'Sing along! Help her!' the conductor urged the masked chorus, whose voices carried Picerno until she regained her composure.ДЄ few days later, the cast practiced dance steps in a mix of street clothes and the bulkier parts of their 19th-century-style costumes. Picerno's singing dissolved in tears during the love duet 'All I Ask of You.' Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber had swung by the studio to deliver a pep talk to the cast before they sang through the familiar score. In the dark days of 2020, living back in North Carolina with her parents and claiming unemployment benefits, she said she 'almost felt like a failure.' She sang her part every day to keep it fresh in her mind until the singing made her too sad and she stopped.Д®motion again overcame her on the first day reunited with her castmates in late September.

Picerno said she was happy to embrace whatever was needed to get back on stage. The entire company was required to be vaccinated and twice a week went to get their noses swabbed at a nearby theater lobby repurposed as a temporary coronavirus testing site. The actor, Emilie Kouatchou, would make her Broadway debut as an alternate for Picerno.ДЇor the returning cast, there were tweaks to lyrics and staging to learn, making it more straightforward to cast non-white actors in principal roles. In August, 'Phantom' producers announced they had cast the first-ever Black actor to play Christine since the show opened on Broadway in 1988. streets last year in outrage at the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white police officer, newly unemployed Broadway workers pushed the industry to make overdue changes to increase racial diversity in theater companies. Within a few weeks of the show going dark, COVID-19 had claimed the life of a beloved dresser, Jennifer Arnold, who had been with the show for more than three decades.ДЄfter protests filled U.S. Reuters watched as the 'Phantom' company prepared for its return. Their return this fall is viewed as a test of the city's efforts to restore some new sense of normalcy. Now, after an unprecedented shutdown, the theaters are among the last workplaces to reopen. Word of the abrupt shuttering came during a 'Phantom' matinee at the Majestic Theatre on March 12, 2020, as some cast and crew themselves were falling sick. The crowded Broadway theaters, vital to the city's tourism industry, were the first places closed by the New York government as the coronavirus began to ravage the state. 'Hopefully, none of us have it, because if one of us have it, we all have it,' she said. Playing the show's heroine Christine required Picerno to kiss two co-stars daily and to sing full-throated love songs with them unmasked and at close range. She knew her job came with risks of exposure.

'I'm a full-on monk now,' she said during a rushed lunch break between back-to-back run throughs.

Broadway s-2