When I arrived in Orlando nearly 30 years ago, Central Florida’s tourism industry was in the middle of a monumental growth period which extended into the early aughts.
Back then, expansions at the Disney and Universal resorts symbiotically supported a slew of independent attractions along U.S.-192 and International Drive. Those entertainment employment opportunities subsequently enabled the theaters and art galleries that occupied downtown’s once-empty storefronts, fueling a creative community that was battered — but never entirely broken — by the post-9/11 collapse in tourism, as well as later downturns caused by the 2008 financial crisis and COVID-19.
As 2024 comes to a close, Orlando’s cultural life seems balanced on a knife’s edge between imminent collapse and a potential new renaissance.
On the one hand, next spring’s opening of Universal’s Epic Universe park is certain to bring worldwide attention to Central Florida’s attractions, which will hopefully help boost the entire local economy; we’re already seeing it spur development up and down neighboring I-Drive, from the remodeled Pointe Orlando to Icon Park’s under-construction Blue Man Group theater.
Never content to lose market share, Disney will unleash billions building new theme park lands, which should keep construction crews busy through the end of the decade.
However, at the same time that Orlando’s attractions are anticipating a boom, it feels like our arts and theater scenes are about to bust.
Over time, I’ve grown accustomed to bidding individual artists au revoir, but over this past year an unsettling number of entire institutions have announced their exits.
While there were some promising developments during 2024 — such as the opening of Sak Comedy Lab’s new home, or the approval of one for Blue Bamboo Center for the Arts — they were overshadowed by the shuttering of stages from Winter Garden’s Garden Theatre to Church Street’s Hamburger Mary’s.
And the hits will keep coming in early 2025, with the closure of Snap! Orlando, whose founder Patrick Kahn is terminally ill, and Orlando Fringe’s ArtSpace (a move I endorsed even before my spouse became Fringe’s co-leader).
While each venue is being vacated for a different reason, arts organizations of every kind have been experiencing inconsistent attendance and ever-escalating expenses.
Gov. Ron DeSantis’ vindictive veto of arts funding will only exacerbate budget woes, despite the best efforts of the TDT Fund and United Arts to fill the grant gap.
Simultaneously, the city has been waging a war on downtown nightlife, but doesn’t seem especially eager to incentivize filling the ever-increasing inventory of vacant bars with affordable arts venues; as a result, the space crunch for small-budget shows seems unlikely to improve in the immediate future.
And although I share everyone’s great expectations for Epic Universe, I also know from personal experience that entertainment jobs are always the first ones to be axed if a park’s profits don’t instantly exceed executives’ expectations … as was the case way back when Universal laid me off after Islands of Adventure’s underwhelming opening.
The bottom line is that I’m entering 2025 with serious shpilkes for those making their living in the creative arts — not to mention our country as a whole — especially in light of the incoming administration’s attitudes toward freedom of expression and workers’ rights.
That’s why I want to pass my final column inches of 2024 over to recently reelected Congressman Maxwell Alejandro Frost and Julie Su, the outgoing Acting Secretary of the Department of Labor, who held a private roundtable with local arts leaders last August on the Dr. Phillips Center’s Steinmetz Hall stage.
If I had a holiday wish, it would be for their words not to be forgotten after the inauguration:
“A lot of what people here are facing is a microcosm of what’s happening in the rest of the country, [and] we know that it’s a state in which the state Legislature and the governor have really pushed back on worker protections. So it’s important to come here and remind everybody in Florida that there’s a federal floor beneath which nobody should be forced to live and work, that applies to you,” said Su in August.
“I appreciate a personal passion [for the arts, but] just because something is done as a personal passion doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have all the [labor] protections. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to join a union. You should be able to have a living wage, real job security and a way to build a life around it.”
“The arts should be seen as labor, as work — good work — and as we fight for high-paid good jobs, the arts should be seen as part of that too,” added Frost. “This is a place where everyone should have a living wage. … Everybody deserves to be paid enough to be able to live, and artists are included in that. Art is work.”
“The arts are how people connect, how we reveal and test and express our humanity,” said Su. “In this moment, everybody in the arts could use a reminder of how desperately we need that.”
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This article appears in Dec 25-31, 2024.