As India sets new daily records in COVID-19 deaths and infections, some experts see the humanitarian crisis as an opportunity for other nations to counter China’s vaccine diplomacy elsewhere.Three of the nations that make up the Quad — U.S., Australia and Japan — are expected to assist the fourth, India, after U.S. President Joe Biden promised April 26 to provide New Delhi with the China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying gestures during a press conference in Beijing on Dec. 10, 2020.China has denied it is engaged in vaccine diplomacy, and it says it is supplying “vaccine aid,” This handout photo taken on May 3, 2021, shows Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte receiving a dose of China’s Sinopharm to battle the COVID-19 coronavirus at Malacanang Palace in Manila.The partnership allows Quad leaders to take “shared action necessary to expand safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing in 2021” and “work together to strengthen and assist countries in the Indo-Pacific with vaccination, in close coordination with the existing relevant multilateral mechanisms including World Health Organization (WHO) and COVAX (COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access),” according to a statement the White House released March 12.Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore, thinks that the partnership will need to be modified “given that it was dependent on Indian vaccine manufacturing capacity. India will, understandably, prioritize vaccines for its domestic population.”Ideally, such partnerships should be fully coordinated with COVAX and WHO to maximize impact, Adalja said in an email to VOA Mandarin. However, Joe Thomas Karackattu, assistant professor in the Humanities and Social Sciences Department at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, India, where he focuses on Sino-Indian relations and China’s foreign and economic policy, told VOA Mandarin via email that COVID-19 relief cannot become a strategic turf war.”All countries have to work together,” he said. “If the Quad delivers on the pitch for the ‘Quad Vaccine Partnership’ … it might cement a longer-term foundation for the Quad to coordinate on multilateral cooperation, but that necessarily does not automatically translate into an organic and systematic modus vivendi in strategic affairs.” On Wednesday, the Biden administration announced that it supports waiving intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines. South Africa and India had proposed the waiver, which is opposed by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a group that includes vaccine makers such as AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson. “This is a global health crisis, and the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures. The administration believes strongly in intellectual property protections, but in service of ending this pandemic, supports the waiver of those protections for COVID-19 vaccines,” wrote U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai.This is a monumental moment in the fight against #COVID19. The commitment by @POTUS Joe Biden & @USTradeRep@AmbassadorTai to support the waiver of IP protections on vaccines is a powerful example of ?? leadership to address global health challenges. pic.twitter.com/3iBt3jfdEr— Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) May 5, 2021 While a waiver could remove obstacles to ramping up the production of vaccines in developing countries, crafting the waiver may take time because it will require approval from all 164 members of the World Trade Organization.Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
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Day: May 6, 2021
Facebook has taken down a network of hundreds of fake accounts and pages targeting people in Ukraine and linked to individuals previously sanctioned by the United States for efforts to interfere in U.S. elections, the company said Thursday.Facebook said the network managed a long-running deceptive campaign across multiple social media platforms and other websites, posing as independent news outlets and promoting favorable content about Ukrainian politicians, including activity that was likely for hire. The company said it started its probe after a tip from the FBI.Facebook attributed the activity to individuals and entities sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department, including politician Andriy Derkach, a pro-Russian lawmaker who was blacklisted by the U.S. government in September over accusations he tried to interfere in the 2020 U.S. election won by President Joe Biden. Facebook said it removed Derkach’s accounts in October 2020.Derkach told Reuters he would comment on Facebook’s investigation on Friday. Facebook also attributed the network to political consultants associated with Ukrainian politicians Oleh Kulinich and Volodymyr Groysman, Ukraine’s former prime minister. Kulinich did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Groysman could not immediately be reached for comment.Facebook said that as well as promoting these politicians, the network also pushed positive material about actors across the political spectrum, likely as a paid service. It said the activity it investigated began around 2015, was solely focused on Ukraine, and posted anti-Russia content.”You can really think of these operators as would-be influence mercenaries, renting out inauthentic online support in Ukrainian political circles,” Ben Nimmo, Facebook’s global influence operations threat intelligence lead, said on a call with reporters.Facebook’s investigation team said Ukraine, which has been among the top sources of “coordinated inauthentic behavior” that it removes from the site, is home to an increasing number of influence operations selling services.Facebook said it removed 363 pages, which were followed by about 2.37 million accounts, and 477 accounts from this network for violating its rules. The network also spent about $496,000 in Facebook and Instagram ads, Facebook said.
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The largest section of the rocket that launched the main module of China’s first permanent space station into orbit is expected to plunge back to Earth as early as Saturday at an unknown location.Such rocket sections — discarded core, or first stage — usually reenter soon after liftoff, normally over water, and don’t go into orbit as this one did.China’s space agency has yet to say whether the core stage of the huge Long March 5B rocket is being controlled or will make an out-of-control descent. Last May, another Chinese rocket fell uncontrolled into the Atlantic Ocean off West Africa.Basic details about the rocket stage and its trajectory are unknown because the Chinese government has yet to comment publicly on the reentry. Phone calls to the China National Space Administration weren’t answered Wednesday, a holiday.However, the newspaper Global Times, published by the Chinese Communist Party, said the stage’s “thin-skinned” aluminum-alloy exterior will easily burn up in the atmosphere, posing an extremely remote risk to people.The U.S. Defense Department expects the rocket stage to fall to Earth on Saturday.Where it will hit “cannot be pinpointed until within hours of its reentry,” the Pentagon said in a statement Tuesday.No plans to shoot it downSecretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said Thursday that the U.S. military had no plans to shoot it down.White House press secretary Jen Psaki at a Wednesday briefing said the U.S. Space Command was “aware of and tracking the location” of the Chinese rocket.The nonprofit Aerospace Corporation expects the debris to hit the Pacific near the equator after passing over eastern U.S. cities. Its orbit covers a swath of the planet from New Zealand to Newfoundland.The Long March 5B rocket carried the main module of the Tianhe, or “Heavenly Harmony,” into orbit on April 29. China plans 10 more launches to carry additional parts of the space station into orbit.The roughly 30-meter-long (100-foot) rocket stage would be among the biggest pieces of debris to fall to Earth.The 18-ton rocket that fell last May was the heaviest debris to fall uncontrolled since the former Soviet space station Salyut 7 in 1991.China’s first space station, Tiangong-1, crashed into the Pacific Ocean in 2016 after Beijing confirmed it had lost control. In 2019, the space agency controlled the demolition of its second station, Tiangong-2, in the atmosphere.In March, debris from a Falcon 9 rocket launched by U.S. aeronautics company SpaceX fell to Earth in Washington state and on the Oregon coast.
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The Netflix series “Zero,” which premiered globally last month, is the first Italian TV production to feature a predominantly Black cast, a bright spot in an otherwise bleak Italian television landscape where the persistent use of racist language and imagery is sparking new protests.
Even as “Zero” creates a breakthrough in Italian TV history, on private networks, comedy teams are asserting their right to use racial slurs and make slanty-eye gestures as satire. The main state broadcaster RAI is under fire for attempting to censor an Italian rapper’s remarks highlighting homophobia in a right-wing political party. And under outside pressure, RAI is advising against — but not outright banning — the use of blackface in variety skits.
With cultural tensions heightened, the protagonists of “Zero” hope the series — which focuses on second-generation Black Italians and is based on a novel by the son of Angolan immigrants — will help accelerate public acceptance that Italy has become a multicultural nation.
“I always say that Italy is a country tied to traditions, more than racist,” said Antonio Dikele Distefano, who co-wrote the series and whose six novels, including the one on which “Zero” was based, focus on the lives of the children of immigrants to Italy.
“I am convinced that through these things — writing novels, the possibility of making a series — things can change,” he said.
“Zero” is a radical departure because it provides role models for young Black Italians who have not seen themselves reflected in the culture, and because it creates a window to changes in Italian society that swaths of the majority population have not acknowledged.
Activists fighting racism in Italian television underline the fact that it was developed by Netflix, based in the United States and with a commitment to spend $100 million to improve diversity, and not by Italian public or private television.
“As a Black Italian, I never saw myself represented in Italian television. Or rather, I saw examples of how Black women were hyper-sexualized,” said Sara Lemlem, an activist and journalist who is part of a group of second-generation Italians protesting racist tropes on Italian TV. “There was never a Black woman in a role of an everyday woman: a Black student, a Black nurse, a Black teacher. I never saw myself represented in the country in which I was born and raised.”
“Zero,” which premiered on April 21, landed immediately among the top 10 shows streaming on Netflix in Italy.
Perhaps even more telling of its impact: The lead actor, Giuseppe Dave Seke, was mobbed not even a week later by Italian schoolchildren clamoring for autographs as he gave an interview in the Milan neighborhood where the series is set. Seke, a 25-year-old who grew up in Padova to parents from Congo, is not a household name in Italy. “Zero” was his first foray into acting.
“If you ask these children who is in front of them, they will never tell you: the first Black Italian actor. They will tell you, ‘a superhero,’ or they will tell you, ‘Dave’,” Dikele Distefano said, watching the scene in awe.
In the series, Zero is the nickname of a Black Italian pizza bike deliveryman who discovers he has a superpower that allows him to become invisible. He uses it to help his friends in a mixed-race Milan neighborhood.
It’s a direct play on the notion of invisibility that was behind the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted in Italian squares last summer following George Floyd’s murder in the United States. Black Italians rallied for changes in the country’s citizenship law and to be recognized as part of a society where they too often feel marginalized.
“When a young person doesn’t feel seen, he feels a bit invisible,” Seke said. “Hopefully this series can help those people who felt like me or like Antonio. … There can be many people who have not found someone similar to themselves, and live still with this distress.”
The protest movement has shifted from targeting Italian fashion, where racist gaffes have highlighted the lack of Black creative workers, to Italian television, where a movement dubbing itself CambieRAI held protests last month demanding that Italian state and private TV stop using racist language and blackface in skits.
CambieRAI plays upon the name of Italian state TV, RAI, and the Italian language command “you will change.” The movement, bringing together second-generation Italians from a range of associations, also wants RAI — which is funded by mandatory annual fees on anyone owning a TV in Italy — to set up an advisory council on diversity and inclusion.
Last week RAI last responded to an earlier request by other, longer-established groups asking that it stop broadcasting shows using blackface, citing skits where performers darkened their skin to impersonate singers like Beyonce or Ghali, an Italian rapper of Tunisian descent.
“We said we were sorry, and we made a formal commitment to inform all of our editors to ask that they don’t use blackface anymore,” Giovanni Parapini, RAI’s director for social causes, told The Associated Press. He said that was as far as they could go due to editorial freedom.
The associations said they viewed the commitment as positive, even if it fell short of a sought-for ban, since RAI at least recognized that the use of blackface was a problem.
Parapini, however, said the public network did not accept the criticism of the CambieRAI group “because that would mean that RAI in all these years did nothing for integration.”
He noted that the network had never been called out by regulators and listed programming that included minorities, from a Gambia-born sportscaster known as Idris in the 1990s to plans for a televised festival in July featuring second-generation Italians.
Dikele Distefano said for him the goal is not to banish racist language, calling it “a lost battle.” He sees his art as an agent for change.
He is working on a film now where he aims to have a 70% second-generation Italian cast and crew. “Zero” has already helped create positions in the industry for a Black hairstylist, a Black screenwriter and a director of Arab and Italian origin, he noted.
“The battle is to live in a place where we all have the same opportunity, where there are more writers who are Black, Asian, South American, where there is the possibility to tell the stories from the point of view of those who live it,” he said.
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Twitter wants to curb what the company calls “potentially harmful or offensive” tweets. The social media company announced Wednesday it has released a feature that can detect a mean tweet and prompt a user to be sure they really want to send it. “People come to Twitter to talk about what’s happening, and sometimes conversations about things we care about can get intense, and people say things in the moment they might regret later,” the company said in a blog post. “That’s why in 2020, we tested prompts that encouraged people to pause and reconsider a potentially harmful or offensive reply before they hit send.” The prompt says: “Want to review this before tweeting?” Users can then decide whether to send, edit or delete the tweet. Twitter did not specify what would be considered “potentially harmful or offensive.” The company currently has a similar feature that asks users if they went to read an article before retweeting a link to the article. Twitter’s new mean tweet detector has been tested for the past year and will be rolled out soon to English-language Twitter. The company said that while testing, 34% of users, when prompted, either edited the offensive tweet or did not send it at all. Last week, Twitter stock plunged 10% on lower-than-expected user growth.
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British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged the world’s economic powers Thursday not to shy away from serious investments in combating climate change.
Merkel hosted the 2021 Petersburg Climate Dialogue, an online conference designed to drive international action on global warming and encourage nations and their leaders to focus on the U.N. Climate Change Conference later this year in Glasgow, Scotland.
In her comments, Merkel said she realized the COVID-19 pandemic has “torn insane budget holes” for the world’s industrialized countries. But she said they should not compensate for that by spending less on development aid and climate protection.
Johnson echoed that theme, saying the world’s wealthiest nations must meet their commitments to a $100 billion fund meant to help developing nations deal with climate change. He said it is up to wealthy countries to take action, as it is the developing world that feels the worst effects from the warming climate.
Johnson said he will use the meeting with the leading industrial nations hosted by Britain next month to promote the U.N.-backed climate goals.
All G-7 countries have now set targets for reducing their greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero emissions — taking out as much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as are put in — by 2050 at the latest.
Scientists say faster cuts are needed to prevent warming that leads to increased drought, rising sea levels and other potentially disastrous effects.
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Pfizer and BioNTech will donate their COVID-19 vaccine to athletes training for the upcoming Tokyo Olympics, the International Olympic Committee said Thursday. Doses are expected to be delivered later this month, which would be in time for the athletes to be fully immunized for the games, starting July 23. “We are inviting the athletes and participating delegations of the upcoming Olympic and Paralympic Games to lead by example and accept the vaccine where and when possible,” IOC President Thomas Bach said in a statement. Last month, the IOC announced a similar deal to distribute Chinese-made coronavirus vaccines to Chinese athletes prior to both the Tokyo Summer Games and the Beijing Winter Games. Most countries have yet to approve Chinese vaccines for emergency use. How the Tokyo Games will be held is still in question as Japan is reportedly considering extending its coronavirus state of emergency, Reuters reported.
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When oxygen supplies at Shri Ram Singh Hospital in New Delhi ran critically low a week ago, Dr. Gautam Singh, who runs the facility, hit the road at night to plead for oxygen from suppliers and also put out a desperate appeal on social media. Finally, a local official helped secure some cylinders to help alleviate the crisis.But after the nightmare of ensuring that his patients are not left gasping for oxygen, Singh has drastically cut back on the number of COVID-19 patients he takes into his facility even as the raging second wave of the pandemic has led to an acute shortage of hospital beds in the city.“We run the same race daily, we have to beg for oxygen but supplies are still very short. It breaks my heart to turn away people, they come in bad shape, but what can I do?” said Singh in a quivering voice. “We have the beds but not adequate oxygen and the sad part is we can keep only as many patients as we can support on oxygen as that is the only thing that lets us buy time to save them,” he added. Although his facility has 50 beds for COVID-19 patients, he said he now treats about 12 or 13 patients.From smaller hospitals like Singh’s to large ones, the desperate battle to ensure sufficient supplies of oxygen needed to treat COVID-19 patients whose oxygen levels run low is now in its second week.Relatives of a woman suffering from the COVID-19, carry an oxygen cylinder as she receives treatment in the emergency room of Holy Family Hospital in New Delhi, India, May 1, 2021.Sometimes they have lost the battle — patients have died when oxygen stocks ran critically low. “This is one of the biggest tragedies I have seen in my life. Patients are dying because we don’t have oxygen,” S.C. L. Gupta, medical director of Batra Hospital in New Delhi told local television channels after 12 patients died on Saturday, when delivery of the lifesaving gas was delayed by 90 minutes. It is one of the city’s most prestigious hospitals.Mukesh Bhardwaj cries next to his wife, who receives oxygen support outside a Gurudwara (Sikh temple) in Ghaziabad, India, May 3, 2021.The federal government denies reports of shortages and says the bottleneck is due to transportation from key production centers that lie in eastern and southern India to the worst affected parts of the country.”There is enough oxygen available in the country,” Lav Agarwal, a Health Ministry spokesman, said at a press conference on Monday.The government is using “oxygen express” trains to transport the lifesaving gas to some of the worst-hit parts of the country – two such trains arrived in New Delhi on Wednesday according to Railway Minister Piyush Goyal. Officials say India has ramped up oxygen production and diverted all industrial oxygen for medical use. Two oxygen plants have also been installed at two of the largest government hospitals in New Delhi.A health worker checks oxygen cylinders stored next to a train at a railway station in Gauhati, India, May 6, 2021.But the situation on the ground continues to be grim and health experts say surging cases of COVID-19 could only exacerbate the crisis – on Thursday India reported its highest tally of 412, 262 cases so far.Courts have stepped in to direct the government to address the oxygen crisis — the Supreme Court has told the federal government to ensure that the capital city gets its full quota of 700 tons of oxygen and asked how it plans to deal with a third wave, which scientists have said is “inevitable.”Some judges have made strong comments — on Tuesday, the Delhi High Court that has been hearing urgent appeals by hospitals wanting oxygen told officials, “You can put your head in sand like an ostrich. We will not,” and asked “Are you living in ivory towers?”Funeral pyres of 25 COVID-19 victims burn at an open crematorium on the outskirts of Bengaluru, India, May 5, 2021.On the same day a high court in Uttar Pradesh, one of the worst affected states in North India, said that “death of COVID-19 patients just for non-supplying of oxygen to the hospitals is a criminal act and not less than a genocide by those who have been entrusted the task to ensure continuous procurement and supply chain of the liquid medical oxygen.”Public health experts blame the situation on a lack of sufficient planning and complacency that the country would not be hit by a second wave after cases in a first wave were brought down to less than 15,000 earlier this year.“Some of these challenges were identified but not followed through after the first wave of the pandemic began to subside,” points out Chandrakant Lahariya, a public policy and health expert in New Delhi. “For example, plans were made to set up oxygen generation plants in 160 districts but most of those have not come up. The standard approach is that when the crisis is at hand you identify the problem, but soon after it is forgotten.”The government announced last month it will set up 500 oxygen production plants across the country.For doctors like Singh, it is a hard time but he is not giving up the fight. “Patients are going from door to door desperate for help. Hopefully we will again be able to serve more people as soon as supplies stabilize. Officials say the situation will improve,” he said.
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The recent decision about Facebook and former President Donald Trump sends a signal to world leaders everywhere that to use social media, they have to play by a set of rules that are still forming. Tina Trinh has more.Produced by: Matt Dibble
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Sixty years after Alan Shepard became the first American in space, everyday people are on the verge of following in his cosmic footsteps.Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin used Wednesday’s anniversary to kick off an auction for a seat on the company’s first crew spaceflight — a short Shepard-like hop launched by a rocket named New Shepard. The Texas liftoff is targeted for July 20, the date of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic aims to kick off tourist flights next year, just as soon as he straps into his space-skimming, plane-launched rocketship for a test run from the New Mexico base.And Elon Musk’s SpaceX will launch a billionaire and his sweepstakes winners in September. That will be followed by a flight by three businessmen to the International Space Station in January.”We’ve always enjoyed this incredible thing called space, but we always want more people to be able to experience it as well,” NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough said from the space station Wednesday. “So I think this is a great step in the right direction.”It’s all rooted in Shepard’s 15-minute flight on May 5, 1961. Shepard was actually the second person in space — the Soviet Union launched cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin three weeks earlier, to Shepard’s everlasting dismay. The 37-year-old Mercury astronaut and Navy test pilot cut a slick sci-fi figure in his silver spacesuit as he stood in the predawn darkness at Cape Canaveral, looking up at his Redstone rocket. Impatient with all the delays, including another hold in the countdown just minutes before launch, he famously growled into his mic: “Why don’t you fix your little problem and light this candle?”His capsule, Freedom 7, soared to an altitude of 116 miles (186 kilometers) before parachuting into the Atlantic.Twenty days later, President John F. Kennedy committed to landing a man on the moon and returning him safely by decade’s end, a promise made good in July 1969 by Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Shepard, who died in 1998, went on to command Apollo 14 in 1971, becoming the fifth moonwalker — and lone lunar golfer.Since Gagarin and Shepard’s pioneering flights, 579 people have rocketed into space or reached its fringes, according to NASA. Nearly two-thirds are American and just over 20% Soviet or Russian. About 90% are male and most are white, although NASA’s crews have been more diverse in recent decades. A Black community college educator from Tempe, Arizona, sees her spot on SpaceX’s upcoming private flight as a symbol. Sian Proctor uses the acronym J.E.D.I. for “a just, equitable, diverse and inclusive space.”NASA wasn’t always on board with space tourism, but is today.”Our goal is one day that everyone’s a space person,” NASA’s human spaceflight chief, Kathy Lueders said following Sunday’s splashdown of a SpaceX capsule with four astronauts. “We’re very excited to see it starting to take off.” Twenty years ago, NASA clashed with Russian space officials over the flight of the world’s first space tourist.California businessman Dennis Tito paid $20 million to visit the space station, launching atop a Russian rocket. Virginia-based Space Adventures arranged Tito’s weeklong trip, which ended May 6, 2001, as well as seven more tourist flights that followed.”By opening up his checkbook, he kicked off an industry 20 yrs ago,” Space Adventures co-founder Eric Anderson tweeted last week. “Space is opening up more than it ever has, and for all.”There’s already a line.A Russian actress and movie director are supposed to launch from Kazakhstan in the fall. They’ll be followed in December by Space Adventures’ two newest clients, also launching on a Russian Soyuz rocket. SpaceX will be next up in January with the three businessmen; the flight from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center was arranged by Axiom Space, a Houston company run by former NASA employees. And as early as 2023, SpaceX is supposed to take a Japanese entrepreneur and his guests around the moon and back.While no fan of human spaceflight — he prefers robotic explorers — Duke University emeritus history professor Alex Roland acknowledges the emergence of spaceflight companies might be “the most significant change in the last 60 years.” Yet he wonders whether there will be much interest once the novelty wears off and the inevitable fatalities occur.Then there’s the high price of admission.The U.S., Canadian and Israeli entrepreneurs flying SpaceX early next year are paying $55 million — each — for their 1 1/2-week mission.Virgin Galactic’s tickets cost considerably less for minutes versus days of weightlessness. Initially $250,000, the price is expected to go up once Branson’s company starts accepting reservations again.Blue Origin declined Wednesday to give a ticket price for future sales and would not comment on who else — besides the auction winner — will be on board the capsule in July. A couple more crew flights, each lasting minutes, would follow by year’s end.As for SpaceX’s private flight on a fully automated Dragon capsule, tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman won’t say what he’s paying. He considers his three-day flight a “great responsibility” and is taking no shortcuts in training; he took his crewmates hiking up Mount Rainier last weekend to toughen them up.”If something does go wrong, it will set back every other person’s ambition to go and become a commercial astronaut,” Isaacman said recently.John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University, where he founded the Space Policy Institute, has mixed feelings about this shift from space exploration to adventure tourism.”It takes the romance and excitement out of going to space,” Logsdon said in an email this week. Instead of the dawn of a new era like so many have proclaimed, it’s “more like the end of the era when space flight was special. I guess that is progress.”
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Many Broadway productions are scrambling to resume ticket sales in the coming days to welcome theater-goers this fall after city and state leaders have green-lit a reopening of the Great White Way at full capacity by mid-September.”We remain cautiously optimistic about Broadway’s ability to resume performances this fall and are happy that fans can start buying tickets again,” Charlotte St. Martin, president of the Broadway League, said in a statement Wednesday. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Broadway theaters can reopen Sept. 14 and will be allowed to decide their own entry requirements, like whether people must prove they’ve been vaccinated to attend a show. Selling tickets will allow theaters to gauge interest before stages open, said Robert Mujica, Cuomo’s budget director.”Phantom of the Opera,” Broadway’s longest-running show, announced Wednesday it would resume performances on Oct. 22, with tickets going on sale Friday. More shows are expected to circle return dates in the coming weeks.Actors’ Equity Association, the national labor union representing more than 51,000 actors and stage managers in live theater, said the news meant the theater community is “one step closer to the safe reopening” of Broadway.”We look forward to continuing our conversations with the Broadway League about a safe reopening and know that soon the time will come when members can go back to doing what they do best, creating world-class theater,” said Mary McColl, executive director of Actors’ Equity. The Broadway that reopens will look different. In May, the big budget Disney musical “Frozen” decided not to reopen when Broadway theaters restart, marking the first time an established show had been felled by the coronavirus pandemic. Producers of “Mean Girls” also decided not to restart.But there will be new shows, including Antoinette Chinonye Nwandu’s “Pass Over” that is slated to reopen the August Wilson Theatre, the same venue “Mean Girls” has vacated. And a Shubert theater has been promised for playwright Keenan Scott II’s play “Thoughts of a Colored Man.” The lifting of all capacity restrictions has long been considered by the industry as crucial to any reopening plan since Broadway economics demand full venue capacity. Some off-Broadway shows have already reopened with limited capacity.All city theaters abruptly closed on March 12, 2020, knocking out all shows, including 16 that were still scheduled to open.Some scheduled spring 2020 shows — like a musical about Michael Jackson and a revival of Neil Simon’s “Plaza Suite” starring Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker — pushed their productions to 2021. But others abandoned their plans, including “Hangmen” and a revival of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
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