Cast a pall is a good phrase for this. Pall of course coming from "pallor", something of a visual mask or something that obscures by, for instance, smoke or fog; diminishes the clear image. We wondered what the government regulation was that cast this pall, we are wondering this morning about communication. In this time of instant contact, e-mail blasts, IM on countless cells, Twitter, well you name it, we live in a village that has none. We, the residents do. But it appears we are on the end of a broken line that starts with the "government regulations" and ends with a good soul wandering through the crowd announcing in a nice, clear voice that there were no fireworks.
Perhaps the role of "town crier" should be revisited and that a clearly visible kiosk would be apropos - and not the pink tinged monolith in front of a firehouse that goes off line at night. It would be charming actually. "Eight o'clock and all is well and there will be no fireworks tonight due to government regulations". We can hear it now.
Armed with the news, we could find out what government regulations required cancelling this event. We could address the issue of who didn't do what that caused the government regulations to spring into effect. Perhaps we could find the government regulator who stood there at 8pm and said "no. not tonight. no how. no way".
Anyway, the pall was caste by the crier in waiting and we don't know what happened except that it didn't.