The Twin Cities powerhouse announces a three-show season at a drastically reduced budget.

By Rob Weinert-Kend: “In a letter sent yesterday to the theatre’s staff, [Joseph] Haj [executive artistic director of the Guthrie Theater] informed them that the Guthrie’s next season would comprise just three shows, to run March to August of 2021, at a projected budget of $12.6 million, 60 percent smaller than the $25 million budgeted for the nine-show 2020-21 season that was to have begun in the fall…

This is bleak news from one of the nation’s largest and most consequential nonprofit theatres, and it comes only after other, rosier scenarios were considered. In his letter, Haj wrote that initial plans were to “start later in the fall, but still produce nine shows in a more compressed calendar. We knew that this would be an optimistic scenario, but that we would then cancel shows if indeed we couldn’t produce and gather an audience for them. In the end we determined that path was neither feasible nor sustainable.

Source: American Theatre