What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
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8 WHAT'S UP! APRIL 11-17, 2021 COVER STORY The Room Where It Happens Walton Arts Center not throwing away its shot at stellar comeback season JOCELYN MURPHY NWA Democrat-Gazette E ven as theater offerings cautiously creep off computer screens and back onto real-life, in-person stages, much remains uncertain — especially when it comes to the industry's pinnacle: Broadway. When will the Great White Way reopen? Will touring productions also resume? If and when they do, will the tours look the same? Will they run smaller, more localized schedules? Will the Walton Arts Center host any of the shows it was supposed to present in 2020? The questions abound, and it will be impossible to answer them all while the pandemic and vaccine rollout continue. With the announcement of the 2021- 22 Broadway Season at the WAC last week, though, Scott Galbraith and Jennifer Ross did try to settle some of the conjecture. "We're really grateful to our partners, the producers we work with and the booking agents that we work with. Because really, everybody was like-minded in essentially trying to un-press pause where we were," says Galbraith, vice president of programming and executive producer. Which is to say, he goes on, when it comes to all of those 2020-21 schedules announced last year that had to be canceled, the entire industry was doing everything possible to get audiences the shows they were expecting. Consequently, the WAC's new season comprises shows that had all already been promised in Northwest Arkansas at one point or another prior to the pandemic. Opening the welcome-back Broadway season on Oct. 26, "Come From Away" is, fittingly, about a group of people coming through the other side of a tragic experience, Galbraith explains. Galbraith and Ross are thrilled to reopen the Broadway series with "a piece that is so poignant, so relevant, and so joyous — because it's not about the tragedy, it's about the overcoming," Galbraith says. "It's about the coming together. It's about the shared humanity pulling together in times of challenge, and finding a way to be civil with each other and to support each other, despite just a ridiculous number of differences. And that's such a great message for right now." Following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the United States closed the airspace, and flights could The new revival of "Fiddler on the Roof" from a Tony Award- winning creative team was originally slated as part of the 2019- 20 Broadway season at WAC. The WAC programming team's persistence paid off. Postponed and rescheduled multiple times due to the pandemic, the show will finally take the stage on May 10, 2022, to close out the 2021-22 Broadway season. (Courtesy Photo/Joan Marcus)