UPDATE:Now's the time to plan transitioning theatre to worldwide audiences.

Ravenclaw said: "What makes you think that people in Austria, Africa, and Brazil are deprived of theatre just because they're not near New York? There is great theatre all over the world, and most plays don't need a worldwide audience to consider themselves successes. I think that in general, preservation of theatre is an important practice which is, unfortunately, often prohibitively expensive, and the problem of access is notoriously difficult to solve,but framing the issue as a service from New York to enlighten the rest of the world is a little presumptive, in my opinion."

American theater is almost completely isolated from the rest of the world. Outside of the UK and perhaps Canada, America has a minimal perspective on theater creatives around the world. You think other countries' theater is sub par? Obviously not, it is as good if not better than American theater.

This attitude of "only we do transcendent theatre" ( which doesn't seem to affect other artistic disciplines) is why posters think that it will be "a privilege" for foreign audiences to be exposed to American productions.

To paraphrase what Winston Churchill said about democracy: It's a terrible idea except for all the others.

I imagine that from an industry marketing perspective, it might even be a good idea to do something like this to help keep Broadway relevant and in the worldwide zeitgeist throughout this mess. Otherwise some fans are going to discover other great sources of theatre content and other pursuits, if they haven't already. Some will reignite their interest in Broadway post-shutdown, but some might not.
Additionally, this could be the best possible time to take greater advantage of a worldwide market willing to pay for online Broadway content. If it's literally impossible to get sufficient numbers of paying bums on seats in physical theatres, then it makes sense to seek additional markets. Such a transition to recording more content wouldn't necessarily need to be permanent (although personally I would hope that it would stick around).

Filmed theatre has its place, but not as a stand-in for the real thing. I think it's great for historical documentation, for research, even for entertainment - I'm not totally against it and there have been some wonderful filmed productions that I've enjoyed immensely, but they're not theatre. I know there are people with physical constraints that make going to the theatre a challenge and it's wonderful that they can still be a part of it, and also people who are geographically detached from a live theatre scene and unable to travel. So I'm not saying don't do it, I'm just saying that it's not the solution to what's going on right now which is a whole different situation.

Plus, it takes a large capital investment to do any sort of filming and distribution and that's even harder to come by now than it was already. I'd prefer to see the capital used toward more productions. I'd be very happy to see physical productions shrink; there's so much beautiful work that can be done with just lighting and staging and possibly projections, and I'd love to see how far that can go. I love a big-ass show as much as anyone but I'd rather see simpler, smaller shows for real than huge ones on film.

I think we have several things converging, and interestingly this jurisdictional dispute between AEA and SAG-AFTRA (which AEA can't win) is dropped right in the middle of it. Showing filmed theatre as entertainment is fine and makes sense for so long as we don't have the real thing. Ditto, to an extent at least, keeping interest alive etc. But the inventory has pretty much been spent at this point and any new work that is added to the pile (in the US at least and we shall see about elsewhere) is a film. Then we have films that rely heavily on plays and stage actors and thus "feel" like theatre even though they are not, and that are produced safely in the style of some (but heaven knows not all) sports. This can and will continue for the duration. And then we have some truly artistic things that have been and can be done within the confines of the socially distant universe most of us are confronting. I think we will see more of this (e.g., the Angels piece we got to enjoy the last few days) but the question is how do we finance it? As Temms said, if we have learned one thing it is that folks (at least at anything approaching critical mass) are not willing to spend big bucks to sit home and watch TV. And theatre streaming is never going to get within a light year of the economies of Netflix, Amazon et al. Interesting stuff to discuss but there is no magic pill in any of this for us.

Updated On: 10/12/20 at 06:35 PM

Jordan, I think you may be technically correct but if you subtract things that are likely to attract less than 100 (or even 1000) viewers, what do you think the percentage is? I'm not sure I am following your last sentence. What are you referring to?