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“I even built a website so I’d have something proper to send in. It’s great that the pandemic has given me the time to work harder and smarter on my new EP than ever before, but I play music because I love doing live shows and it feels … really bad not being able to do that.”
In July, Kelsey Verzotti and Jacob Sheffield, two Toronto-based musical theatre performers, launched an online store to market the offstage talents of their peers who, like them, lost their livelihoods due to COVID-19.
Called SideBiz, the site boasts an eclectic catalogue, including vintage clothing, handmade soaps, intuitive line art, clay and leather earrings, as well as intangibles like “love coaching” and hypnosis recordings for actors.
“The idea definitely came out of the pandemic,” Verzotti said. “The pandemic gave us the opportunity to just go for this and spend a lot of time on it, which I don’t think would have happened with our old go, go, go busy lifestyle.”
The pandemic gave us the opportunity to just go for this and spend a lot of time on it
Derrick Chua, a theatre producer, lawyer and director of the Actors Fund of America, said COVID has been an “unmitigated disaster” for people dependent on now-shuttered theatres and concert venues. For them, CRB will have “a huge impact,” he said.
But that impact, he said, wouldn’t necessarily be on creative output.
“An individual artist would be able to receive a maximum $13,000 in CRB payments. It’s certainly not chump change, but is it going to allow for a lot of impossible work to be created? Maybe, but I wouldn’t want to suggest that any artist who receives CRB but does not create anything in this time is somehow less than another who was able to write a play or record an album.
