At 5:10 p.m. ET on Thursday evening (May 1), Sara Landry’s agents got the call that would send their next three days into turmoil.
A rep from New York City venue Brooklyn Mirage was on the phone to say that Landry’s show at the club that night was canceled. The sold-out performance was meant to be Mirage’s first concert upon reopening after a months-long closure and extensive remodel, but the venue was forced to nix Landry’s show after building inspectors declined to grant the facility a permit to open.
Less than an hour after delivering this news to Landry’s team, Mirage posted an announcement explaining the situation to its hundreds of thousands of social media followers. The update was especially head-spinning for Landry’s team, given that they’d had dinner with Mirage operators the night prior and no one had mentioned there might be an issue.
“I had been paying very close attention and asking for lots of updates,” Landry tells Billboard of Mirage’s reopening. “Like ‘How are we looking? Is this going to happen?’ The response was, ‘We’re going to open; we have all the permits; everything’s on schedule.’ But when [the cancellation] happened, there was a part of me that was like, ‘Okay, this was a statistical possibility.’”
When the call came, Landry was in a 2026 planning meeting with her entire team at the WME office in Manhattan. Their meeting space quickly became, as Landry now calls it, “the situation room,” where she, her agents, her publicist and the rest of her team scrambled to find another venue for the DJ and the 6,000 people who were scheduled to see her at the Mirage that same evening. It was a situation they’d repeat the next day when The Mirage announced it also could not open on Friday (May 2), effectively canceling Landry’s second show at the venue. (Additional opening weekend shows by party brand CityFox and South African producer Black Coffee were also cancelled, and Brooklyn Mirage has since announced that its reopening is delayed “indefinitely.”)
“Obviously, opening the Mirage was a big deal for us, especially coming out of such a massive Coachella,” says Tracey Manner, Landry’s publicist and founder of PR agency Sequel. “We had been working on things to make this another moment for her.”
The Mirage was meant to host the New York debut of a large-scale show called Eternalism that the hard techno producer and her team had spent the last year creating, which made its U.S. debut last month at Coachella’s Sahara tent and which by Thursday was set up inside the Mirage for a performance that, as it turned out, was never going to happen.
By the time Manner got the cancellation update and left another meeting to join the team at WME, she says, “Sara had eight agents in the room, everyone on a call with another venue, talking to legal, talking about ticketing with Dice, about how this could all work. WME pulled into one room… and every single person pulled out their own version of expertise.”
“There was never going to be an option where I sat in my hotel room without doing anything, knowing that thousands of people spent money in this economy to buy tickets and fly in,” says Landry.
While Landry’s agents, Bailey Greenwood and Annie Chung, along with other WME agents, including the agency’s head of electronic music Stephanie LaFera, worked the phones, Landry and Manner strategized on messaging. They decided it was important to post videos of Landry explaining the situation, so fans could see and hear her, a move they knew would humanize the situation.
“We talked about getting things across as clearly as possible and not getting stuck in anything about the Mirage,” says Manner. “We were always going to take the high road.”
“The key piece is always being transparent,” says Greenwood. “In the absence of information, people tend to start creating their own narratives or spinning out, and so it was important for us to update people as we went along and say, ‘This is what we know right now. This is what’s feasible.’ Fans were so receptive to Sara being the face of trying to make something happen.”
Within an hour of getting the news of the Thursday cancellation, Landry posted a video of herself to her social media accounts explaining that she and her team were working on solutions. An hour after that, the WME team had secured the Brooklyn Storehouse for a show that would happen the following day, Friday (May 2). Landry went back on social media and posted another video explaining that Brooklyn Mirage Thursday ticketholders would have their original tickets refunded by Mirage and receive an email with tickets to the Brooklyn Storehouse show.
Not long after, Landry posted another video saying she and her team had also secured Knockdown Center in Queens for a show that night, Thursday (May 1). Anyone, whether they had a Mirage ticket or not, could RSVP for free to this show, with Landry requesting that people who lived in New York skip this Thursday night set and go to the Friday show at Storehouse, to prioritize people who’d traveled to New York for the Thursday event. By this point, it was impossible for the Eternalism production to be moved to either venue, necessitating a much sparer set-up for these shows.
While Landry’s team pondered canceling Landry’s Friday night show at the Mirage while they were reconfiguring her Thursday performance, this wasn’t possible due to contracting, meaning they had to wait to find out if Friday’s show would be canceled, which it ultimately was. When this Friday cancellation happened, Landry’s team was able to add two more shows at Knockdown, one on Friday night and the other on Saturday afternoon (May 3), to accommodate the roughly 6,000 Mirage ticketholders at the 3,100 capacity Knockdown.
Meanwhile, the team combed through emails to prioritize getting tickets to the Thursday show to people who needed to see it that night, including those who’d traveled to New York and could only stay in the city for one day (this included a couple who’d received Thursday night tickets as a wedding gift). As the WME team was working through the complicated process of getting new tickets sent out through Dice, Manner was responding to comments on social media to help clarify the situation.
“We all split up the tasks and called different people, purely based on everyone’s relationships and who we could probably get the quickest answer from,” says Greenwood. “For example, Knockdown Center did the two shows with Sara last year and have booked her for years, so it was honestly a really great moment for them to have her back, and they were heroes.”
Chung, Greenwood and the team were cognizant, however, of the organization required when relocating thousands of people to a new venue. They note that most city “takeovers” by artists, which find acts playing myriad venues over a couple of days, typically take months of planning.
“When you do a pop-up at that capacity and scope, there’s always the chance that it can do more harm than good in terms of creating chaos and sending people to a venue that can’t withstand the demand,” says Chung. “For us, it was springing into action to figure out a game plan that made it possible for everyone who was planning to see Sara to safely see her.”
Greenwood also nods to the strength of the local dance music community in having Knockdown Center and Brooklyn Storehouse fully staffed and ready in terms of lighting and sound with just hours’ notice. Ultimately, Landry played the pop-up show at Knockdown Center on Thursday night, the Friday early evening show at Brooklyn Storehouse, then another show later that night at Knockdown Center and another Knockdown Center show on Saturday, performing for 15,000 people altogether over the weekend — a number exceeding the 12,000 she’d been scheduled to play for at Mirage — all of whom were admitted free of charge.
The artists who’d flown in to be her support acts at the Mirage, Amsterdam-based producer Diøn and French artist Shlømo, both also got to play, as did the local support acts who’d been booked on the Mirage bills. The financial elements of the entire weekend are still being worked through by WME and the various venues involved. (Typically, with these types of cancellations, the venue is on the hook for paying 100% of the artist fee.)
Landry adds that “obviously I wanted nothing more than to go through with things at The Mirage, and I know for a fact that the Mirage team wanted nothing more than for that to go ahead. They had so many people on the ground that were working hard and passionately to bring their vision to life. I think that, unfortunately, sometimes the construction gods are not on your side and sometimes the bureaucracy gods are just not on your side. Stuff can always go wrong.”
While New York has yet to see Eternalism, Landry says, “I did give them four crazy underground type sets, so I think they were happy.” (She ultimately DJ-ed for nine hours over the weekend, and when we talk on Tuesday morning, she’s planted in bed, where she’s been since Sunday, intermittently napping, eating artichoke pizza, scrolling TikTok and watching Hacks.)
Greenwood, Chung and Manner all agree the vibe was extra special at the Storehouse and Knockdown shows, with the cheers a bit louder and longer, as people seemed grateful just to be in the room.
“It definitely felt extra special for us,” Greenwood says. “This was really a stress test. Cancellations happen; production stuff happens. This is where our training and expertise are the most important, in how quickly can you pivot.”
