2021 Season

Can you hear the Belgians whooping?! The Packer fans hooting?! The lumberjacks hollering?! That’s right: we at Northern Sky are beside ourselves with excitement. At long last, we are able to confirm what we’ve long hoped: that we will be presenting original musicals in person this summer, both under the stars at Peninsula State Park and indoors at the Gould Theater. Performances at the Park will run from June 14 to September 18, and performances at the Gould will run from July 12 to November 6. Hip, hip, hooray!

We’re not yet prepared to announce the shows we’ll be presenting. But in the coming weeks, we’ll be firming up (and sharing with you) show titles, safety protocols, and ticket sales information.

And today, we’re pleased to announce that we’ll kick off this season May 30 with Raise the Curtain: Take a Leap! It’ll be a full day of virtual merriment and music, culminating in the world premiere of Not Even Remotely, Northern Sky’s very first show of our 2021 season. (Note: this gala day, including Not Even Remotely, will be virtual–but all day, we’ll be celebrating the rest of the season, which begins in person on June 14!)

This year’s Raise the Curtain will be chock-full of the kinds of things we’ve all come to love from our past year of online gatherings: Northern Sky Fashion Spy! An online Marketplace! Northern Sky Boxes from Door County Delivered! And banter, music, and bakery on The Jeff & Katie Show. But this time around, we’ll have the joy of knowing we’re opening an in-person season any minute (and we’ll tell you all about it!). And at the end of the day, we’ll be premiering a brand-new Northern Sky show, Not Even Remotely, by Richard Carsey and Stephen Kovacs–and afterward, we’ll have a one-night-only After Party with the show’s creators and cast.

Sign up now. Take a leap!

So stay tuned, and start counting down the days. We cannot wait to see you again.

We know you are eager to hear what Northern Sky has in store for this summer and fall. Trust us, we feel that way, too! The good news is, we’re getting closer all the time to knowing what Northern Sky’s 2021 season will look like—and more importantly, to being able to tell you.

Here’s what we do know:

This past month we have put together a scenario that we now have in the works for getting us back up and going in the amphitheater at Peninsula State Park and in our brand-new indoor Gould Theater. As soon as we get permission from Actors’ Equity and a thumbs-up from the DNR, we’ll be able to announce our intended season and start selling tickets. That’s how close we are!

The good news is that Actors’ Equity has revised its guidelines to include having a safety plan in place contingent on the company being “fully vaccinated.” We are hoping this will streamline the process for getting approval for our season and lessen the mitigation requirements that would otherwise be in place.

Dear Northern Sky Fans,

Normally, at this time, we’d be in the throes of season planning. One year ago, we were hard at work on lining up all the details for our ambitious 2020 season. It was to have included ten shows playing in both the park and at the Gould concurrently. Little did we know what would be before us by the time March hit.

And so now here we are, faced yet again with the uncertainties of what it will mean for any large gatherings to take place safely, making theater-planning a continual guessing game.

We keep asking ourselves the same questions:
1) When will it be safe enough for us to gather?
2) What can we reasonably expect to program?
3) How will we make sure that safety is in place for everyone involved—audience, volunteers, staff, artists?
4) How quickly will the vaccine be effective in giving us all more assurance that large gatherings are safer than they’ve been for the past year?

And, of course, all of these questions’ answers are, at this point, still unknowable.

So . . . what DO we know?

We know that we can’t present what we had intended to do in 2020 for this upcoming season for multiple reasons:
1) It was highly ambitious, and even at this early date we know that we can’t move forward with it.
2) The actor’s union isn’t allowing in-person performances of musicals yet. 
3) Right now, the state is only allowing 50 people to gather together in the park.

All of this added together means the 2020 season as planned is not possible.

We know that we are not cancelling the upcoming season.  Certainly not now before we learn a lot more. And our hope is that what we learn is that the vaccine is working and people are able to gather, at least in some fashion better than is currently possible. And if we can gather, we want to have something to share with you.

We know, from having experimented a bunch this past year, that we can be quite nimble and inventive. So, we’re exploring all kinds of options for a possible season: 
1) Presenting concert shows
2) The Jeff and Katie Show performed live
3) New material being written for the moment with safety protocols in mind.

Believe me, we’ve got our thinking caps on.

We know that presenting shows in our indoor Gould Theater this summer will be the biggest challenge we might face because even more safety issues would apply. Like every other theater in the country, we are keeping our fingers crossed, waiting to see how things unfold.

We know that announcing anything right now would lend itself to needing to be unannounced until we know more. Again, we’ll need clearance from the state, at minimum, to be in the park. And, again, so much depends on how quickly the vaccines take hold.

We hope you’ve been taking in our winter season (first ever!) and have been enjoying our social media presence. We are as creatively alive as ever. Trust me, no matter what happens, we’ll be in touch and we’ll all keep figuring this out together. We’re counting on you for that.

Be safe. We miss you.

Jeff Herbst, Artistic Director
Dave Maier, Managing Director