precarious ecosystems of dining, travel and live entertainment that exist elsewhere. What happened here could have happened anywhere that invites the world to visit, as Cape Cod does in the summertime - and as New York and other big cities do year-round in ordinary times. This is not a scare story about Provincetown, whose Covid numbers have dropped as its Covid precautions have risen. No piano bars or karaoke, then, with unmasked people all around no indoor, vaccine-optional cabaret. I thought a lot - more than I’d expected - about what sets off alarm bells for me, and what I might regret. ![]() I chose shows that were either outside or in indoor spaces that required proof of vaccination, where I kept my mask on even if lowering it to take a drink was allowed. This summer, it’s like seeing them hit a scary bump in what had been an encouraging convalescence - the threat to their wellness not yet vanquished, much as you wish it would be.įrom late July into August, I spent over a week in town seeing performances and feeling perfectly safe. Last summer, with so much of the town’s signature liveliness replaced by pandemic quietude, coming here was like visiting a stricken relative. I HAVE LOVED PROVINCETOWN since I was a little tourist kid flocking to the candy store for peanut butter fudge on days too gray for the beach. His piano player, he said, was out with Covid. His show this year is gleefully funny, but Roberson said he was sorry that I hadn’t gotten to see it performed with live music. Like, why didn’t we just ease into things?” “There were no restrictions,” Jeffery Roberson, who plays Varla, marveled one afternoon at the Crown, near the poolside open-air stage that began last year as a pandemic innovation.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |