Cameron Mackintosh, Producer of shows like Phantom, Les Mis and Mary Poppins spoke to Michael Ball this morning on his BBC Radio 2 show and gave a truthful insight into how long we are really looking at before theatres can reopen in the UK.
He said: “the truth is, until social distancing doesn’t exist anymore, we can’t even plan to reopen and I think from the moment social distancing doesn’t exist anymore, it will take us four to five months to actually get the actors back together. I think the truth it we won’t be able to come back until early next year”.
That estimate will obviously depend on Government guidelines around how social distancing will work when we are out of lock down and how long it will take until we can go back to the way things were.
Cameron also spoke about how horrible an experience it would be for audiences to have to sit socially distanced and how you can’t have actors six feet away from each other on stage.
Listen to the radio show here (Cameron joins around 1hr 30mins in)