Hi, my name is Sammi Cannold, and I'm talking to Playbill
about the documentary film, The Show Must Go On.
The 2019-2020 season. Reserve your seats today.
Broadway is going to go dark.
The show will not be going on.
All 41 theaters on the Great White Way.
Shut down 96000 jobs.
So I was FaceTiming with a group of friends.
One of them, Kristen Blodgett, who is
has been working on Phantom of the Opera and Cats
Worldwide for over 30 years.
And it was, you know, in
in the doldrums of the pandemic when everything was was quite bad.
And she said, I'm going to Korea
in a few weeks to work on the South Korean tour of Cats.
And at that time, nobody was making theater anywhere.
And I was just dumbfounded. And I was like, how are you?
How is it even possible?
The pandemic has halted performances worldwide,
but here in Korea, a touring production of Phantom of the Opera is on stage.
I woke up to a phone call telling me that I was in Cats.
I was like, Are you sure?
Cats and The Phantom of the Opera could be a good example.
We were going to be one of the few shows in this entire world.
The Phantom of the Opera World Tour,
when it was running in spring of 2020, was
the only large scale English language production in the entire world .
And so I'd been reading about that and then hearing about Cats from Kristen
and then watching Andrew Lloyd Webber, you know,
championing the survival of theater on the West End.
And I was like, these dots all kind of connect.
And it seems like there's a story to be told here.
You know, of course, there's a story to be told about
all theater makers keeping theater alive in all the so many different ways
that they did during the pandemic.
But this felt like in documentary film, you really want to pick a specific story
in a specific subject that you can use to sort of speak to a larger theme.
And this felt like "aha!" three dots connect and allow us to tell,
you know, a slice of a larger story.
It's really important for us to have that theater alive.
We've been living on a little bit of a knife edge every day.
It was very hard to make a film
while the world was shut down. Three weeks after
we decided to make the film, I was on a plane to Korea
and I had to quarantine for two weeks in a government facility
along with the whole Cats company before we were able to do anything.
We were only able to have certain numbers of crew in the room at a given time
because we were trying to keep, you know, potential positive cases low.
At the time, there was no vaccine.
We really had to be cautious
and make sure that, you know, the show could go on.
it was mostly myself
and our our our DP, and we had to keep the crew really small.
So I shot a lot, you know, on a little camera that that that I carried around.
And, you know, we had members of both the Cats and Phantom companies
shooting things on their iPhones.
We had folks all over the world shooting things on their iPhones for us.
And so it's really a film that is like collage through the efforts
of so many theater makers. And we're very grateful for that.
I learned a lot from making the film.
And I think most of all, deep admiration for the Korean theater industry.
I had been to Korea before, but wasn't familiar with the way
that the theater industry worked,
the commercial leader industry there is only about 20 years old. And the
the way that they forged ahead against all odds
in this moment is really inspiring and I think comes from
a belief that theater is essential,
not in any way to comment on
theater shutting down everywhere else in the world, because
Korea as a country is doing so much better than everywhere else in the world.
So it was sort of uniquely possible there, but it was also uniquely possible
because of the protocol that were, you know, quickly implemented.
And I think that, you know,
theater communities around the globe have been learning from from Korea's
example, and I'm really inspired by that and grateful for it.
That it didn't spread
throughout the company was a miracle,
We were racing to get the film done because we wanted it to come out
before theater came back, in large part because we wanted it to be helpful
and would be part of the conversation and say, here's what Korea did.
We can learn from their example and and use it to come back ourselves.
And, you know, it takes a while to to finish a documentary film.
So we were racing against the clock
and we were like, oh, my gosh, we're going to be so irrelevant.
Like COVID is going to be a way in the rear view mirror.
We're not going to be even thinking about it anymore.
And here we are with with the Delta variant.
And hopefully all will be on track for for Broadway's
reopening and the reopening of theater around the country and around the globe.
But as we're seeing on the West End and in Australia and everywhere,
theater still has a really big uphill battle.
And so I hope that the tenacity of the Korean theatre
industry, that's that we sort of aim to document in the film
is helpful to folks.
Not to say that we should charge ahead against all odds,
because sometimes that's just not possible.
But to say, you know, with the right combination of factors, you know, perhaps
we can keep the show running
despite this factor, this factor, this factor.
And I don't own a theater. I'm not a producer.
I'm not the one making those calls. It's above my pay grade.
But I am so inspired by what I saw.
You know, our Korean colleagues doing.
And I'm excited to amplify their message.
It is so incredibly meaningful to get to premiere, the film
in the Majestic Theatre, Home to The Phantom of the Opera.
I mean, first of all, it's just such a historic and and meaningful site.
And also to be back in it as the first thing in over five
hundred days since, you know, the Broadway shut down on on March 12, 2020
is very meaningful.
So we are really grateful.
And additionally, we are very grateful that the
the premiere will be in support of The Actors Fund.
And 100 percent of tickets sold will go towards towards the funds vital work
to aid entertainment professionals in need, particularly at this very
critical time when so many in our industry are in critical need of of that support.
And we so admire what the fund is doing and are so grateful
that we have to celebrate their work and
and contribute to it a little bit through through this event.
So buy tickets.
Thank you for watching.
Thank you, Playbill.
And you can get tickets at Telecharge or specifically
The show must go on.
to the theater we go.