INTERVIEW: BroadwayHD promotes wonders of theater to audiences around the world
Photo: Cirque du Soleil’s Toruk: The First Flight reimagines the world of James Cameron’s successful movie for the stage. It’s now available to stream on BroadwayHD. Photo courtesy of BroadwayHD / Provided with permission.
There’s nothing quite like seeing a Broadway show live in Midtown Manhattan. The experience is one shared by locals and tourists alike, and it’s a rite of passage for anyone traveling to the Big Apple. That experience of catching Hamilton, Aladdin, SpongeBob SquarePants or Kinky Boots is unparalleled, but a new company is looking to add to those theater-going memories.
BroadwayHD, founded by Tony-winning producers Bonnie Comley and Stewart F. Lane, presents many theatrical productions through a unique streaming service. This online destination, which comes with monthly and annual plans, is home to High-Definition videos of beloved Broadway and off-Broadway fare.
It’s here where fans can relive those memories of Indecent, Memphis, Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, Holiday Inn, Falsettos and She Loves Me. London productions are well represented as well, including Imelda Staunton in Gypsy. Plus, there’s a ton of celebrity-driven shows, including Kevin Kline in Present Laughter, Holland Taylor in Ann, Jason Alexander in The Portuguese Kid, Ian McKellen in Macbeth, Nathan Lane in The Man Who Came to Dinner and Hugh Jackman in Oklahoma!
BroadwayHD keeps busy with their cinematic projects.
“We’re trying to capture the Broadway-going experience and share it another medium,” Lane said in a recent phone interview.
The big change for the company came four or five years ago. They were filming many one-offs, including Kline in Cyrano de Bergerac and Orlando Bloom in Romeo and Juliet, and the buzz was so positive that they decided to bring their efforts together under one roof.
“People were just coming up to us and going, ‘Oh, my God, that was amazing. Like, you should do every show like this,'” Comley said. “But with each one they’re so difficult to pull together, and the financial reward wasn’t really there. So they’d be critically acclaimed, but the finance was always we’re trying to claw back our money on those. We just sort of looked at each other and said, we just love doing this. Where is the business? With that, we looked and said, you know, the whole world is going to streaming. What if we start streaming these? And then we put our shows that we had together, but we had done about 10 of them at that point. And 10 does not make a destination for a streaming platform, so we decided to aggregate all the content that we could find. And then we launched in October of 2015, and we had just over 100 titles. … That should be enough to get their interest, and that’s what we did. Now we’re up to over 270 full-length stage plays and musicals, and that might be the legacy that we leave behind is aggregating all similar content into one place. So that if you want to stage-to-screen, we’re the destination for it, like a Cartoon Network or a MTV.”
Lane stressed that BroadwayHD is focused on attracting new people to the Broadway community, and streaming can bring in younger audience members who will fill the seats in the future.
And it’s not only Broadway and London; BroadwayHD has now branched out to include many Cirque du Soleil productions, including Amaluna, Kooza, Alegria, Toruk: The First Flight and Saltimbanco, among others.
“We’re talking about the younger audiences, the new audiences, the future audiences,” Lane said. “They’re the ones who really started to express an interest in theater, and movies and TV shows about theater, so whether it was Crazy Ex-Girlfriend or Smash or Rise or La La Land, there’s this groundswell of support for musical theater and Broadway. And we were able to capture that with the streaming device and be the first ones to make it out there. In fact, we made the Guinness Book of World Records by streaming the first Broadway from Studio 54, She Loves Me, about two years ago.”
Lane said some of the company’s most streamed shows include Cats and The Phantom of the Opera, which proves that there’s also a segment of the population who know Broadway well and would like to relive their memories of seeing the show in New York City.
“Then there’s a large number out there of people who just cannot, either for geographical reasons or financial reasons … or time reasons, they can’t get to New York to see the show,” he said. “So when there’s a limited run of Kevin Kline doing Present Laughter or a long-running show, and they just can’t afford to come here, we give them accessibility and affordability.”
Comley said they have worked hard over the past few years to have agreements in place with 17 Broadway unions, guilds and associations. When they want to film a new show, it then becomes a negotiation between BroadwayHD and the producers.
“We can then go talk to the producers because it’s their production,” she said. “Then if if they’re on board with it, then we talk to the underlying rights holders, so whoever created, wrote it, so the composers or the authors. … And then after that, the arm wrestling begins.”
For Lane, including a theatrical presentation in BroadwayHD’s library helps get the word out on the production, and he hopes more shows allow streaming while the play or musical is still running.
“This is kind of a learning curve for the industry,” he said. “We fervently believe this is a marketing tool to enhance ticket sales for shows that are running and can be leveraged that way. We have a certain amount of flexibility that we can actually shoot it, show it live for say a month and then pull it back for a little bit and maybe show it only on the anniversary of the show as it keeps running. Certainly when movies have come out when a show is still running, it’s always enhanced the ticket sales. It’s given longevity to the show that’s running on Broadway, so we see this more as an enhancement to the Broadway community. And I think they’re slowing coming around to our way of thinking.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
BroadwayHD is now available for monthly and annual plans. Click here for more information.
