Broadway History

Last night my wife, a couple of guests, and I watched a live performance of the current Broadway revival of She Loves Me, the 1963 Jerry Bock-Sheldon Harnick musical. It’s a musical adaption of the same Hungarian play as formed the source material for the 1940 Jimmy Stewart-Margaret Sullavan movie The Shop Around the Corner, later adapted into the movies In the Good Old Summertime and You’ve Got Mail.

We watched it livestreaming via our Roku on BroadwayHD. That marked a Broadway first—the first time a Broadway production has ever been livestreamed.

There’s nothing like a stage performance by a really good, seasoned cast and the production was wonderful.

I hope this is the first of many. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to see a live performance of Barbara Cook, who originated the part of Amalia Balash (the Margaret Sullavan/Meg Ryan part) and also originated the part of Marion in The Music Man? Or Ezio Pinza and Mary Martin in South Pacific? Or Bert Lahr and E. G. Marshall in Waiting for Godot? Or Zero Mostel in practically anything? (Rhinoceros, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Fiddler on the Roof, etc.) Future generations may have just such opportunities.

5 comments… add one
  • sam Link

    What Roku channel?

  • Thank you for reminding me, sam. I’d intended to incorporate that into the post and have now done so.

    They have lots of other shows available—Gypsy, Billy Elliot, Les Mis, etc. Live performances were recorded but not liverstreamed. If Shakespeare is more your bag, they have dozens of streamable live performances of Shakespearean plays, many from the Beeb but from a variety of sources.

  • walt moffett Link

    We’ve been here before, e.g Playhouse 90, etc. Maybe a subscription model like Netflix will keep it alive this time while others trade bootleg DVD’s of Khloe and Kim, the SuperDuperSiliconeSisters.

  • ... Link

    My wife watched that production last night and loved it.

    (I was at the club first pressing to win a difficult R+B vs R+N endgame, and later struggling to save it after I goofed up and transformed it into a B vs N endgame at the wrong time. Good times!)

    I also saw Barbara Cook live once in DC, years ago now. She put on quite a show!

  • walt:

    We’ve been here before, e.g Playhouse 90, etc.

    There’s a big difference between the live television of the 50s and what I saw last night. I watched the live TV of the 50s. Those were hurriedly put together by casts who came together for that one performance and that was that. The cast I saw last night had been performing that show as a company eight times a week since the middle of March. It really makes a difference.

    On a disconnected note the chap I took my directing classes from had been a director for Playhouse 90 and Armstrong Circle Theater.

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