New York may be seeing some small signs of improvement, while New Orleans appears to be going downhill:
https://business.financialpost.com/pmn/ ... -worsens-3
In a nice gesture, the National Theatre will be broadcasting some of its more popular shows free online during the lockdowns:
https://theguardian.com/stage/2020/mar/ ... -thursdays
Thursday night could become National Theatre night, as the company announced plans to broadcast some of its most popular productions for free during the lockdown.
The new two-month National Theatre at Home programme will begin with One Man, Two Guvnors, the Richard Bean comedy starring James Corden.
The films will be shown at 7pm every Thursday to try to recreate, where possible, the communal viewing experience. They will then be available on demand for seven days.
Lisa Burger, the executive director and joint chief executive of the National Theatre, said writers, actors and directors had all waived their rights to the productions.
“Everyone has said yes. Please. Let’s get it out to people,” she said. “It has taken a bit of negotiation and management but the outpouring from the industry has been fantastic.”
The shows will be available to watch on YouTube. They kick off on 2 April with a play regarded as one of the most joyously laugh-out-loud shows of the last decade.
One Man, Two Guvnors, directed by Nicholas Hytner, is Bean’s 2011 adaptation of Carlo Goldoni’s 1746 comedy and a brilliant vehicle for Corden’s stage comedy skills. The Guardian’s Michael Billington, giving it five stars, wrote: “The result, a kind of Carry On Carlo, is one of the funniest productions in the National’s history.”
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That will be followed by Sally Cookson’s adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, a production that began at Bristol Old Vic; Bryony Lavery’s adaptation of Treasure Island which was the National’s Christmas show in 2014, and the 2017 Twelfth Night, which starred Tamsin Greig as Malvolio. More titles are still to be announced.
The shows will also have accompanying contact, which includes Q&As with casts and creatives and post-show talks.
The National is just one of many arts organisations quickly endeavouring to get content out to the public during the coronavirus lockdown.
The RSC has teamed up with the BBC for six plays to be broadcast from their archives including the 2016 Hamlet starring Paapa Essiedu; the 2018 Macbeth that starred Christopher Eccleston and Niamh Cusack, and the 2015 Othello, which starred Hugh Quarshie and Lucian Msamati.
The Royal Opera House has made available productions that include the Royal Opera’s Così fan tutte and the Royal Ballet’s Peter and the Wolf.
Burger said storytelling was needed more than ever. “That combination of entertaining, inspiring, challenging … it makes us think a bit about what other people might be going through. But also it just brings people together around something which is shared. I hope it stimulates a lot of conversations.”
As well as National Theatre at Home, the theatre is making its online resource for schools, universities and libraries, the National Theatre Collection, accessible at home while everything is closed.
The National Theatre will be one of many arts organisations and individuals to benefit from Arts Council England’s £160m emergency package to help them survive the coronavirus crisis. The money is also designed to help them come up with creative responses “to buoy the public” during the lockdown
Burger said it was a positive move. “Of course it is very much needed because we are all in a very precarious position. It is good that they have got that money and we look forward to understanding how it will be used, how freelancers can be supported and also theatres who don’t receive Arts Council funding.”
Edit: Here's another link for the New York situation:
https://theguardian.com/us-news/2020/ma ... irus-cases
New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, has said officials are seeing very early signs that physical distancing may be starting to slow the spread of coronavirus in his state, but cautioned that the number of cases is still rising significantly and hospitals would soon be overwhelmed.
The New York City metro area accounts for 60% of new Covid-19 cases in the US. Despite that, Cuomo said it was encouraging that hospitalizations were projected to double every 4.7 days on Tuesday, compared with Monday, when the number was doubling every 3.4 days, and Sunday, when the figure was every two days.
“The arrows are headed in the right direction, and that is always better than the arrows headed in the wrong direction,” Cuomo said at a press conference Wednesday.
But the virus still continues to spread quickly, and Cuomo said the “single greatest challenge” New York faces right now is a severe lack of ventilators, essential equipment for patients with potentially fatal Covid-19 infections. He said New York needs 30,000 ventilators but only has 4,000 in the current system.
Cuomo said the state has purchased 7,000, and the federal government has now provided 4,000 as high-tier officials start to recognize New York’s crisis. Cuomo has said doctors would start trialling the use of one ventilator for two patients.
New York City on Wednesday took further steps to decrease the density of people, announcing that some roads would be shut to cars to allow pedestrians to use them, and encouraging social and physical distancing to be observed in playgrounds. Sports that involve “close contact” such as basketball should also be avoided.
Cuomo warned that if these measures to reduce the density did not work on a voluntary basis, then the city would make the guidelines mandatory.
The moves came after Dr Deborah Birx, part of the White House coronavirus taskforce, said on Tuesday that about 56% of all the cases in the US, and 60% of new cases, are in the New York metro area. Mike Pence called on people who have recently left New York for other parts of the country to self-quarantine for 14 days.
The vice-president said: “We have to deal with the New York City metropolitan area as a high-risk area.”
Donald Trump tweeted on Wednesday that he had a good conversation with Cuomo, who later thanked Trump and his team for their cooperation. The tone was a considerable change from Tuesday, when Cuomo had fiercely criticized the federal government’s response to the pandemic and balked at Trump’s suggestion that restarting the economy superseded public health concerns.
While Trump has said he would like to see parts of the US economy reopening for business by April, and see churches packed by Easter Sunday, on 12 April, New York officials have implemented extreme social distancing measures, having non-essential employees work from home, shuttering schools and only allowing restaurants to provide takeout and delivery.
Still, more than one in every thousand New York residents has tested positive for the virus. The state confirmed 30,811 cases and 285 deaths as of Wednesday morning; 12% of cases have required hospitalization.
New York’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, said: “The world we knew is gone. And it’s not coming back, not for the next few months. That’s the blunt truth. We’re gonna lose some people.”
New York state accounts for roughly 7% of all confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide, and De Blasio said it was likely more than half of all New Yorkers will get Covid-19. New York City alone tallied 17,856 cases and 199 deaths. The large number of cases could be attributed to New York’s large testing numbers – it is testing more people per capita than South Korea.
New York officials are scrambling to equip hospitals with basic necessities to combat the virus. The hospital system has been given a mandate to increase capacity by at least 50%, but even if all hospitals doubled their capacity, the state would still be 34,000 beds short to accommodate projected numbers once the outbreak reaches its peak in the coming weeks.
There is also a severe shortage of space in intensive care units, where the most critical patients access ventilators. Right now, New York can support 3,000 ICU beds, but Cuomo said the hospitals will need 40,000 ICU beds – a more than 1,200% increase.
The Jacob Javits Center – a landmark convention center in midtown Manhattan – is being repurposed as a temporary hospital for Covid-19, along with four other sites selected by the army corps of engineers. But those new facilities will only inject a few thousand hospital beds into the wider network.
“The inescapable conclusion is that the rate of infection is going up,” Cuomo said at a press conference a day earlier, on Tuesday. “It is spiking. The apex is higher than we thought, and the apex is sooner than we thought. That is a bad combination of facts.”
Scott Weisenberg, an infectious diseases expert at NYU Langone, said hospitals are trying to create additional capacity with more beds and increased staffing. But he cautioned that a return to normalcy in a few weeks’ time would be completely inappropriate, at least in New York.
“I would just say I would be very cautious about trying to reopen society too soon,” he said. “Or you’ll end up paying for it with a lot more cases and more deaths that could have been prevented.”
"I know its easy to be defeatist here because nothing has seemingly reigned Trump in so far. But I will say this: every asshole succeeds until finally, they don't. Again, 18 months before he resigned, Nixon had a sky-high approval rating of 67%. Harvey Weinstein was winning Oscars until one day, he definitely wasn't."-John Oliver
"The greatest enemy of a good plan is the dream of a perfect plan."-General Von Clauswitz, describing my opinion of Bernie or Busters and third partiers in a nutshell.
I SUPPORT A NATIONAL GENERAL STRIKE TO REMOVE TRUMP FROM OFFICE.