SMITH CENTER Vegas is Ready to Say Goodbye to the Pandemic and Hello to Live Performances
Written by Myron Martin
It
has been a year since The Smith Center was forced to close our doors due to the pandemic. Little did we know back then that the road to reopening would be so long and that its path would wind so fiercely. As the timeline was extended, our furloughs turned to layoffs and our hopes of reopening moved farther and farther out. I will never forget being greeted at the stage door by the company manager from the Broadway show Once On This Island late in the performance week asking that we cancel the balance of the performances for the week. With little notice we had to notify ticket holders that the performances for the rest of the weekend were cancelled. No one from the company had Covid19, but the performers, like our audiences, were becoming more and more concerned based on what we were hearing in the news. The Smith Center closed that day – ahead of most of our peers in Las Vegas- and when we closed, we knew that we would be among the last to reopen. Unlike strip venues who primarily served 74 | VEGASLEGALMAGAZINE.COM
visitors, we focused on our friends and neighbors who live here in Las Vegas and we took great strides to keep our staff and our neighbors safe. We also knew that the magic of live theater was enhanced by the shared experience of a theater full of people laughing and crying together. So, we vowed to wait until we could once again give our audiences a complete and fulfilling experience. Cancelling shows was tough in the beginning. Lawyers representing performing artists and tours tried to say that we had no case for force majeure and therefore should be liable for cancellation fees - even though their clients were actually looking for ways to get off of the road and even though venues were shutting down from coast to coast. It is hard to book and contract 400 performances and events per year, but it was nearly impossible to cancel that many dates. However, once the national dialogue turned to social distancing, masking and staying away from
