“If theatre is truly to be the artform of interaction and participation, then we must ask ourselves these questions and be ready to follow the thrilling thread of live performance wherever it may lead.”
Introduction
This is a two-part series exploring the benefits of incorporating livestreaming technology into theatres. Part 1 of the report documents a history of livestreaming theatre (involving a timeline and the lifespan of the industry’s biggest players) and a brief analysis of what it means to perform “Live!” and its programming potential. Part 2 includes two case studies that illuminate the resources that allow livestreaming on a large and medium scale.
The first case study identifies how the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles impacted BroadwayHD as its first regional production. The second case study comes from the Orlando Shakespeare Theater, the largest theatre in its region, whose livestreamed educational performances have reached up to 14,000 students and 359 classrooms per show. This educational effort, still in its early iterations, may set a national benchmark for accessible regional livestreaming.
A History of Livestreaming Theatre
The live visual transmission of theatre begins with television. The first theatrical foray into the field of television was done by the Theatre Guild in 1938, when part of When We Are Married was televised from London’s West End. Janice Wardle, a theatre and cinema scholar, describes the filming setup of this performance, where "one camera was in the foyer to capture the atmosphere of the audience arriving. The second was backstage to interview the performers and the third was in a box in the auditorium to televise the first part of the play." (Mcgovern, 89) The first of its kind, televised play portions filmed in the manner of When We Are Married halted only during the activity of World War II. As such a success, The Theatre Guild was already proposing replacing all touring companies with televised performances – a kind of Fathom Events in 1947! Audience satisfaction seemed to waver based upon the material selected for television adaptation more so than the endeavor itself. It wasn’t until 1953 when the Theatre Guild quit radio that it set its sights on original productions for the small screen.
Figure 1: The cast of When We Are Married (1938), the poster for Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party as a play of the week, and the poster for The Maids by Jean Genet (1975) for American Film Theatre. Source: IMDB.
From 1959 to 1961, you could find Play of the Week on your New York television with scripts written specifically for TV. While this series had a short life, it served as proving ground for those who would go on to create commercial films of plays like Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
Famed playwright of the work, Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953), was a fervent advocate for play-to-screen adaptation. From an adaptation of his The Iceman Cometh with American Film Theatre, to projects that followed his writing of Long Day’s Journey, O’Neill saw a future in reaching broader audiences through the medium of television:
“The day may come when there will develop a sort of Theatre Guild ‘talky’ organization that will be able to rely only on the big cities for its audiences. As for the objection to the ‘talkies’ that they do away with the charm of the living, breathing actor, that leaves me completely cold. ‘The play’s the thing,’ and I think in time plays will get across for what their authors intended much better in this medium than in the old.”
However, not everyone saw the same future as O’Neill. Critics felt that filming a performance limited the viewer’s choice of perspective. If the cameraman decides upon a closeup, the viewer has no freedom to glance about the stage. This is the nature of editing, done by an individual as an audience member, or as a cameraman/assembler behind the scenes. Many, though, argued that this “editing” process simply mirrored the role of a director, who guides audience’s eyes with staging techniques. Some critics at the time believed the filmed performance of Long Day’s Journey was “so faithful to its theatrical source, so scrupulous about giving us nothing more or less than what Eugene O'Neill wanted, that it does constitute almost a new film genre." (Mcgovern, 89)
American Film Theatre – Successful Production, Failed Distribution
Most arts organizations will not be producing musical theatre for TV giants, but there is plenty to be learned through large-scale successes and failures to reach and satisfy broad audiences. American Film Theatre was one such project, where great stage plays were reproduced exactly as written in the script, often with the original cast or with big-name actors. The plays were filmed not from the back of the house, but close to the actors, often in immersive sets. It was a movie feel, with the body of a play. Those working on AFT productions would often work with reduced pay, taking to heart the importance of immortalizing stage works in film.
To see an American Film Theatre play, audiences would visit specific theatres for one of four viewings that aligned with eight-show subscriptions. The rockiest step of this process was when theaters elected to play shows; typically, low-volume Mondays and Tuesdays, to offset any competition from Hollywood heavy-hitters. Whether it was for scheduling and hosting reasons (for which AFT filed an antitrust lawsuit) or for a number of other exhibition conflicts, AFT only survived from 1973 to 1975. In the end, it reached 500 theaters in the US.
While services of the time, especially American Film Theatre, were an abject failure in audience’s eyes, modern services are finding better footing. The Met flits from one of its 2000 venues in 70 countries to the next, then to PBS, and finally onto DVD. England’s National Theatre Live claims to reach nine million people with productions by the National Theatre as well as smaller companies (the influence of Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet certainly contributed to this reach).
Figure 2: A timeline of livestreaming and theatre, from 2002 to 2019. Source: Author
It’s A-Live! Modern Siblings of Livestreaming
What does it mean for something to be live? If you are livestreaming the Superbowl on your laptop, are you watching a live event? Most would probably say, yes. If your livestream is delayed by ten minutes, is it live? Maybe not. Some may even declare that nothing is live if it isn’t experienced in-person. However, in The Empty Space, Peter Brook wrote: “A man walks across [a bare stage] whilst someone else is watching him, and that is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.” (Brook, 7) If that “someone watching him” is in the room or on the moon, how does this change what it means to perform “an act of theatre?” (How does virtual reality make an impact?)
To consider livestreaming from a regional theatre, an organization may look to the live performances being broadcast to major network television. Here, we may learn some lessons about why and how audiences watch performances from home.
In his segment in iBroadway: Musical Theatre in the Digital Age, “You Can’t Stop the Tweet: Social Media and Networks of Participation in the Live Television Musical,” Ryan Bunch deconstructs the idea of liveness, from the idea of audience and performers in a shared physical space, to a number of alternative and supplementary forms. These include Internet liveness (“sense of co-presence among users), social liveness (“sense of connections to others; mobile phones, instant messaging”), online liveness (“social co-presence on the internet”), and group liveness (“users in continuous contact through calling and texting”). (177) Audiences may be in the same space at a watch party, or may be FaceTiming with family many hundreds of miles away. In contrast to the highly regulated front house of a theatre, what determines who is “there” is whether or not they were on their phones during the show.
“The interactions of fans, critics, producers, performers, and others during a live musical involve the dissemination of content across media forms in an example of what Henry Jenkins calls “convergence culture,” defined as “the flow of media across multiple platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want.” (173)
Audiences watch via digital platforms for several different reasons, from using the event as a centerpiece for a social gathering (we performed Grease last year, let’s have a cast reunion), to sharing their passion with family and friends, to using it as a means for comedy-making on social platforms. For example, “musical fans who saw themselves as curators of musical theatre’s cultural cachet took the opportunity to educate those whose only access to theatre was through the presumably lowbrow medium of television.” (180) Live musical performances saw responses that varied from hate-watching to comedic critique, and applied perspectives from social movements like Black Lives Matter in response to The Wiz Live!
Modern live musicals hearken back to NBC’s Peter Pan of 1955, starring Mary Martin, and Julie Andrew’s performance in Cinderella in 1957. They pull in American Idol audiences’ live event atmosphere in an attempt to mobilize nostalgia and modern sporting culture simultaneously. CNN anchor, Nischelle Turner, has even observed live theatre as a musical version of Sunday Night Football. (175)
These broadcasts were preempted by a behind-the-scenes segment to build excitement for the live broadcast. The author mentions a musical theatre audience’s consideration of a performance as twofold, where the performer is admired both as their character and as an athletic performer. The handling of this presentation via live representation “has important implications for the perceived success or failure of the productions according to audience expectations.” (177)
One great perk of live broadcast is the immortalization (for better or worse) through memes.
“Musicals are highly quotable and easily referenced through their words, music, images, and bodily affects, which makes them easily translatable into memes employing camp and other affectionate forms of critical humor. For example, a popular meme uses the image of Julie Andrews spinning on a mountain at the beginning of the classic film version of The Sound of Music (1965), with arms outstretched. The familiarity and recognizability of musicals makes them available for this kind of referential humor.”
For Your Consideration: The Mini Musical
“For the past decade, Internet “mini-musicals,” reflexively and satirically centered on cyber subjects, have gone viral, with spectatorship for popular online productions topping the million-viewer mark soon after their postings. Such online works employ “wink and nod” navel-gazing, having been created for the Internet about the Internet. As a number of these videos – sometimes described as YouTubsicals – have “blown up” on YouTube and other sites, the phenomenon has also further complicated the traditional definition of a musical. (47) The overall structure and aesthetic remains intact. Works in line with the YouTubsical description include 2008’s Doctor Horrible’s Sing Along Blog, Starkid Productions’ A Very Potter Musical, and parodical musicals spoofing current events and pop culture.
Figure 3: Joey Richter, Joe Walker, Darren Criss, and Bonnie Gruesen in A Very Potter Sequel, Chris Dzombak 2010. Source: Polygon.
Whether or not there is a place for regional theatre to create YouTubesicals is not the focus of this study, but is an emerging pocket of livestreamed performance that cannot be underestimated. A Very Potter Musical, for example, ran for two days at a physical location in 2009, but has garnered over 100 million views across its divided parts on YouTube. Production company “Team Starkid” has continued to produce fan-funded musicals on the success of this first production, and members such as Darren Criss (who would go on to be featured on Glee, as well as the Broadway productions of How to Succeed, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and American Buffalo) found their careers in new standing. From one two-night engagement to hundreds of millions of YouTube experiences, Potter exemplifies the reach possible through the use of online platforms.
Tickets and the Digital
What is the point of livestreaming? Mathematically, it changes the concept of ‘butts-in-seats.’ “Despite the vastness of the Internet, any musical will always have a finite number of tickets available for sale.” (Hillman-McCord, 36) In the case studies in part 2 of this report, the impact of livestreaming on ticketing will be further illustrated. The math is straightforward: there are more screens in a neighborhood than there are seats in a theatre. You may reach 1,000 patrons in one night through a livestream, where your 300-seat house may only sell 75% for three nights of a run. Accessibility to an infinitely broad audience is one impact of livestreaming, especially when considering impact through educational performance.
However, this is not the only way that a digital presence impacts potential ticket-buyers. In iBroadway, contributor and editor Jessica Hillman-McCord emphasize the intersection of the digital and the real. She poses that fandom and ticketing are incredibly intertwined, as evidenced by the drama of purchasing Hamilton tickets online. Online marketing extends the consumer’s experience to digital engagement. Digital recognition by a musical’s media channel (whether it be through retweeting, reposting, or shout-outs), fuels fan community affection.
Conclusion
When considering livestreaming as an element of programming, an organization must consider its historical context, the impact of livestreaming on ticketing, and the successes and failures of programs past What we learn from the history of livestreaming is that audiences require ease of access in order to utilize the service, both in platform and in timing (as illustrated by the poor timing of American Film Theatre presentations). History also contextualizes how many view the director and editor roles in conversation with one another, and provides support for livestreaming as a form of theatre by a paragon playwright of American theatre. Considering the impact of large-scale “Live” performance and small-but-mighty viral performing arts also contribute to the understanding of digital platforms as a stage.
To better conceptualize these implications, consider reading the case studies that make up the second part of this series on livestreaming. The first case study identifies how the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles impacted BroadwayHD as its first regional production. The second case study comes from the Orlando Shakespeare Theater, the largest theatre in its region, whose livestreamed educational performances have reached up to 14,000 students and 359 classrooms per show. This educational effort, still in its early iterations, may set a national benchmark for accessible regional livestreaming.
Resources
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