Five years after COVID-19 forced the statewide shutdown of public entertainment, it’s mostly curtains on the big blackout.

Want to see your favorite Hawaii entertainers? Check their websites. They’re working somewhere.

A crowd recently gathered for an evening of Hawaiian music by Kawika Kahiapo to mark the 17th anniversary of the Outrigger Reef Waikiki Beach Resort’s poolside Kana Ka Pila Grille. The entire weekend was sold out when The Actors’ Group opened “My Name Is Asher Lev” at the Brad Powell Theatre on Friday.

Kumu Kahua also is expecting a sold-out opening for the “The Magic of Polly Amnesia” on Thursday.

The Hawaii Shakespeare Festival anticipates getting closer to where it was before COVID-19 with the 2025 season opening July 11 with R. Kevin Garcia Doyle directing “Comedy of Errors” at The ARTS at Marks Garage.

The Blue Note Hawaii and the Hawaii Theatre Center are back to full force with everything from stand-up comics and “legacy acts” to Na Hoku Hanohano Award-­winning Hawaiian music stars, reggae and jazz. Andy Bumatai and Augie T are partnering for a Mother’s Day brunch at the Blue Note, and Joe Moore and Pat Sajak will co-star in “Prescription: Murder” at the Hawaii Theatre opening July 31; Moore and Sajak are donating all proceeds to the theater.

Kapena — the family group of Kelly “Kelly Boy” De Lima, son Kapena De Lima and daughters Kalenaku and Lilo — has returned to performing full time in Waikiki and elsewhere. De Lima and his daughters also are teaching again at the Kapena School of Music in Kaneohe.

None of this was guaranteed when Honolulu went dark, and venues like Diamond Head Theatre were especially hard-hit. The theater’s Hawaii-premier production of “The Bodyguard” — with Broadway veteran Lindsay Roberts guest-starring as Rachel Marron — was two days away from opening when plans were disrupted by COVID-19 lockdowns.

DHT Artistic Director John Rampage said, “Initially it was only going to be two weeks, and then it was a month. We had Lindsay here. I kept asking her, ‘Can you stay a little longer if it comes back?’”

But, he said, they soon realized that “it wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, and everything would be on hold for a long time.”

Roberts returned home to New York, the cast disbanded and the historic theater was shuttered. Rampage and DHT Executive Director Deena Dray began looking for alternatives — “not necessarily to make money, but to keep the name of Diamond Head Theater in people’s minds.”

“There was no long-term plan because nobody knew what to plan for,” Rampage says. “So we took the Shooting Stars (students) online on Zoom. Then we came up with the idea of doing the Sunset Concerts in the (theater) parking lot — which nobody expected to become the huge success that it was. It was initially going to be for four Fridays, but we ended up going from July until November every week.”

Survival mode

Five years post-COVID-19, DHT Executive Director Trevor Tamashiro is using annual audience surveys to learn which shows DHT’s core audiences want to see; one of the top choices in the 2024 survey, “Les Miserables,” has been scheduled for the 2025-2026 season.

Honolulu’s other major community theater groups also learned lessons from their COVID-19 struggles.

Eric Nemoto, TAG’s founder and president, recalls COVID-19 as “one of the greatest challenges TAG had faced in its 27-year history.”

“Because TAG had endured so many growing pains over the years, we didn’t fear it,” Nemoto said.”Like the things we endured before, we knew that if we just methodically thought out and planned our way through, we would make it through, and we did.”

Nemoto said TAG endured shutting down for in-person plays by surviving on its reserves and new grants.

“We did have some online productions to keep the momentum going, but they didn’t really bring in any real income,” he said.

When indoor productions were banned during COVID-19, Kumu Kahua Managing Director Donna Blanchard initially planned to move her group’s revival production of “The Conversion of Ka‘ahumanu” to the park adjacent to the Kumu Kahua Theatre on Merchant Street, but the logistics proved challenging and cast members still worried about possible exposure to the virus.

Kumu Kahua eventually presented the show in two online performances in August 2020, which paved the way for a larger commitment to online programming.

Blanchard is now “cautiously optimistic” about Kumu Kahua’s future.

“We’re still going through recovery. We came back to a very different Chinatown, and for a while we had to hire security, which was a big chunk of money that was not a part of our (pre-­pandemic) budget,” she said. “We’re not back to pre-COVID numbers of ticket and subscription buyers, so we are still watching our pennies and working with a smaller budget to try to get ourselves back to whatever the true new normal is going to shake out to be.”

Lessons learned

Entertainers and entertainment companies and venues throughout Hawaii still draw on lessons learned during the pandemic to shape their future.

The Hawaii Shakespeare Festival’s founder Tony Pisculli had several months to prepare for a full season of live Zoom theater in the summer of 2020. By the time the third show of the season, “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” opened on Aug. 14, 2020, the cast included online actors from three mainland states as well as in Hawaii, and their performances were supported with visual effects and animation that would not have been possible in a traditional live, in-theater production.

“It was important to us to do something as close to theater as we could pull off over the internet,” Pisculli said. “We saw the challenge of COVID as an opportunity to do what we could in the face of adversity.”

With no revenue coming in, Hawaii Theatre President and CEO Gregory Dunn had to lay off almost the entire staff.

“We wound up being shut down for 22 consecutive months, and during that period we provided over 350 livestream broadcasts that reached millions of people around the world,” Dunn said.

Hawaii’s entertainers — singers, musicians, comedians — shared their music online to bolster spirits and to make money during the lockdowns. Singer/­keyboardist Jeannette Tre­vias went on Facebook Live one day a week — and then two, and then three, and then with Johnny Valentine as a weekly guest.

Lehua Kalima Alvarez made a commitment to post a new song on Facebook daily; she also partnered with Shawn Pimental for a live weekly show where they played audience requests.

Hoku Zuttermeister took requests for classic Hawaiian and hapa haole songs while he sang and played in his backyard. Sunway Sunwei gathered her band members for a full-length concert outdoors with each performer positioned more than 6 feet away from the others.

Bryan Tolentino previewed his new album online. Kristian Lei introduced a COVID-19-themed parody of Keith Whitley’s 1986 hit, “Ten Feet Away” she titled “Six Feet Away.” Violinist Duane Padilla used split-screen technology to become a one-man violin quartet.

When Kapena went from working full time to working no time, the group started doing twice-weekly concerts in “Kelly Boy” De Lima’s living room.

“After working for 20-plus years in Waikiki, we had to feel that we were doing something,” De Lima said. “I would get ready, take a shower, come out, put my jewelry on, put my wedding ring on, put on my aloha shirt.”

He said he also put on cologne, which was part of his routine.

“My kids would go, ‘Dad, you don’t have to put on cologne. This is not smell-o-vision,’” said De Lima, who said he thought it was important to treat his home venue like a hotel gig.