Broadway Visitors Find Other Games in Town

Last weekend, as Broadway’s strike talks resumed, there was a surge of optimism among theatergoers in New York and around the nation. When talks faltered on Sunday night, that optimism died.

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People planning to visit the city and take in a show had a new decision to make: Now that most of the shows they wanted to see were canceled, should they still come?

Some decided to cancel their holiday vacations, but many others, like Lysa M. Hetrick, 12, vowed to make the best of it and either get tickets to one of the shows still open or just find other things to do.

Lysa, a seventh grader from Scottsdale, Ariz., in the city until Saturday, was busy rehearsing for her chorus role in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, but she hoped to catch a few shows anyway. The ones she wanted to see most, “Legally Blonde,” “Hairspray,” “Chicago” and “A Chorus Line,” are all shuttered.

“I’m disappointed, but I guess I’ll find something else to do,” Lysa said. Her plans now include shopping, dinner, ice skating and the Rockettes.

Lysa’s mother, Maria D. Castro, 43, was disappointed, too.

“I’m wondering if we can afford to come up again,” said Ms. Castro, a doctor. “We’ve seen some of the traveling shows, but it’s not the same as being on Broadway; it’s not the caliber.”

Karen Thurm Safran, 45, from San Jose, Calif., had been over-the-moon ecstatic about the great seats she had obtained for herself and her two children to see “The Phantom of the Opera,” another one of the canceled shows.

“My son, when he was 8, used to walk around the house singing ‘Christine, Christine, you have to do your homework’ to the ‘Phantom’ music,” Ms. Safran said. “My kids were glued to the DVD of the movie.”

She got some financial gain from the strike. Ms. Safran asked the hotel to discount her reservation to match the current strike prices the hotel is charging and saved about 0. She said her family might go to watch the balloons get blown up for the parade.

“We’re trying to get tickets to the Rockettes, but we’ll be way up high in the nosebleed section,” she said.

Many people who have seen the headlines about the strike have missed the fact that eight Broadway shows remain open, said Chris Boneau, a spokesman for several Broadway and Off Broadway shows still running. Among the shows still playing are “Mary Poppins,” “Pygmalion” and “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.”

He said some Disney employees were staying outside the theaters where canceled Disney productions had been playing, giving advice to people on what they could do. Some people needed directions to bars and restaurants; others needed hugs.

Jef Furr, 51, senior vice president of Music Travel Consultants in Indianapolis, a company that books trips for performing groups, had his own headaches from the strike. He had organized trips by three groups of high school band students, who were coming to the East Coast to play in the Macy’s parade and in a parade in Philadelphia. The students were spending about 0 apiece on airfare, food, lodging and tickets to the Rockettes and “Legally Blonde.”

Watching the strike news, Mr. Furr sent a panicked e-mail message to his group sales agent to try to get the tickets exchanged. He was relieved to learn they would now see “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.”

“The funny thing is, one of the groups that was seeing ‘Legally Blonde,’ when the band director told his kids they were now going to see ‘Spelling Bee,’ the kids were more excited,” he said.

Evania G. Nichols, 47, had planned to fly in for the week with friends from Orlando, Fla. They had tickets for “Jersey Boys,” “Wicked” and “A Chorus Line,” all of them now closed.

“I was really on pins and needles this weekend when I thought they’d make a decision,” Ms. Nichols said of the negotiations. She eventually decided not to make the trip.

“During Thanksgiving, it’s so magical,” she said. “It’s one of those things you only do this time of year; it’s the whole deal.”

Ms. Nichols, who works in sales for Johnson & Johnson, estimated that she would have spent ,000 on tickets, hotel, dinner and transportation, not including the shopping she was planning to do. Instead, she made plans to meet friends in North Carolina.

“We’re going to watch the parade on TV and make horribly disgusting breakfast pastries, and we’ll be sad,” she said. “It’s such poor timing. They probably could have picked a time that would have sent a message without punishing so many people.”

Mr. Boneau was just looking forward to the end of the strike. “We’re going to all hold hands and sing ‘Kumbaya’ when this is all over.”

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