After Losing $430,000 in the Wake of ICE Killings, A Minneapolis Children’s Theater Heads to ‘Oz’ for a Comeback: ‘We Need a Little More Humanity’
Categoria: Musica
The Children's Theatre Company endured a season far more challenging than anyone could have anticipated.
Por Billboard | 19/05/2026
“The show must go on” might be an oft-repeated adage in showbiz, but when it comes to children’s theater, the curtain rising is not the top priority. “The safety of children is the number one thing,” Ryan French, who has served as managing director at Minneapolis’ Children’s Theatre Company (CTC) for the last year, tells Billboard . To that end, even before the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s controversial Operation Metro Surge hit Minnesota in early 2026, the theater “had been preparing for what could be some form of immigration enforcement” in Minneapolis. “We had all our protocols in place on how to read warrants and deal with anyone that would have come specifically to the theater,” explains French, who oversees administrative and operational duties at the CTC. In January, however, the situation escalated far beyond what anyone expected. Seventeen days after Renée Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent a mile away from the theater, another Minnesotan, Alex Pretti, was shot and killed by ICE agents just two blocks from the children’s theater – despite, like Good before him, seeming to pose no threat to ICE agents. “That’s when it became very, very real,” says French. With children inside the theater for Saturday classes when Pretti was killed, “we made the decision to continue with the shows where the kids were safest in the building. Then when their parents came to pick them up, we canceled the rest of the day.” Sunday’s slate of programming was scuttled, too. “The National Guard was coming in to basically cordon off the neighborhood so we couldn’t have had a show if we wanted to.” All in all, six performances of Go, Dog. Go! • Ve Perro ¡Ve! — a bilingual show based on a popular children’s book — were canceled outright, but the incident’s impact persisted well beyond the days the theater went dark. With ICE still swarming the streets of the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota) after killing two U.S. citizens in broad daylight, attendance plummeted. “People canceled, school groups chose not to come,” French explains. “Most people just said, ‘We’re not coming downtown.’” The drop in ticket sales continued into March, affecting the theater’s next production, Dinosaur World Live , as well. “We saw dramatic decreases in both shows,” French says. “We expect between 65 to 85% of a house filled for our shows at that time of year, and we saw numbers around 40%, almost half of what we would expect.” Initial estimates placed the CTC’s loss at $230,000 for the period of January and February, but the theater’s estimated loss has soared to $430,000 since then. While French acknowledges you “can’t attribute all of that to necessarily a single incident or single presence,” he points out that Go, Dog. Go! • Ve Perro ¡Ve! had been on track to earn its financial goals until Pretti was killed two blocks from the theater, causing an immediate drop in attendance. Aside from lost income for the six-decade-old childr