After Losing $430,000 in the Wake of ICE Killings, A Minneapolis Children’s Theater Heads to ‘Oz’ for a Comeback: ‘We Need a Little More Humanity’

“The show must go on” might be an oft-repeated adage in showbiz, but when it comes to children’s theater, the curtain rising is not the top priority. “The safety of children is the number one thing,” Ryan French, who has served as managing director at Minneapolis’ Children’s Theatre Company (CTC) for the last year, tells Billboard.

To that end, even before the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s controversial Operation Metro Surge hit Minnesota in early 2026, the theater “had been preparing for what could be some form of immigration enforcement” in Minneapolis. “We had all our protocols in place on how to read warrants and deal with anyone that would have come specifically to the theater,” explains French, who oversees administrative and operational duties at the CTC.

In January, however, the situation escalated far beyond what anyone expected. Seventeen days after Renée Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent a mile away from the theater, another Minnesotan, Alex Pretti, was shot and killed by ICE agents just two blocks from the children’s theater – despite, like Good before him, seeming to pose no threat to ICE agents.

“That’s when it became very, very real,” says French. With children inside the theater for Saturday classes when Pretti was killed, “we made the decision to continue with the shows where the kids were safest in the building. Then when their parents came to pick them up, we canceled the rest of the day.” Sunday’s slate of programming was scuttled, too. “The National Guard was coming in to basically cordon off the neighborhood so we couldn’t have had a show if we wanted to.”

All in all, six performances of Go, Dog. Go! • Ve Perro ¡Ve! — a bilingual show based on a popular children’s book — were canceled outright, but the incident’s impact persisted well beyond the days the theater went dark. With ICE still swarming the streets of the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota) after killing two U.S. citizens in broad daylight, attendance plummeted. “People canceled, school groups chose not to come,” French explains. “Most people just said, ‘We’re not coming downtown.’”

The drop in ticket sales continued into March, affecting the theater’s next production, Dinosaur World Live, as well. “We saw dramatic decreases in both shows,” French says. “We expect between 65 to 85% of a house filled for our shows at that time of year, and we saw numbers around 40%, almost half of what we would expect.”

Initial estimates placed the CTC’s loss at $230,000 for the period of January and February, but the theater’s estimated loss has soared to $430,000 since then. While French acknowledges you “can’t attribute all of that to necessarily a single incident or single presence,” he points out that Go, Dog. Go! • Ve Perro ¡Ve! had been on track to earn its financial goals until Pretti was killed two blocks from the theater, causing an immediate drop in attendance.

Aside from lost income for the six-decade-old children’s theater, which serves the second-largest theater-company-per-capita market after New York City, French bemoans the lost experiences. “For a school matinee, that second grader, that might be their first time seeing live theater,” muses the father of two, surrounded by children’s drawings and a “Hi Dad!” message from one of his kids on a whiteboard.

The CTC is hoping to overperform economically with its current production of The Wizard of Oz, which is on stage through June 14 and closes out the current season. But French is well aware that, ruby slipper miracles notwithstanding, it is “mathematically impossible for us to remake all $430,000 of earlier missed goals.”

Still, the CTC is pursuing “aggressive goals” for the show, a glitzy, crowd-pleasing production directed by CTC artistic director Rick Dildine—and luckily, they are on track to hit their revenue goals for it. Naturally, it helps that The Wizard of Oz is a production with built-in nostalgia and cross-generational name recognition.

“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 says. Plus, The Wizard of Oz is hitting the stage in the wake of not one but two blockbuster films based on the Broadway smash Wicked. “For some kids, they don’t even know that there was a show before Wicked,” he laughs. “You’ll hear parents say, ‘This is where that one reference in Wicked comes from.’”

With its emphasis on self-discovery, supporting other people’s dreams and the importance of home, The Wizard of Oz arrives as a fitting finale for the theater’s exceptionally difficult season. “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 says when asked of the connection. “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.”