Marc Kirschner, the co-founder of Marquee TV, an arts-oriented streaming service that launched in February, gets the question all the time: “People have been asking us when we were going to have ‘Hamilton.’”

His answer: “Well, if we had ‘Hamilton,’ we would change our name to The Streaming Platform That Has ‘Hamilton.’”

The platform that does have Lin-Manuel Miranda’s blockbuster is Disney+, which paid about $75 million for the live capture that premieres on July 3. (In what surely must be a coincidence, Disney+ has dropped its free trial period.)

While watching theater on a screen now feels a bit weird, live telecasts were common in the 1950s and early 1960s, when programs like Playhouse 90, Studio One and The U. S. Steel Hour displayed the work of the finest playwrights, directors and actors.

ADVERTISEMENT

Continue reading the main story


Sponsored Video
Sponsored by Advertising Partner
Some of them are even streamable. Amazon Prime, for example, offers a 1957 telecast of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, once Broadway’s royal couple, starring in “The Great Sebastians.”

What about other options? While the state of theater streaming is in perpetual flux, here are answers to the most common questions. Be warned, however, that “Hamilton” is an outlier among Broadway hits.


Image
Imelda Staunton, center, as Momma Rose in “Gypsy.”
Imelda Staunton, center, as Momma Rose in “Gypsy.”
Credit...Johan Persson
I love musicals. Where do I find them online?
Here’s one genre where there is actually a lot out there. The websites Filmed on Stage and Thespie can help point you to many of them, such as the West End production of “Gypsy,” starring Imelda Staunton and available to buy or rent on Amazon, iTunes and YouTube. Musicals are a portion of the long-running PBS Great Performances series, while Netflix lists popular properties as different as “Shrek the Musical” and “Springsteen on Broadway.” HBO will present the Spike Lee capture of “David Byrne’s American Utopia” later this year.

I don’t want to spend time hunting for those shows, though. Aren’t there one-stop shops?
Yes, and to nobody’s surprise the popularity of subscription-based platforms has increased in recent months. The closest thing to a Netflix for theater is BroadwayHD, which has about 300 titles in its catalog, from hits like “Kinky Boots” to vintage nuggets, including Lee J. Cobb reprising his Willy Loman in a 1966 CBS telecast of “Death of a Salesman.” The British-American Marquee TV is another service that offers all-you-can-watch for a weekly, monthly or annual fee. (Broadway On Demand is a newcomer in this market, and while its original interview programming seems promising, its high-profile stage offerings are underwhelming so far.)

Editors’ Picks

The Reality Behind ‘Below Deck’

The Day the White Working Class Turned Republican

What Do You Do When Extremism Comes for the Hawaiian Shirt?
Continue reading the main story

ADVERTISEMENT

Continue reading the main story

Why aren’t all the big Broadway shows available for streaming?
Video recording a show is up to individual producers. And they have tended to pass on the opportunity for two main reasons: cost, and the fear that streaming will cannibalize ticket sales. “To do what ‘Hamilton’ did would require a real outlay of cash from the producers,” said Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League. That show’s three lead producers, who have made fortunes from it, financed the filming themselves; for others, a multicamera investment can be prohibitive.

And then there is the paperwork.

“We secure all the permissions from the creative teams, the producers, the theater companies, all of the casts,” said Patrick Hoffman, director of the Theater on Film and Tape Archive at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. “Everyone has to sign an agreement authorizing us to come and video-record a production in its entirety.” And, of course, there must be an agreement with the unions, which Hoffman handles via the Coalition of Broadway Unions and Guilds.

That public library archive must be a treasure trove. How do I watch?
It is indeed a bounty: 5,000 live theater performances covering the last 50 years. But they are only viewable in person, with a New York City library card, which limits access considerably. A new agreement will let a librarian screen tapes in local schools and colleges. For now, obviously, both the performing-arts library and schools remain closed.

What about those National Theater and Royal Shakespeare Company captures? There are so many, and with big stars, too.
Britain and many other European countries got a head start because digital initiatives were made a condition for state funding, to help achieve accessibility, equity and sustainability. “Most countries started with that top-down view of digital, whereas in the United States it’s an upside-down approach, which is one reason everything has lagged behind so much here,” said Marquee TV’s Kirschner.

MORE ON ‘HAMILTON’ AND LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA
‘Hamilton’ Review: You Say You Want a RevolutionJune 30, 2020
‘Hamilton’ Is Coming to the Small Screen. This Is How It Got There.June 25, 2020
Lin-Manuel Miranda and Disney: Timeline of a CollaborationJuly 3, 2020
He also points out that video recording is prohibitively more expensive in America. “To capture a Broadway production costs 5 to 10 times what it would overseas,” he said, which helps to explain the impressive film catalogs of Britain’s National Theater and France’s Comédie-Française, not to mention Canada’s Stratford Festival.

Will my school have to deal with streaming rights if we want to do our show on Zoom?
Licensing companies have rushed to create package deals that include streaming for their properties, instead of just the rights for a live performance onstage (known as the grand rights). “We are clearing the rights on a title by title basis and adding new ones every day,” said John Prignano, chief operating officer and director of education and development for Music Theatre International, which holds the rights to hundreds of shows.

ADVERTISEMENT

Continue reading the main story

MTI has also partnered with the ticketing company ShowTix4U and Broadway Media Distribution to bundle licensing, ticketing, streaming and collecting royalties — making the process easier for schools, for example.

Why can I watch some streams whenever I want but for others I have to log in at a specific time?
There are three basic types of streaming. Livestreaming is the closest you get to an appointment theatrical experience: you watch a show as it unfolds live, usually by purchasing a ticket or making a donation ahead of time.

With scheduled streaming, audience members watch a recording of a show at a specific time. Finally there is streaming on demand, which is either a subscription model à la Netflix or timed access where customers buy a ticket and have, say, 48 hours to watch the show.

“Each show we license might have different options,” Prignano said. “Some only offer livestreaming, others only offer live and scheduled streaming, etc. If a show has a movie deal or an impending movie deal, it’s more difficult to get streaming rights, and it’ll be really difficult to get on-demand.”

With no Broadway until January 3, at least, will we run out of new material to stream?
“We have enough in the pipeline to take us well into next year, when we can start shooting again,” said Bonnie Comley, the co-founder and co-CEO Broadway HD — which adds about four titles (older and newer, with a heavy preponderance of British productions) to its roster per month.

Producers are also looking at ways to capture shows performed in front of empty or socially distanced houses. Actors’ Equity Association is in the process of reviewing pandemic-prompted agreements, including for Zoom shows, that were released in March.

“One was to allow theaters to exhibit online archives of their productions, another to allow producers to do remote work,” said Lawrence Lorczak, a senior business representative for the union. “We’re in the middle of reviewing the terms for those two to make them more accessible for the producers and theaters.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Continue reading the main story
I miss the shared experience, even when my neighbors drove me nuts with their texting!
Some streams encourage an interactive element — this may be the first time in theater history that live-tweeting a show has been actively encouraged. BroadwayHD recently organized a singalong to “Falsettos,” and the chat window during live webcasts on YouTube can be wildly active.

“Part of me was itching to get back to the chat,” Kathleen Cavalaro, the executive director of the Seacoast Repertory Theater, said of sitting in her venue during a livestreamed performance. “I think it’s one of the reasons people keep coming back.”