Broadway's Best Seats Are Now in Your Living Room

Photo credit: David Lee
Photo credit: David Lee

From Town & Country

When Shakespeare decreed that all the world’s a stage, he couldn’t have imagined a time every living room would be a theater. Today our small screens are no longer solely conduits for prestige TV dramas and ’90s romcoms, they’re lifelines for the culturally omnivorous—and Broadway seems to be the next big bet.

A wave of recent film adaptations of stage productions is arriving, with unexpected poignancy. Disney Plus aired its film of Hamilton’s original Broadway cast in midsummer, more than a year ahead of schedule, and in September The Boys in the Band, complete with the cast and director of its latest Broadway run, got a made-for-TV release. These aren’t traditional movie musicals, like the much maligned Cats, or the versions of The Prom and Dear Evan Hansen currently underway, they’re instances of a new hybrid, in which stage shows are turned into a kind of high gloss cinéma ­vérité. The latest example: HBO’s recent David Byrne’s American Utopia, directed by Spike Lee and filmed in front of an elated pre-­pandemic live audience during the acclaimed production’s engagement at the Hudson Theatre.

Photo credit: Disney
Photo credit: Disney

The movie attempts to bridge the gap between the experience of live performance and the conventions of onscreen entertainment. Absent the energy of an elbow-to-­elbow crowd, sweeping wide shots and impossible closeups invite viewers directly into the action. “In some ways the film is more intimate than what you get in the theater,” says Byrne, who discovered new sides to his own show—such as a bird’s-eye view of its kinetic choreography—that he couldn’t have seen while it was being performed onstage.

Byrne has announced a 2021 return to Broadway, but in the case of the Tony-­winning revival of Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band, directed by Joe Mantello, the goal of the Netflix film is to capture for posterity the menagerie of star turns (Jim Parsons, Zachary Quinto, Matt Bomer, oh my!) seen by only a lucky few in 2018. “My goal was to capture the experience that we all had together” making the original production, Mantello says.

Photo credit: MELINDA SUE GORDON/NETFLIX
Photo credit: MELINDA SUE GORDON/NETFLIX

This new stage-to-screen pipeline is open to experimentation. Diana, a musical about the late princess, will test the waters early next year when it comes to Netflix prior to a Broadway opening. Though Diana played a handful of preview performances prior to being shuttered in March, its producers intend the film to drum up buzz, and ultimately box office dollars, for the live show’s return. “If it’s done well, I think it generates an audience,” Mantello says of productions made to stream. If not—well, producers will have to wait and see.

Today, broadening Broadway’s reach beyond the geographic and economic limitations potential consumers face, while still enticing them through reopened doors, is on every producer’s mind. “Even if they can get it on streaming, they’d still go to a live show if they could,” Byrne asserts. “There’s nothing like it.”

This story appears in the December 2020/January 2021 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW

You Might Also Like