Ian McKellen as King Lear (Photo by Simon Farrell)

Oh, British theatre, you’ve bested your American counterparts again, and you likely don’t even know about it. I should explain.

In late October, a new streaming service called BroadwayHD came online, to a flurry of press attention, likening the offering to Netflix or Hulu for the stage. As the holiday season often affords the opportunity to seek out online entertainment, I finally had the opportunity to peruse the offerings on the nascent BroadwayHD. To my surprise, I found remarkably little US theatre, let alone material from the Great White Way.

As of now, the relatively limited repertory of the service is comprised overwhelmingly of BBC offerings, tilted towards Shakespeare. Now, there’s no question that the selection is choice, featuring esteemed actors such as Judi Dench, Michael Gambon, Juliet Stevenson, Ian McKellen, Anthony Hopkins and others, but the fact is, few of the shows on offer ever played Broadway.

Rifling through the categories of comedy, classics, drama and musicals yields a decidedly anglicised view of theatre. The category of musicals, which one would expect to be a strong suit, is the most American of sections, but also particularly thin, with only nine offerings, the most recent being Memphis and the oldest being Tintypes from 1980. One of the titles is the Bette Midler made-for-television Gypsy, which was never performed on stage.

That’s not to say there’s no value in the service, because I’m eager to explore some of these pieces – Daniel Craig in Copenhagen, anyone? But for now, it remains largely a US subscription-based version of BBC’s iPlayer with a cache of older titles. It also points out, once again, how behind US theatre is in adapting to the newly pervasive video reality, whether broadcast into movie theatres like NT Live is, or available on a mobile device.

I will always say that filmed theatre is not true theatre because it alters according to what the video camera finds. The live experience is unparalleled. But until all of the parties concerned – producers, writers, directors, actors, designers, craftspeople and crew – get together to hammer out an agreement that makes it possible for more US theatre to be recorded and distributed electronically, us Americans will be runners-up to our British colleagues (and soon our Canadian ones as well). Without that commitment, access to theatre will remain out of the reach of swathes of our population, for geographic and financial reasons.

Meanwhile, less attentive users of BroadwayHD will be left wondering why all of these ‘Broadway’ shows were performed with British accents.

This essay originally appeared in The Stage.

Amber Riley, Shanice Williams and company in The Wiz. (Photo by Virginia Sherwood/NBC)

Last week, more than 11 million people in the US watched a live broadcast of the musical The Wiz, an adaptation of The Wizard of Oz that came almost 30 years before Wicked. Created for a black cast, it won best musical at the Tony Awards in 1975. The Wiz (2015 edition) was the third annual live musical from producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, following The Sound of Music in 2013 and Peter Pan last year. The Wiz was, by consensus, vastly superior to the previous two, and I happen to agree; in fact, I tweeted that opinion only 75 minutes into the three-hour broadcast. As has always been the plan, The Wiz production is now expected to run on Broadway in the 2016-17 season, although it’s unlikely the stage version will manage to field a cast like the broadcast did. Among the performers were Mary J Blige, Queen Latifah, Ne-Yo and, in a cameo role, Common.

Mind you, the early days of US television, when most broadcasts were live, were filled with adaptations of plays, and some distinguished works first written for TV, like Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful or Rod Serling’s Requiem for a Heavyweight were later adapted for both the stage and as films. Remarkably, what seems to be driving the new popularity of live staged TV are social media, which value the immediacy of sports, awards broadcasts and, yes, theatre, because as they unfold in real time – with all of the spontaneity and potential for gaffes intact – they create the opportunity for shared experiences online. Indeed, audience members can chat away with one another throughout these shows without disrupting anyone else; they can even let their cellphone rings without causing an interruption in the performance.

This blurring of the stage and screen is happening at an accelerating pace in a variety of ways. While NT Live has forged new paths for the streaming of theatre to cinemas around the world (though they’re only really live in the UK and nearby time zones), the US has been much slower to adopt the model, due in part to more restrictive, and therefore expensive, union agreements. That said, just last night, the Off-Broadway production of the intimate musical Daddy Long Legs was streamed live online for viewing anywhere, which is an important development that will surely be closely watched as a test case. Can the embrace of video technology add value to a property or production even when it’s offered up gratis?

This week has also seen the daily release of new videos from the second series of My America short films from Centerstage in Maryland, where artistic director Kwame Kwei-Armah has been exploring the intersection of film and theatre by commissioning original short plays from an array of writers. The new series has been shot guerrilla-style on sites where racial violence has taken place, essential spots in the new civil rights movement. But it blurs the traditional lines between the mediums by shooting plays in real-life settings specifically for video viewing; it’s theatre that won’t play in a theatre.

Just as the word television is becoming more a term for a specific viewing appliance, as opposed to the content itself, what we consider theatre may have to evolve as well. Purists will say that The Wiz was a Broadway text and score produced for video, not theatre – in no small part because there was no audience present – and that despite the credentials of the participating authors, My America is essentially a film series.

But perhaps we should be worrying less about the labels and looking more at impact: The Wiz may have inspired an interest in theatre among young people who may never be able to attend the show’s promised Broadway run; the Daddy Long Legs stream may help promote a chamber piece into the musical theatre repertory; live audiences could not have attended a play performed outside the burned out chemist shop that went up in flames during the Baltimore riots.

And in the US, it’s worth noting that the largest national audience for musical sequences from Broadway shows isn’t on the annual Tony Awards broadcast – it’s found in the first hour of the broadcast of the venerable Thanksgiving Day Parade from New York, which is seen by more than 20 million people. Just because it’s not performed in a theatre, does it stop being theatre?

This essay originally appeared in The Stage.

Are you still grumbling about “tweet seats”? Oh, that is so 2013. Time to get with the program and start worrying about the newest development in mobile tech, which could have a vastly more significant impact on the live performing arts.

At this year’s SXSW Festival, a new app, Meerkat, saw a frenzy of adoption by attendees, so much so that Twitter moved to quickly curtail the app’s access to Twitter data. The reason for that draconian move came clearer yesterday when the app Periscope, which is owned by Twitter, was launched as a direct competitor to Meerkat.

So what do they do? Both apps allow you to stream live video from your phone. Now, instead of taking something so pedestrian as a photograph via Instagram, or so cumbersome as shooting a video and then uploading it to YouTube, anyone with an iPhone and a dream can relay what they’re seeing in real time to their connections on these services. This will of course result in streams from countless teens doing teen oriented things for the entertainment of other teens, but it will also turn everyone who wishes to be into an instant broadcaster into one. Yesterday, Periscope immediately became a source for realtime video of the tragic explosion and fire in New York’s East Village.

Of course, as I experimented with Periscope (I’ve loaded Meerkat, but not tried it yet), I realized how significantly this could have an effect on live entertainment. Now, anyone adept enough at manipulating a smartphone from an audience seat might well be streaming your show, your concert, your opera to their friends and followers. If they can do so with a darkened screen and sufficient circulation to keep the blood from leaving their upraised hand and arm, the only thing stopping them would be vigilant ushers, chastising nearby patrons and battery life. For however long they sustain their stream, your content is on the air – and unlike YouTube, where if you find it, you can seek to have it removed, this is instantaneous and so there’s no taking it back.

I should say that I’m not endorsing this practice, any more than say, a play about graffiti artists is exhorting its audience to go out and start marring buildings with graffiti. I’m just pointing out that there’s a big new step in technology which could serve to let your content leak out into the world in a way that’s much harder to control than before (while also offering many new creative opportunities for communication) – and since these apps are just the first of their kind, they and competing apps will be rolling out ever more effective tools to stream what’s happening right in front of you, just as cell phone cameras and video will continue to improve their quality and versatility.

Scared yet?

Some will quickly say, as they have from the moment cell phones started ringing during soliloquies and operas, that there should be some way to simply jam signals inside entertainment venues. But the answer to that remains the same: private entities like theatre owners cannot employ such technology (which does exist) because they would be breaking the law by interfering with the public airwaves. No matter that the photos, video and streams may be violating copyright. That kind of widespread tampering with communications wouldn’t be allowed – and if it ever were, it could very well have a negative effect on patrons’ willingness to attend.

The quality of streams via these apps would leave much to be desired (think of your stream also capturing the heads of those in front of you, and the couple on your left whispering about their dinner plans). They’d hardly capture the work on stage at its best, but if your choice is $400 a ticket for Fish in the Dark or a free, erratic stream, you just might choose the latter.

Movie companies have been fighting in-theatre bootlegging since the advent of small video cameras, and one hears stories about advance screenings with ushers continually patrolling the aisles in search of telltale red lights (sometimes wearing night vision goggles) and assorted laser and infrared technologies designed to mar the surreptitious image capturing. But does that seem desirable or even feasible at live theatres?

I’m not shrieking about this problem because I expect plenty of others will. That said, I’m also not about to just instill fear in your hearts and run away. Having just chastised others for enumerating arts problems without offering ideas on how to address them, here’s my thought on how to try to stave off the onslaught of Meerkat and Periscope and their ilk: we have to solve the issues that are preventing U.S. based organizations from cinecasting on the model of NT Live.

Yes, the Metropolitan Opera has built a strong following for their Met Opera Live series. But we’re not seeing that success translate to other performing arts in a significant way, with theatre the most backward of all. I know it may seem counterintuitive, but if people have the opportunity to access high quality, low cost video of stage performances, they’re going to be considerably less interested in cheap live bootlegs in real time. It won’t stop the progression, but it will offer a more appealing alternative.

Video is now in the hands of virtually every person who attends the theatre, the opera, the ballet and so on. Short of frisking or wanding people for phones and having them secured in lockers at every performance space (can you imagine?), the genie is out of the bottle. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not keen on the ramifications of these advances either, but there’s no point in damning reality. The question now is how do the arts respond – by seeking to police its audiences as if attending a performance resembled an ongoing TSA checkpoint, or by offering alternatives that just might make the newest developments unappealing or irrelevant?

But the field, commercial and not-for-profit alike, needs to get a move on, because even if this is the first you’ve heard of Periscope and Meerkat, it won’t be the last. Just wait until smartphones can record and stream in 3D.

P.S. Last week when I saw the Radio City Spring Spectacular, there was a caution against flash photography – not all photography, just flash. There may well have been a warning about video, but all it would have taken was a fake Twitter account and one of these apps to start sharing parts of the show with you as an untraceable scofflaw. Just imagine if I had activated Meerkat a bit sooner.

Position 1: a stage production that is recorded, filmed or actually broadcast live ceases to be theatre. It may be considered television or film, but it is a record of theatre, not the thing itself. True theatre is experienced in the flesh, so to speak.

Position 2: for people who have no means to see any theatre, or a specific production, a recording or live transmission of the event, whether it occurs in a movie theatre or on a computer, is better than not seeing it at all, provided it is at least competently produced.

Position 3: even though it means I don’t get to see some things that really interest me, I don’t enjoy recorded theatre, no matter how artfully done, and I’m lucky enough to have access to lots of great theatre live, so after a few tries, I now don’t go. But that shouldn’t stop anyone else.

Why have I laid out these positions so baldly, rather than making a case for them? Because I want to talk about an aspect of the growing appetite for cinecasts, NT Live, the home delivery Digital Theatre and the like that isn’t about the viewing experience at all. That’s a matter of opportunity and preference and I leave it to everyone else to hash out those issues. My interest in this trend is about how it is branding certain cultural events and producers ­– and how U.S. theatre is quickly losing ground.

In general, people attend commercial theatre based upon the appeal of a production – cast, creative team, author, reviews, word of mouth, etc. Who produced a show is pretty much irrelevant, and only theatre insiders can usually tell you who produced any given work.  In institutional theatre, the producer has more impact, as people may attend because they have enjoyed a company’s work previously, because it conveys a certain level of quality. This is true in major cities and regionally, and while the name of the theatre alone isn’t sufficient for sales, it is a factor in a way it isn’t in the West End or on Broadway.

As a result, what is happening with theatrecasts is that the reach of the companies utilizing this opportunity is vastly extended, and the brands of the companies travel far beyond those who sit in their seats or regularly read or hear about their work. There’s long been prestige attached to The Royal Shakespeare Company, the Metropolitan Opera and the National Theatre; now their presence in movie theatres has served to increase access and awareness.  These longstanding brands are being burnished anew now that more people can actually see their work. The relatively young Shakespeare’s Globe, even as it makes its Broadway debut, is also gaining recognition thanks to recordings of their shows.

It should be noted that for UK companies, “live” is a misnomer when it comes to North American showings. We’re always seeing the work after the fact, given the time difference, so in many ways it’s no different than a pre-recorded stage work on PBS. But the connotation of live is a valuable imprimatur, and few seem to mind it, even when there are “encore” presentations of shows from prior years. The scale of a movie screen, the quality of a cinema sound system appear to be the true lure, along with the fact that these are not extended engagements, but carefully limited opportunities that don’t compete with actual movie releases.

MEMPHIS, one of the rare U.S. originated cinecasts

Regretfully, by and large, American theatre (and theatres) are missing the boat on this great opportunity for exposure, for revenue, for branding. There have been the occasional cinecasts (Memphis The Musical; Roundabout’s Importance of Being Earnest, imported from Canada’s Stratford Festival) but they’re few and far between.  We’re about to get a live national television broadcast of the stage version of The Sound of Music, but it’s an original production for television, not a stage work being shared beyond its geographic limitations.  Long gone are the days when Joseph Papp productions of Much Ado About Nothing and Sticks And Bones were seen in primetime on CBS; when Bernard Pomerance’s The Elephant Man was produced for ABC with much of the original Broadway cast; when Nicholas Nickleby ran in its entirety on broadcast TV; when PBS produced Theatre in America, showcasing regional productions, when Richard Burton’s Hamlet was filmed on Broadway for movie theatre showings 50 years ago.

London MERRILY rolled across the Atlantic

Most often, when this topic comes up in conversations I’ve been party to, there’s grumbling about prohibitive union costs as a roadblock. Perhaps the costs have changed since the days of many of the examples I just cited, yet somehow Memphis and Earnest surmounted them. Even as someone who doesn’t particularly care to see these recorded stage works, I worry that American theatre is lagging our British counterparts in showcasing work nationally and internationally, in taking advantage of technology to advance the awareness of our many achievements.  Seeing an NT Live screening has become an event unto itself – this week the National’s Frankenstein is back just in time for Halloween; the enthusiasm last week for the cinecast of Merrily We Roll Along (from the West End by way of the Menier Chocolate Factory) was significant, at least according to my Twitter and Facebook feeds.  The appetite is also attested to by an online poll from The Telegraph in London, with 90% of respondents favoring theatre at the movies (concurrent with an article about the successful British efforts in this area).  I’d like to see this same enthusiasm used not just to bring U.S. theatre overseas, but to bring Los Angeles theatre to Chicago, Philadelphia theatre to San Francisco, Seattle theatre to New York, and so on – and not just when a show is deemed commercially viable for a Broadway transfer or national tour.

I’m not trying to position this as a competition, because I think there’s room for theatre to travel in all directions, both at home and abroad. But without viable and consistent American participation in the burgeoning world of theatre on screen, we run the risk of failing to build both individual brands and our national theatre brand, of having our work diminished as other theatre proliferates in our backyards, while ours remains contained within the same four walls that have always been its boundaries and its limitations.  Somebody needs to start removing the obstacles, or we’re going to be left behind.