Casting a Spell

Proshots, Accessibility, and the Mechanics of Live Theater

My favorite musical that I’ve seen was the 2022 revival of Camelot. The Lerner and Loewe piece had been modernized at the Lincoln Center, removing the explicitly magical elements of the plot for a grounded take on the classic. The limited run was headed by three of the brightest stars on Broadway: Andrew Burnap (The Inheritance, Othello) as King Arthur, Philipa Soo (Hamilton, Into the Woods) as Queen Guenevere, and Jordan Donica (The Phantom of the Opera, My Fair Lady) as Sir Lancelot Du Lac, the love triangle at the center of the show. I was blown away at the depth of their performances, and it cemented Andrew Burnap as my favorite actor. Partway through the show, I began to notice a pattern in the costuming. Throughout the show, Arthur had mostly been wearing red (a very English color) while Lancelot had been wearing blue (a very French color). Guenevere, however, as she oscillated her allegiance to and love of the two men, tended to change what color she was wearing between scenes, red for moments of firm loyalty to Arthur and blue for moments of vulnerability around Lancelot. It seemed to be a very compelling use of colors as symbolism, letting the audience immediately gauge where Guenevere was mentally during each scene. At least, it seemed to be. The truth is, I’ll never really know whether my hunch was correct. Because the show doesn’t exist anymore.

Yes, there are some press photos. And a wonderful soundtrack, which we are very fortunate to have considering the show wasn’t widely considered a success. Otherwise, though, all I have is my memory. If there had been an official recording of Camelot, a “proshot” as they are called, I would have loved to pour over the production and analyze all of the intricate costuming, staging, and set design. I could have even written an essay about all that to celebrate my favorite Broadway memory. But there isn’t a proshot. Very few shows get the luxury of a widely available recording akin to the 2020 release of Hamilton. Unfortunately, proshots are the exception rather than the norm.

There’s a reason for the lack of professional recordings. Essentially, it’s too expensive. Theater, especially Broadway, is all too often a delicate multi-million dollar balancing act with incredibly tight margins. For a small or medium show, there are easily dozens of artists and crew on weekly contracts. Plus the creative team that’s already been paid, payments to the theater hosting the show, advertising, and a whole array of other costs that are completely unknown to me, all before a team even decides the show is worth recording. Once the team does, as Gibson DelGiudice, a producer, illuminates in a blog post, the production team needs to secure filming rights from the creative team, pay union wages for all of the working artists, pay copyright fees for the copyrighted material like choreography and direction, pay residuals once the tape has been released, and find a distributor/hosting site, and that’s all outside of the actual cost of cameras, a camera crew, audio technicians, and all the other costs that go towards making a movie. In a world where most shows on Broadway don’t recoup their initial investments and almost every show is a few bad weeks away from shutting its doors, the margins to take a financial risk like filming a proshot are just not there. For more proshots to happen, money needs to come from somewhere. I’ll never support not paying your working artists what they deserve or charging $500 a ticket, but for more shows to be filmed, someone either needs to be comfortable paying theaters more or making less money off of theater.

Should we find a way to make more proshots, though? We’ve heard calls for more recordings of shows since the concept was invented, usually under the banner of making theater more accessible. I’m all for accessibility, of course, I think the more people that can consume anything the better, usually. But in an entertainment culture forever warped by streaming services and a focus on media being convenient to consume, trying to make theater fit the streaming framework might undermine some of the elements that make the medium of live theater so special.

I am not saying that I don’t understand the reasons behind a push for more proshots. Broadway is incredibly inaccessible at the moment. My current teacher at Marymount Manhattan College, Rob Dutiel, a scenic designer and industry professional, commonly cites to his classes that the average cost to go see a Broadway show, between the actual ticket, transportation, and housing, is $300 per person. We currently see shows getting very comfortable charging up to three times that (Othello currently has $921 Orchestra Seats) for the ticket alone. This is why we see demographic information that nearly half of Broadway audience members have annual household incomes above $150,000, and more than a quarter have over $250,000. Broadway is a hobby for the rich. Due to geographic and economic inaccessibility, it’s likely a lot of people in this country won’t see any theater (outside of maybe a high school’s production of Legally Blonde) except for maybe once in their lives. And all due respect to those productions, but with limited budgets and a cast that’s rarely had formal training, high schools can’t really capture the magic of theater that a professional production can. A streaming service could fix this; surely it’d be better to pay $10-20 a month to see recorded theater than to once in your life possibly scrape up the funds required to see a Broadway show.

From an artist’s perspective, posterity is also a very solid reason to want more proshots in the world. Any person working on a production, especially an actor who tends to do slightly different work every night, may find value from having a record of their work. Recording efforts already exist for posterity’s sake, specifically the New York Public Library’s Theater Archive, a collection of flat recordings of shows to look back on. The archive is a great resource for musical canon, and it does wonders for the conservation of plays on Broadway, which tend to have much less staying power and fewer ways to reach an audience outside of people seeing the show without the soundtracks musicals can release. If you’re not the next Angels in America, a Pulitzer Winner, or a Tony winner, a play is unlikely to stay open for a few years or on people’s minds. The NYPL is a godsend for any director, choreographer, or actor looking to learn from the theatrical canon, and a good time even for those just looking to consume and not learn. Unfortunately, the archive only exists in person and does nothing for the accessibility issue.

Of course, in discussions about proshots, both for means of accessibility and posterity, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention theater streaming services that already exist. The two major ones are BroadwayHD and the UK’s National Theatre at Home. BroadwayHD is… not laughably bad, but a few rough years and it might get there. I’m being a bit mean to a streaming service that’s currently celebrating its tenth year of streaming, but I expect a little more from Broadway’s premier (and only mainstream) platform to watch proshots on. Since growing a catalog stretching back to the 1950s, there are a little over 100 shows to watch on the platform. The shows featured aren’t limited to Broadway plays or musicals, incorporating performances not usually associated with Broadway, such as charity galas and solo concerts. Though out-of-the-box thinking is a charitable read of the shape of BroadwayHD’s catalog. An uncharitable read would be that the floundering streaming service realized what they tried to get into was far too expensive to be sustainable, and packed their catalog with enough things to make the $20 a month charge seem worth it to a consumer. None of this is to say there isn’t anything worth watching in the catalog. The West End’s 1999 revival of Oklahoma, Paula Vogel’s historical epic Indecent, and the star-studded 2018 revival of She Loves Me are all worth a watch. I’m glad there’s a place for people to watch these fantastic shows. Still, as I said earlier, I expect more from the pioneer in theater streaming.

National Theatre at Home is more of what people are looking for: a $13 monthly subscription to a catalogue of over a hundred plays. Actual, fully produced, and professionally captured plays. No concerts or one-off shows. Real theater and classics. The only real issue is that it’s only plays on this service, which have always been less appealing to people than musicals. Although, as of a few months ago, NTAH got the distribution rights for Waitress, specifically an American production of the musical, so the service might make moves in the future to secure more musicals and become the go-to place to stream theater, not just plays produced at the National Theatre. There’s a reason this service can be so developed. First off, the National Theatre is a government institution in the UK, being built and run with government funds. Secondly, union wages are lower for actors in the UK. Essentially, there’s less money going out and more money coming in for the National Theatre, allowing for more to be directed towards the costs of filming and the residuals for the artists’ work that’s being captured. That money simply goes elsewhere in Broadway theaters.

The NYPL, NTAH, and BroadwayHD are amazing resources, and they’re leaps and bounds more accessible than any show on Broadway. However, I fear what would happen if streaming became the dominant way to consume theater. While each service has its flaws, whether it be accessibility, size of catalog, or type of catalog, a world where each is perfect and makes theater as accessible as turning on your TV risks undermining the core facets of why theater is a unique and beautiful art form. Let me explain why.

In my conception of live theater there are two main, intertwining pillars that make it distinct from other art forms: intimacy and discomfort.

Intimacy is the part of theater that is live. Our bodies have a physical response to seeing and feeling another human body in a shared space, distinct from the responses we have from digital reconstructions of humans in film or, say, proshots. We feel, incredibly viscerally, the emotions and actions of character as they occur in space because they are breathing the same air and vibrating our bodies with their voices. We can weep when Eliza Hamilton sings about her husband because we’ve seen the actual relationship occur in front of us. We cheer when Orpheus and Eurydice finally reunite because we have been with them as they struggle and love. Theater thrives on artifice, things constructed to garner a response but that are authentic nonetheless, actions that are simultaneously fake and real. Without the fully realized worlds we see in movies, this artifice only works because of good performance and the fact that our mammalian brains want to empathize with another human. We want to believe what another person believes and feel what they feel. None of this would be achievable without the intimacy that a shared space allows. Even Moulin Rouge, a show that’s about 50% set design, 40% lighting design, and 10% actual story by volume, is intimate in the fact that you are watching real people doing incredible things in front of you. The spectacle is derived from intimacy.

Discomfort is the second pillar and works on one fundamental construction: it’s inconvenient to leave a show. A combination of social etiquette (getting up during a show is considered rude) and the sunk cost fallacy (you paid for your ticket, might as well sit through all of it) get people to stay at a theatrical performance, even if they aren’t enjoying it or it makes them uncomfortable. And the best art is supposed to make you uncomfortable, to challenge your beliefs or make you rationalize something you hadn’t considered before. Pass Over, a brilliant play by Antionette Nwandu with a runtime of about 75 minutes, encourages production teams to not give the audience an intermission. Nwandu added this because, as she sees it, the characters can’t leave their environment laden with strife, so why should the audience be able to leave this shared space? Some audience members walked out of productions of Pass Over, a brutal look at violence against black bodies, but so many more would’ve stopped watching if the remedy to their discomfort was the press of a pause button. All good art makes you uncomfortable, but theater forces you to consider if the only way out is through, and forces you to share space with other bodies in a way that other mediums simply can’t.

Consuming theater digitally undermines both the intimacy and discomfort that theater thrives on. You can be emotionally stimulated by a digital recreation of a performance, absolutely, but you cannot be physically intimate with another body via a recording. There is simply no other body to be in space with you. You also can’t truly be made uncomfortable by a performance when you are the sole arbiter of when it starts and stops. Theater that challenges you, that looks you in the eye and asks you to rethink how you see the world cannot land when it is chained to a TV remote. Of course I want to make the majesty of theater accessible to as many people as I can, but I ask you: what happens when you make one of the last intentionally inconvenient things in our world too convenient?

Of course, it’s hard to look a broke theater kid in middle-of-nowhere Nebraska in the eyes and tell them I don’t think they should watch theater online because it’s a betrayal of the medium, or whatever. I’d be a hypocrite if I did that. I started doing theater at summer camp, but I fell in love with theater while hunched over my computer watching a bootleg of Heathers alone in my dark room. And maybe it wasn’t raw or vulnerable or discomforting but it was fucking beautiful. Recordings of theater are really the only way to grow the fan base, and to get more people into this medium that has monumentally altered the course of my life. I just worry that we could end up losing some of the magic if theater is absorbed into the streaming landscape of today, a landscape that recycles the same comfortable, known properties into endless sequels and remakes because comfort sells. Truth is, I worry a lot that the art form I adore doesn’t have a place in the world we seem to be headed towards. I’ll do everything I can to make sure that isn’t true, but faith only keeps you from worrying for so long.

The future of proshots is muddied. Broadway is only getting more expensive with no sign of stopping anytime soon, but we’re also in a bit of a proshot golden age, or it feels that way. Waitress just released and Hadestown just finished filming earlier this month; there’s a Merrily We Roll Along proshot somewhere around looking for a distributor, and every bigger show on Broadway right now seems to be sitting on a mountain of professional promotional footage. We’re getting good about recording shows, and that’s for the better. Despite my holdups, I would always rather more people be able to glimpse the beauty of theater than only have a small group of rich people be able to experience the majesty fully. The difficulty of proshots is just a reflection of parts of the society we live in, one without an investment in the arts. Unfortunately, I don’t see that changing with this administration, seemingly more focused on getting queer people out of the Kennedy Center than making theater more accessible, but I can see the pendulum swinging back the other way on the horizon. In the meantime, we need to do theater as much as we can, and get as many eyes on it as the world will allow.

As much as I think proshots only give the audience half the beauty of live theater, they need to exist. They are, by leaps and bounds, the best tool to get people to experience works on stage, especially as Broadway becomes accessible to only the richest among us. We cannot, however, let proshots become the only way to consume theater, especially if they are hosted by massive corporations who focus on convenience to the consumer above all else. By doing so, we would be giving over an art form that is beautiful because it is human, raw, and temporary to groups who only understand the world in terms of numbers, comfort, and convenience.

I often think back to that day I saw Camelot. Maybe I’ll never get a chance to analyze the brilliant artistic choices that went into it. Maybe I’ll never feel the tangible love between Guenevere and Arthur again, or feel Jordan Donica’s velvety smooth voice resonate in the same room as me, or realize at the climax of the show that the Boy King really was just a boy who had kinghood thrust upon him. But I know that it was there, and I know that it was beautiful.

“Ask every person if he’s heard the story

And tell it strong and clear if he has not

That once there was a fleeting wisp of glory

Called Camelot”

-Finale Ultimo, Camelot (2022)

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-Dexter