As a musician, composer, and artist I feel everyone's pain, and am at the same time humbled. Individually I do not have to balance the larger scale budget problems as do Benaroya Hall, The Pacific Northwest Ballet, the 5th Avenue Theatre, among many other large venues. While I don't have the finances to contribute to all those in need as I would like to, I wish everyone the best.
The world would be a truly grim place without art, music, and the performing arts.

"meet them where they are at?"

Sadly, this city has treated some of the largest donors to the arts like crap on toast... and funding, support from this source will be hard to get.

They don't have to do this. We developed the vaccines precisely so they don't have to do this, so their hypochondria at this point is on them.

Chickens coming home to roost. If the larger nonprofit arts organizations, instead of believing that they have no need to make the community quantifiably better (receipts, please, with actual numbers attached) because, ya know, art for art's sake or some such hogwash, there wouldn't even be a question of supporting them with government dollars. But they don't, they never have, and don't want to. Art is not the end, it is the means toward an end. Should they consider breaking themselves up to impactful pieces rather than just mounting what was on or off Broadway last year?

Y'all saying "Let the arts organizations perish" are going to come back into these comments and complain about how boring and stiff Seattle has become once they finally die. Some of you have never been to a performance of live theater, and it fucking shows. Enjoy your dipshit Reality TV crap for the rest of your miserable lives, because that and Marvel are the only entertainment you're going to be able to get in the monopolistic corporate hellscape that awaits us all in the future.

Also, to everyone saying "Why don't they just do something other than what was on Broadway last year?", the answer is: they do! We stage original musicals and plays here ALL THE TIME. The 5th Avenue alone is putting on a new musical in its next season and another new one in the season after that, to say nothing of what the other arts orgs are producing around town.

But hey, if you had any knowledge of the arts orgs in this town, you'd probably already know that. Each and every one of you salty motherfuckers in here is probably just complaining about these organizations because you want another want to choke out the liberal/progressive cultural institutions in favor of building more godawful highrise condos for rich fucks.

From the bottom of my multi-generational Seattle heart, I would like to invite you to fuck yourself in the ass until you hemorrhage out. The world will be better off without you.

For anyone who is vaccinated and boosted: Guess what? You are at very, very low risk. Seattle has been one of the best places in the country to be during the pandemic. We now need to realize that our successes allow us to open back up. If not now, when?

I know a lot of Seattleites just want to keep up the hygiene theatre, and want to keep wearing masks (even outdoors? Still? Seriously?!), and don't ever want to accept any risk associated with this awful disease, but the risk is lower now than at any point in the last two years. There's a better chance I'll get hit by a bus (almost happened twice in the last 12 months), or get run off the road by some idiot driver than that I'll have serious consequences from COVID (boosted, with a mild natural infection in January).

Our antibody and memory T cell responses will protect us. Really tired of living in a low-risk city with a bunch of people who are no longer following the science and want to continue to scaremonger the rest of us because they want to keep practicing their performative progressivism.

@9

I work in the arts. We should reopen. Really grateful for all of the government money that has come our way in the last two years. But it was always going to end at some point.

I don't expect the government to keep paying for hygiene theater and pointless testing. Everyone is vaccinated. Every artist is vaccinated. Every employee is vaccinated. Every attendee is vaccinated.

What the hell are we waiting for?

@11 I work in the arts as well, and you and I both know that an audience's second favorite thing to do in a theater is cough. Every institution should keep checking vaccine cards for as long as they can get away with it. I don't know about you, but I'm not eager to see the Paramount or McCaw to become the ground zero for the next variant outbreak.