As there seems to be no end in sight for restrictions about gathering in groups and coming together, the coronavirus pandemic continues to impact the entertainment world.
While the summer still seems so far away, local organizations have been working right along to determine if and how previously scheduled programming might look.
The Peterborough Players already canceled its season and Andy’s Summer Playhouse has switched gears to offer the Digital Renaissance Project online. And recently Monadnock Music, the Monadnock Summer Lyceum and the Amos Fortune Forum have made decisions on how to proceed.
Monadnock Music announced its first – and hopefully last – season of six Virtual Village Concerts. Last week, the Lyceum announced it will in fact hold its season this summer, but will move all eight of its speakers to a livestream format for the summer of 2020. Just days later, the Amos Fortune Forum committee sent out a letter to its patrons with the unfortunate news that it has decided to cancel its season.
General Manager Laina Barakat said Monadnock Music was initially optimistic that by mid-June everything would be fine to hold in-person concerts.
There was one concert planned for May and the thought was they could either cancel or hold it digitally, but the hope was that would be the only one affected.
“At that point we weren’t thinking about a digital season,” Barakat said.
Monadnock Music had previously announced dates and locations for its season and then did a livestream announcement of the concert specifics in early April.
“It was within a matter of days we realized what have we done,” Barakat said.
Barakat said they quickly got to work on planning a virtual season and creating a new budget. While there were 18 concerts planned for 2020, the cost of producing high-quality digital recordings limited what they could offer – considering their fundraising abilities as well as ticket sales will be significantly impacted.
“It’s a real financial challenge. There’s a huge loss of income,” Barakat said. “But we started ahead of the game this season and we should end up fine.”
The six Virtual Village Concerts will be free and will be pre-recorded and released on Monadnock Music’s website, and YouTube and Facebook pages.
“We want the quality of the performances to be very high,” Barakat said.
Barakat said new artistic director Rafael Popper-Keizer had spent a lot of time revamping the structure of the season and she was excited to see how it would all look.
“We put a lot more work into the season than year’s past,” she said.
The biggest downside to the revamped season is the cancellation of the James Bolle Memorial Concert presentation of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in July.
Dates and times are to be determined for the season. For a list of the six Virtual Village Concerts, visit www.monadnockmusic.org.
For Mary Vallier-Kaplan, chair of the Monadnock Summer Lyceum committee, there wasn’t really a question of whether or not they’d have a season, but how.
All of the conversations during the month of April centered around ways to still host the Sunday speaker series – albeit in a much different way that ever before.
“We’re here to inform and educate the community and they need that more than ever,” Vallier-Kaplan said. “So how do we make that happen?”
It was clear they wouldn’t be able to hold the Lyceum in the Unitarian Universalist Church in Peterborough, where it has been held for many years. So they quickly turned their attention to finding an online platform to host the weekly tradition and settled on Streamyard. The speakers will be live from their homes, as will the moderators, and the virtual audience will have the ability to ask questions like they would in person. She said there will be a musical presence, but the details are still being determined.
Vallier-Kaplan said the length of the program will remain an hour, beginning at 11 a.m., and that each of the eight speakers originally lined up for the season have stayed committed to their dates.
“We really envision people creating a new tradition,” Vallier-Kaplan said. “Grabbing a second cup of coffee and sitting on their porch.”
And like they have done in the past, each week will be recorded and put on the Lyceum website.
Vallier-Kaplan said the committee had finalized the season earlier in the year and were ready for summer. And that a lot of people have been putting in extra work to ensure the season happens. They even did a test run show.
“We were pretty confident we’d be able to do this,” Vallier-Kaplan said. “That’s been our mindset. We’re having a 2020 season.”
The season begins with Andrew Card, who will speak on Democracy, Bipartisanship, and Leadership in Troubled Times, on Sunday, June 28. For complete details and a list of speakers, visit https://monadnocklyceum.org.
The letter to friends of the series held at the Jaffrey Meetinghouse began with “It is with very heavy hearts that we write to let you know that the Amos Fortune Forum will not be in session for summer 2020.”
It is the first summer Amos Fortune will not be held since its founding in 1946, a decision that was extremely difficult to come to said Amos Fortune co-chair Nan Beiter.
Beiter said they looked at all options, including a shortened season and going to a strictly online format.
“We did think that maybe we could just cancel part of the season, but that didn’t seem appropriate given the speakers we had,” Beiter said. “The only other option was to go online.”
The discussions began in mid-March and Beiter said the committee worked through the different scenarios until they came to a consensus. And if they couldn’t gather in the traditional sense, it became increasingly more apparent they should forgo the season.
“Because the forum is such a social event, as it is an educational experience, it really wouldn’t be worth doing online. It wouldn’t be the same,” Beiter said.
The committee did receive a generous offer from The Park Theater in Jaffrey to make studio and audio visual equipment available, but in the end it just didn’t seem like the right avenue to take.
“The Committee believes that the Amos Fortune Forum is more than the experience of listening to an excellent presenter. It is also a gathering of the Monadnock community to meet in person and to engage in face to face, meaningful dialogue. The gathering together on a warm summer evening to enjoy the beauty of a classic New England village in our magnificent Meetinghouse is integral to the Forum experience,” the letter read.
Beiter said it is difficult on many levels, as both a member of the Amos Fortune committee and a patron of the series since the 1980s.
“It’s a very important part of my summer,” Beiter said. “So are the Lyceum and the Peterborough Players.”
In a perfect world, this season’s speaker lineup would simply move to 2021, but Beiter said it is not that simple.
“We have to give them a lot of leniency with how generous they are with their time,” Beiter said. “And I can’t guarantee their availability.”
Beiter said they always look for speakers with a tie to the region, but since they do not pay, it can be like putting a puzzle together to get everything to line up just right.
She said the committee has been in contact with all of the speakers on the schedule this season and will continue to work to bring as many back as possible.
Planning for a season begins in the fall, but with no summer series this year it will begin earlier. 2021 was supposed to be Amos Fortune’s 75th season, but that will now be celebrated in 2022.
The letter ends with “Thank you for your generous support and continued interest over the years. We hope to see you in 2021 when we will, at last, declare the 74th season of the Amos Fortune to be in session.”