She Loves Me
At its core, Broadway has always been about live. The actors, musicians, and backstage crew perform the show, live, eight times a week in front of an audience. If something goes wrong, it goes wrong – there are no cuts or do overs. And this live experience is confined to this particular audience, making it a unique occurrence for the thousand or so people who are sitting in that theater, on that evening, as this combination of things won’t ever happen again, even if the script and score are the same night after night.On June 30th, 2016, that changed. BroadwayHD and the Roundabout Theater broadcast “She Loves Me” live from Studio 54.Other media companies have been live streaming for some time now – the Metropolitan Opera, for example, has been live streaming productions into movie theaters for over a decade and has used those broadcasts to grow their audience. This, however, is the first instance of a Broadway theater streaming a live production into people’s homes. The BroadwayHD app provided a live stream to subscribers, though non-subscribers were able to watch too, for a one-time $9.99 fee. The production will be available for the next seven days to subscribers, at which point it will be removed. A cinema version, cut together from the live stream and multiple other captures taken throughout the week, is expected to debut in November.Prior to the stream, the BroadwayHD library consisted primarily of BBC dramatizations, West End musicals, PBS Great Performances, and staged versions of shows for anniversary concerts. Filming and streaming a musical is difficult business. BroadwayHD cofounder and Tony award winning producer Bonnie Comley noted that among the difficulties were “shows not being set up to be filmed, actors not having anything in their contracts about live streams and on-demand, recording artists being unable to perform on anything not label approved… the list goes on.”The other major concern that shows have is the worry that streaming theater is going to kill live theater. Broadway relies on people coming to see the shows in person, and the extended Broadway economy needs people to see shows as they tour. Some producers have stated concerns that live streaming or having a current show on demand would kill the market for touring companies and reduce the desire for consumers to travel to New York to see a show.With “She Loves Me,” BroadwayHD managed to skirt both concerns, given that the show is scheduled to close on July 10th and there are no plans for it to go on tour. Comley felt the show was “the perfect show to introduce a live audience to Broadway – it has a lush set (that beat “Hamilton” for the Tony for best scenic design), a great story, great music, a talented cast – all these things came together, and it’s a limited run. If you missed it, weren’t going to see it.” Plus, the fact that a good chunk of the audience knows it better as “You’ve Got Mail.”Thanks to a prior relationship, the Roundabout Theater was on board to give the live stream a try. Cameras were brought in the day before and filmed the two Wednesday productions for redundancy’s sake. Despite a few hiccups before the start of the transmission, the broadcast itself went on without a hitch, with viewers praising it on social media and sharing photos of their HD streams. The same show that 1,006 people saw live in the theater could be watched on big screen TVs via Roku and Apple devices, or on laptops, TVs, or iPhones. Many of these audiences would have been unable to see the show otherwise. Comley noted that the BroadwayHD service has geo-based blocking, which will be useful as more shows stream and producers block certain areas from access when a touring company is in town, but the streamers appeared to be coming from across the globe.As for what’s next, Comley noted that there are several productions interested in possibly replicating what “She Loves Me” did. She wasn’t able to divulge any names yet, and despite my previous pleas, one of them is definitely not going to be “Hamilton” (a recording of that does now exist, but it’s being kept in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Gringotts vault). Which show comes next remains to be seen, but the live broadcast showed there is a marketplace for these productions and they aren’t going to cannibalize traditional revenue streams.At the theater, prior to the overture, a speaker noted that this production was in fact the first of its kind, and instructed the wider audience to enjoy it and ignore most usual theater decorum. For those in the theater, it was just another night on Broadway, intermission bathroom lines and all. For everyone else, it was a new treat as delicious as ice cream. Vanilla ice cream.