The Belgrade Theatre in Coventry have been forced to suspend performances of their pantomime, Beauty and the Beast, due to a number of company members testing positive for Covid-19.

A statement has been issued by the theatre this afternoon:

“Despite extremely robust safety measures being in place and the back-up of understudy actors, we’re incredibly sad to say that some of our Panto company have recently tested positive for Covid. This means that we have to suspend live performances and we know we will not able to restart live performances of Beauty and the Beast until Saturday 18 December at the earliest.

“Our Box Office team are currently contacting the ticketholders for affected performances. All other performances are still scheduled to continue as planned, so if you have tickets for a performance outside of the affected dates, there’s no need to contact Box Office or take any further action.

“Knowing this would always be a risk during the ongoing pandemic, we have taken the precaution of creating a professionally filmed version of our Beauty and the Beast production. We intend to screen this filmed version to audiences at the Theatre from Friday 10 December, in place of the planned live performances.

“We will continue to keep our audiences informed of any other changes throughout the run of panto via email and our social media channels, should the need arise.

“Performances of Santa’s Magical Mystery Guest and A Christmas Carol in B2 are unaffected and will proceed as planned. We look forward to welcoming audiences back to our Main Stage when Beauty and the Beast performances resume.

“We’d like to sincerely thank our audiences for their patience and understanding and know they will want us to send their best wishes to the Panto Company.”

We had the pleasure of being at the press night of Beauty and the Beast, with the performance earning four stars from us. Show the team at the Belgrade some support when back up and running, Besties.