Two of my favorite things have finally come together – Broadway musicals and technology. For the first time in history, the Broadway show She Loves Me was streamed live on June 30th. So for $10 instead of $100, you could see live theater and you didn’t need your opera glasses. Nor were there lines for the restroom at intermission. And the snacks didn’t cost more than a movie ticket. But I digress. This was a big deal. While there is nothing quite like being at a Broadway performance, let’s face it folks, not everyone can get to New York, nor pay the often outrageous prices. I was one of the lucky ones who got to see Hamilton with a ticket for which I actually paid face value at the box office.
To me there is nothing that’s as exciting as live theater. The recent efforts to do Broadway shows “live” on television (The Sound of Music, Peter Pan, Grease, The Wiz), were all carefully staged for the television audience. Not the same as live theater, nor as spontaneous. For example, in She Loves Me, Laura Benanti dropped some ice cream during a scene. I don’t think it was scripted. When you do eight shows a week there are going to be mistakes – flubbed lines, missed cues, dropped props. That’s what makes it live – and fun.
The live stream was created by Broadway HD, an organization whose aim is to bring Broadway to the folks who can’t come to Broadway. And while regional theater companies may be good and national tours have some of the original actors, there’s still nothing like seeing the real deal.
The production certainly did make an effort to accommodate a television audience. When you see a show you are limited to the view from your one seat. And you choose to focus on whatever part of the stage has the action. But that same experience would not translate well to the small screen. So the producers used a number of cameras, representing the variety of views that the audience would have from mezzanine, center orchestra, side orchestra, and even looking up from the first row. For the director, this had to be challenging. Getting the right camera to follow the right action at the right instant takes a lot of rehearsal time and a lot of skill. While the live stream was well produced, there were clearly some moments when the director, or the “live” camera, lagged the action, though only momentarily.
From the technical perspective, how you enjoyed this at home very much depended on how, and on what, you were watching. You needed to purchase She Loves Me directly from the Broadway HD website and stream it from there. I tried it four different ways. First I used my laptop and connected Google Chromecast to send it to my 65″ HDTV. A mistake. My less than zippy Internet connection suffered buffering issues, and several times even lost the Chromecast connection. Then I watched from my laptop. It was okay, but left me longing for a bigger screen. Next up, I tried viewing it on my 27″ desktop computer. There was no buffering and the stream was relatively smooth, but not the experience I’d hoped for. Finally, I used an HDMI cord from my laptop to my big screen television and that was the best experience of all – full stereo sound, great picture, and no buffering.
Given the success of this first effort to live stream a Broadway show, I’m sure there will be more. If you love musical theater and if you can’t make it to Broadway, for a mere $10 this is certainly the next best thing to being there and a hell of a lot cheaper.
Want to know what you missed? Here’s the best clip we’ve found so far.
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