Thank you for your question and for your support always. It gives us so much confidence when we have an MP who cares about the arts, so I just wanted to share that and thank you.
A great example was in Quebec. We got the go-ahead earlier this summer, so theatres scrambled, scrambled, scrambled to get work going for the fall. In this case, everyone was doing a one-person or a two-person show because of the financial risk and the timeline. In order to do a musical, for example, we usually cast the musical a full year ahead.
In order to get back to where we were before, you usually work on a project one to two years out. If you're a distributor or just a presenter, then you can kind of grasp for these things that can come in and just get up in a few days, but when you're really creating, when you're really part of the ecosystem of development, it really takes a year.
I'd like to piggyback for a second on what Madame Prégent was saying in that we understand that, with our unions—we work predominantly with the Canadian Actors Equity Association and sometimes with UDA—when we are making an offer, that contract needs to be signed in equity 10 days from the offer, so it's very, very scary for an institution to say that we're going to do a big show, because everybody will need to be paid if we're going to cancel. This is what's happening with Underneath the Lintel.
Zebrina. Une pièce à conviction, at the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde.
It's a one-man show with a full team. We hired everybody under UDA for 16 performances. We're not doing any, and they're all being paid. It's a tremendous loss for us, although CALQ has given wonderful support to try to recoup some of the ticket losses so we're all very grateful for that. Bit it's the mounting of these productions and knowing that you're just going.... We want the money to get into the hands of the artists, but living under this back-and-forth, are we or aren't we, makes it impossible to do anything that we could do before. There's going to need to be a vaccine before we can have 10 people on stage who can dance and sing.