Arts Groups Bet Big on Holiday Programming. Will Children Come?
“I haven’t been to the Met in years,” Mattea Volpe, who is 10 years old, recalled bemoaning on her ride to the opera house. “I was exaggerating, but then I was like, ‘Wait, I actually haven’t!’”
No children had.
When she took her red velvet seat last week, Mattea became one of the first children under 12 allowed back inside the Metropolitan Opera House since the Covid-19 pandemic forced it to close in March 2020. When the Met reopened this September, its strict vaccine mandate kept young children away, since they were not yet eligible for shots. Now they are, and fully vaccinated children are being welcomed back — not a moment too soon for a company that had decided to bet heavily on child-friendly operas this holiday season.
The Met, whose family holiday presentations have grown in popularity in recent years, is presenting two this season. To build on the success of its popular abridged English-language version of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” it is mounting a new offering: “Cinderella,” a 90-minute English adaptation of Massenet’s “Cendrillon.” At the final dress rehearsal, Met employees could invite their fully vaccinated children. Mattea, whose mother plays violin in the orchestra, whose father is the Met’s head electrician and whose grandfather Joseph Volpe ran the company for years, was among them.
“I wouldn’t say we lucked out,” Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, said of the new vaccine eligibility that allowed a big part of his target audience back into the opera house in the nick of time. “But I would say we were very fortunate.”
The milestone comes at an uncertain moment in the course of the pandemic. A surge in cases and the spread of the Omicron variant has led to the cancellations of performances of some Broadway shows after cast and crew members tested positive for the virus, and led to the cancellation of one of the city’s most popular family offerings, the “Christmas Spectacular Starring the Radio City Rockettes,” more than a week before Christmas.
Children are a key part of the audience many New York City arts organizations court over the holidays. “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker” is one of New York City Ballet’s biggest draws each year. Broadway beckons families from out of town. Museums try to draw children who are off from school, as with the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new Walt Disney exhibition. This year, many institutions are trying to navigate the surge in Covid cases and fast-changing health and safety protocols for children.
On Dec. 14, New York City began requiring children between the ages of 5 and 11 to show proof of one vaccination dose at entertainment and performance venues, including on Broadway, where they had previously been allowed in if they could show a negative test, and at museums. (The Met Opera and Carnegie Hall are stricter: They will only allow fully vaccinated people to attend performances, so children under 12 must wait two weeks until after they have received their final doses.)
The new vaccine requirement took effect the day before the American Museum of Natural History opened a new, child-friendly exhibit on sharks. Museum officials said that since the announcement of the new vaccine requirement for children, they had fielded more than 100 requests for refunds from advance ticket holders. The day after the rules took effect, the museum had to turn away four families who had not seen the museum’s notifications and were not aware of the change.
Anne Canty, a spokesperson for the museum, noted that it has hosted a city vaccination site since April, and said that “as a science institution, we are completely pro-vaccine and supportive of the city’s policies requiring vaccines.”
Broadway and other presenters that had been allowing unvaccinated children in with negative tests had to switch gears when the new city mandate took effect. It came in the middle of City Ballet’s 47-show run of “The Nutcracker.” When the run began after Thanksgiving, the company had initially decided to allow children under 12 to attend with proof of a negative PCR test taken shortly before the performance; it then adjusted to comply with the city mandate.
“We are hopeful that the new mandate will help to further mitigate the spread of Covid-19 and enable even more people to safely enjoy our performances,” said Rob Daniels, a spokesperson for the ballet.
Even as Broadway has had to endure a raft of show cancellations in recent days, producers said that the new vaccination policy for children seemed to be going smoothly at shows like “Aladdin” and “The Lion King.” Disney Theatrical Productions, which runs those shows, said in a statement that during the first days after the new policy took effect, 98 percent of the parties arriving at the performances came prepared for the protocols — the same level of compliance they have seen since the shows returned in September.
The new vaccine eligibility rules allowed the Met Opera to welcome back some of its youngest performers: the members of its children’s chorus who are under 12.
Since August, the chorus has been split into two groups based on age and ability to get vaccinated. Vaccinated children 12 and older could rehearse at the opera house, while those under 12 who could not get vaccinated rehearsed at a nearby church. But late last week, a group of about 15 members of the choir who are under 12 returned to the Met with hopes of joining the cast of the next run of “Tosca” in January.
“They’ve been liberated,” Gelb said. “We’ve had very tall children onstage — it will be nice to have some who are smaller.”
Officials at other arts institutions across the city said they have by now become accustomed to adapting quickly to constantly shifting public health guidance — nonetheless, some made clear that changing course on short notice is not, in fact, easy. Staff members at various sites have been working quickly to notify advance ticket holders of the shifts by email, change signage as needed and ensure front-of-house staff know who must be checked and for what.
The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to Know
The Omicron variant. The new Covid variant appears to be highly transmissible, though it remains unclear if it is less severe than other forms of the virus. New studies indicate that vaccines, and especially their boosters, may offer protection against severe disease.
Omicron and vaccines. A booster shot of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine significantly raises the level of antibodies that can thwart the variant, the companies announced this month. Though all vaccines seem to prevent serious illness, the non-mRNA shots relied on by most of the world are unlikely to stop Omicron infections.
Biden’s vaccine mandate. A federal appeals panel on Dec. 17 reinstated a Biden administration rule requiring larger companies to mandate that their workers get vaccinated against Covid-19 or submit to weekly testing by Jan. 4. A day later, the Labor Department said that it would delay that deadline until Feb. 9.
A new U.S. surge. The C.D.C said that the Omicron variant’s rapid spread in the U.S. may portend a surge in infections as soon as January, but cases are already spiking. On Dec. 17, New York officials reported the state’s highest single-day total of new cases.
Kids and schools. Pfizer said that a low dose of its vaccine did not produce an adequate immune response in 2- to 5-year-olds in ongoing clinical trials. Meanwhile, the C.D.C. announced “test-to-stay” guidelines that allow unvaccinated students exposed to the virus to stay in school if they remain asymptomatic.
At the recent “Cinderella” dress rehearsal, some of the returning young audience members came in their own costumes, sporting homemade paper crowns and adorning their face masks with holiday ribbons.
“If you can hear my voice, clap once!” Dan Marshall, a member of the Met’s education department, said, leveraging a classic teacher trick to settle the children just as the show was about to begin. “Welcome back to the Met.”
During the performance, Kayla Curran, a 6-year-old attending her first opera, would occasionally lean toward the aisle, her eyes wide, trying to peer around the adult in front of her to get a better view of the performers. So it was no surprise that when they were offered the chance to go onstage after the show to meet Cinderella, Prince Charming and the Fairy Godmother in person, Kayla and the others leapt at the chance.
As she headed backstage, Cruz Lopez, 10, said that she had been delighted to get the chance to take a day off from school, and a book report deadline, but that she had a few doubts about Prince Charming. “I don’t know about the prince,” she said. “He was like, ‘I really like you!’ — even through he had barely met her. ”
