Coronavirus News: Broadway offers discounted tickets amid COVID-19 outbreak
NEW YORK (WABC) -- As the novel coronavirus continues to spread across the country, New Yorkers are seeing one perk: discounted Broadway shows.
The announcement on Tuesday is the first sign that Broadway is preparing for many open seats in the coming weeks.
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Here some of the latest developments:
Tickets for "To Kill a Mockingbird," "West Side Story," "The Lehman Trilogy," "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," and "The Book of Mormon" will be $50 for all performances from March 12 through March 29.
Standard top prices for those shows usually run around $200, which is normal for Broadway.
"As long as New York City is open for business, its beating heart remains the Broadway stage," said producer Scott Rudin. "This is an unprecedented opportunity for everyone to see a show that they otherwise might not have had easy and affordable access to. I can't pretend that great theater is the panacea we've been waiting for, but in the meantime I think we could all use a few hours away from the evening news."
Broadway isn't the only industry in the area being impacted by coronavirus.
At Gourmet Advisory Services, a leading event planning company in NYC, all corporate events in the next two weeks have been canceled or postponed.
"We've prepared for blizzards and storms and hurricanes and things like that, there have been acts of terrorism, this is the spreading of a virus and people being afraid of germs and contracting a bug is a very unusual thing to experience," said Melissa Rosenbloom with Gourmet Advisory Services.
Rosenbloom said smaller events like weddings may go on, but they'll be posting signs and doing fewer food passings.
But she's concerned how the industry in general.
"Our vendors, the venues that we work with, people have to do layoffs if they have no business in the next two weeks and that's very upsetting and very unsettling," Rosenbloom said.
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