No one wants to say it, believe it or deal with it … but it’s not over.

Not only is COVID still ripping its way through the local performing arts community with renewed vigor, but this winter we have the tripledemic: COVID, the flu and RSV, otherwise known as Respiratory Syncytial Virus. And, according to the Colorado Department of Public Health, they are all on the rise.

The ongoing and accumulating damage to the performing-arts community since March 2020 is incalculable, from lost productions to unpaid artist wages to the unrealized associated economic impact.

Last year, when Omicron reared its scurvy head during the holiday season, it seemed like a cruel joke after everything arts organizations already had endured. The holidays are the worst time of year to be losing performances because seasonal programming is the absolute lifeblood of nearly every arts organization. It’s the only time of year companies can be sure that pretty much whatever they put on the stage, people will come.

Some smaller companies can generate as much as half their entire annual revenue in the final six weeks of the year. When Omicron shut down the Arvada Center’s holiday staging of “Elf the Musical” and the Denver Center’s national touring production of “The Lion King,” the damage ran into the millions. For smaller companies that shut down for Omicron, the crisis was potentially existential.

But people are still dying. We’re averaging about 43 deaths a day in the U.S. right now, and there have been 1.1 million overall. But when it comes to managing the ongoing crisis, it’s the Wild West out there. Local, state and federal leaders have fully abdicated when it comes to issuing guidelines and ordering common-sense protections. That’s left local arts leaders to be the grownups in the room when it comes to making hard decisions that are in the best interests of all concerned.

But more and more it seems arts leaders, too, have thrown in the towel. They are letting shows go on that a year ago would never have gone on. And that is putting the health and safety of both artists and audiences at greater risk.

On Nov. 17, I sat in the tiny Benchmark Theatre and watched a fear-of-God play called “The COVID Wife,” which is essentially actor Suzanne Nepi reliving the gory real-life details of her husband’s 37 days in a COVID ICU. It was a terrifying reminder (and I was the only one in the audience wearing a mask).

Two nights later, I walked into the Vintage Theatre in Aurora not knowing that I was walking into the newest local epicenter of the epidemic. Vintage is currently offering two simultaneous productions: The popular Monty Python musical “Spamalot’ in the 145-seat Nickelson Auditorium, and the Colman Domingo comedy “Dot” in the 67-seat Bond-Trimble Theatre. Both were performed to capacity audiences that night.

I remember walking into the packed lobby and feeling overwhelmed with joy for this indefatigable little theater that, like most every company everywhere, has struggled to get audiences to come back at pre-pandemic numbers. The sight of so many humans in one place was a sure sign of a corner being turned, I thought.

What I did not know was that COVID and other illnesses had been zig-zagging through both Vintage shows for weeks. “Spamalot” was going on that night with three understudies. And the lead actor in “Dot” was home recovering from a COVID case that wiped out the opening weekend of performances. And for her, there was no understudy.

But rather than cancel a second week of “Dot” performances, Vintage officials instead asked veteran Denver actor Adrienne Martin-Fullwood to read the role of the family matriarch from a script she carried in her hand – and on just 48 hours’ notice.

This was problematic in a dozen ways, starting with the fact that there was no announcement telling the audience with full transparency what was going on here. To them, this was not a heroic actor riding to the rescue as best she could (which it was). Instead, one might incorrectly assume this was an actor who just didn’t bother to learn her lines.

Once I asked and was filled in, I was left with several troubling questions. Why were audiences not told that COVID was all over this building? Why were we not given the option to leave for our own safety – or, at the very least, told that we might want to mask up? And from a separate, quality-control POV, there was the fact that someone had decided that having the leading actor reading words from a script was an acceptable artistic choice for a professional theatrical production.

To her credit, Vintage Theatre interim Executive Director Margaret Norwood admits that “these are all good questions and, in retrospect, I don’t really have any good answers. It’s possible that we didn’t fully think through all of the issues.”

These are hard times and hard questions with no easy answers. No one wants a single performance to be canceled. And Vintage is hardly alone in the struggle. Recently, Curious Theatre canceled the opening of its current comedy, “Franklinland.” Backstage COVID nearly wiped out the Arvada Center’s “Into the Woods” before it even opened. The DCPA Theatre Company hired an emergency replacement for an actor in “Much Ado Without Nothing” with COVID. Town Hall Arts Center canceled a weekend of “Once on This Island.” Really, these are brutal decisions most every arts organization is having to make.

But COVID has been wreaking so much havoc on the making of our productions for so long, we seem to be at the point now where just getting a show on stage these days is winning.

But is the audience losing? The prevailing wisdom should be:“If we can’t put up a good show to our highest artistic standards, and do it safely – then we just won’t do it.”

Shouldn’t it?

This latest COVID uptick, Norwood said, caught the folks at Vintage by surprise, even though two of Colorado’s most prominent residents – Gov. Jared Polis and Denver Nuggets star Nikola Jokic – were in the headlines with positive cases. Without reliable, organized testing in place anymore, Norwood said, no one is on the same page right now. Vintage’s current policy says is that the company will shut down only when there are six simultaneous positive COVID cases among cast and crew.

“It is very difficult to make informed decisions when each organization is doing their own thing, especially when we no longer have governmental guidelines,” she said. “But with so many possibilities for boosters now that weren’t available a year ago, I think there is a general feeling all around that people are more protected from severe illness.”

It is certainly both the right and responsibility of every individual to make their own decisions when it comes to determining their personal acceptable risk of COVID exposure. But Norwood agreed that, in this case, Vintage did not give its audiences all of the information to make an informed decision whether to stay or go that Saturday night.

First-time Vintage director Mykai Eastman, who is not otherwise a member of the Vintage leadership team, said he was ultimately given the decision whether to cancel the second weekend of “Dot” performances. Of course the director is going to want to find a way for the show to go on. “We worked really hard on this show, we are proud to bring this story to the people of Denver, and the actors deserve to have their run,” said Eastman, who added, “If even one person told me they felt unsafe, I would have had no problem shutting it down. But no one did.”

If Vintage were to cancel even one night of sold-out performances, it would lose about $6,000 in ticket revenue, which can be catastrophic for any small company. Both Norwood and Eastman emphasized that if wrong decisions were made here, they were driven by creative pride, not lost revenue.

“The decision we made was not about money,” Norwood said. “If we made a mistake, it was in trying to be as supportive of our artists as we can be. And I will concede that might have been the wrong choice here. But as a leader, you make the choice that feels right at the time, you live with it, and you learn from it.”

We all should learn from it. Because this is not yet over. Not by a long shot.