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San Diego’s Wonderfront Calls Off November Festival, Citing COVID Surge
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Wonderfront Music & Arts Festival organizers will have to wait longer to show off the second edition of the San Diego festival. Organizers broke the news today that rather than announcing the lineup for the Nov. 19-21 event, Waterfront has been postponed to 2022. A press release points to the Delta variant causing “a skyrocketing surge of new Covid cases and hospitalizations in California and nationwide.”
The inaugural event in 2019 featured more than 125 artists playing across three stages including performances from Miguel, Ben Harper & The Innocent Criminals, Don Omar, STS9, Migos, Slightly Stoopid, Nicky Jam, MGMT, Big Gigantic and more. The three-day November 2019 festival welcomed more than 57,000 attendees. Waterfront 2020, like most events last year, was postponed because of the pandemic.
Thursday’s announcement says more information is to come but the new “anticipated dates” are November 18-20, 2022.
“The continued safety of the community had to be front and center in our decision making. We pushed as long as we could working with the Wonderfront Festival team to see if case trends might look more positive or new information would give us the comfort level needed to move forward,” Michael G. Brown, Port of San Diego’s vice president of marketing and communications, said in a statement. “But at the end of the day, the situation has not improved. Knowing that people book advance travel to attend, and production crews have months of logistical planning to do, a final decision needed to be made.”
Paul Thornton, Managing Partner of Wonderlust Events, LLC., added, “This announcement, though challenging, is met with understanding and appreciation for the Port of San Diego for providing us with such a spectacular venue for our festival,” said Paul Thornton, Managing Partner of Wonderlust Events, LLC. “We love our lineup, including major headliners who confirmed this year, and the Wonderfront team has been tirelessly working on the festival’s second year. We have some new fan experiences we were so excited to roll out. Our team completely understands the Port of San Diego’s decision, as the safety of the Wonderfront community must come first. Once again, we will pivot and work with our artists to push this lineup to our new 2022 dates. We’re hoping to finalize the new dates so we can announce them and put tickets on-sale this Fall. We are looking forward to building an even better experience and celebrating the world getting back together at Wonderfront 2022.”