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“The show must go on” may be one of entertainment’s most famous sayings, but for children’s theater, raising the curtain is never more important than protecting kids. “The safety of children is the number one thing,” Ryan French told Billboard. French has served as managing director of Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis for the past year.

Because of that priority, even before U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement launched its controversial Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota during early 2026, the theater had already started preparing for the possibility of immigration enforcement actions nearby. “We had all our protocols in place on how to read warrants and deal with anyone that would have come specifically to the theater,” French explained, referring to procedures designed to protect the children and families inside the building.

In January, however, the situation escalated far beyond anything the theater expected. Seventeen days after Renée Good was shot and killed by ICE agents roughly one mile away from the theater, another Minnesota resident, Alex Pretti, was fatally shot by ICE agents only two blocks from the Children’s Theatre Company. Like Good, Pretti reportedly appeared to pose no threat to officers.

“That’s when it became very, very real,” French said. With children attending Saturday classes inside the theater at the time of the shooting, staff decided the safest choice was to keep everyone inside the building while finishing the scheduled shows. “Then when their parents came to pick them up, we canceled the rest of the day,” he explained. Sunday’s programming was also canceled. “The National Guard was coming in to basically cordon off the neighborhood so we couldn’t have had a show if we wanted to.”

In total, six performances of Go, Dog. Go! • Ve Perro ¡Ve!, a bilingual production based on the beloved children’s book, were canceled. But the long term impact stretched well beyond those immediate closures. With ICE activity continuing across the Twin Cities following the deaths of two U.S. citizens in public, attendance collapsed. “People canceled, school groups chose not to come,” French explained. “Most people just said, ‘We’re not coming downtown.’”

The decline in attendance carried into March and affected the theater’s next production, Dinosaur World Live. “We saw dramatic decreases in both shows,” French said. “We expect between 65 to 85 percent of a house filled for our shows at that time of year, and we saw numbers around 40 percent, almost half of what we would expect.”

Early financial estimates placed the theater’s losses for January and February around $230,000, but the projected damage has now climbed to approximately $430,000. While French acknowledged it is impossible to attribute every dollar lost directly to one single incident, he noted that Go, Dog. Go! • Ve Perro ¡Ve! had originally been on pace to meet its financial goals before Pretti was killed nearby and attendance immediately dropped.

Beyond the financial damage to the nearly 60 year old theater company, which operates in the second largest theater market per capita in the United States behind New York City, French says the emotional loss matters just as much. “For a school matinee, that second grader, that might be their first time seeing live theater,” he reflected while sitting in an office surrounded by children’s artwork and a “Hi Dad!” message written by one of his kids.

The Children’s Theatre Company is now hoping to offset some of the financial damage through its current production of The Wizard of Oz, which runs through June 14 and closes the organization’s season. French understands, however, that “mathematically impossible” odds remain when it comes to recovering the full $430,000 in losses.

Still, the company is pushing aggressively to maximize the production’s success. Directed by artistic director Rick Dildine, the theater’s lavish version of The Wizard of Oz has reportedly remained on track financially. French noted that the production benefits from decades of nostalgia and universal name recognition across generations.

“You enter the theater, and your heart is already filled with anticipation, and then it just bursts. It’s so beautiful and well done,” French said. He also pointed out that the stage production arrives shortly after the massive success of two blockbuster films based on the Broadway phenomenon Wicked. “For some kids, they don’t even know that there was a show before Wicked,” he joked. “You’ll hear parents say, ‘This is where that one reference in Wicked comes from.’”

With themes centered around self discovery, supporting others and finding the meaning of home, The Wizard of Oz feels especially meaningful at the end of such a difficult season for the theater. “I do think there’s an interesting and heartfelt parallel to what Minnesotans discovered about themselves, the strong internal drive that came out when they needed to get together to take care of their neighbors,” French said. “We need a little more humanity and fewer screens and isolation. I can’t think of a better way than live theater to have that happen.”