Equity in the News May 2020

Actors’ Equity has unveiled four overarching principles needed to safely reopen theaters across the country. 

Actors’ Equity Association, which represents 51,000 theater performers and stage managers, lays out guidelines aimed to keep its members safe.

With its entire membership of 51,000 professional actors and stage managers out of work, Actors’ Equity Association on Tuesday announced the health and safety guidelines it expects theaters to follow before it will authorize its members to return to the stage.

The reopening of Broadway theaters should not come without as much consideration for actors’ safety as for that of audiences, Actors’ Equity Association made clear today in a presentation by union officials and their public health safety consultant Dr. David Michaels.

On April 21, the Council of Actors’ Equity Association (the national union for professional actors and stage managers in live theater) unanimously passed a new internal membership rule that members may only return to work when the union deems it safe to do so, and that they will not sign over their rights to a safe workplace. Three days later, on April 24, Equity announced that public health expert Dr. David Michaels, who served as Assistant Secretary of Labor for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) from 2009-2017, during the Obama administration, would consult for the union to help develop new model health and safety standards for COVID-19, and would be key to implementing a plan in which member safety is put first and decisions are made with a clear scientific basis.

The actors’ union, advised by former OSHA head Dr. David Michaels, lays out core principles for stage safety.

Mary McColl, Executive Director of Actors' Equity Association released the following statement following regarding the HEROES Act, which has now passed the U.S. House of Representatives, and includes a 100% COBRA subsidy for displaced workers.

Disney’s Frozen has become Broadway’s first long-running casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic and industrywide shutdown. The production, which opened March 22, 2018, at the St. James Theatre, announced today that it will not return when Broadway reopens — whenever that might be.

When Broadway re-opens, it will do so without a certain snow queen.

The big budget musical “Frozen” will not reopen when Broadway theaters restart, marking the first time an established show has been felled by the coronavirus pandemic.