It’s long been a source of frustration for theater fanatics: many Broadway shows, even those that don’t become years-long fixtures of the Great White Way, are professionally filmed, but often only for archival purposes, not public consumption. For years, those living outside of the greater New York City area unwilling to make an expensive trip of seeing a particular show were limited to the hierarchy of a touring company, a local production, or maybe, some years later for a particularly notable show, an airing of a filmed version on PBS. If all else fails, they could hope for an inevitably disappointing film version that failed to recapture the onstage magic. Starting in 2005, there were also occasional Fathom Events presentations of filmed stage shows, typically made available for one or two nights at a time, at premium prices (and looking more like ultra-big TV than polished cinema, at least at first).
Lately, though, so-called “pro-shot” movies – those filmed versions that used to pop up on public television’s American Playhouse or Great Performances series, as with the 1989 version of Into the Woods, aired two years after shooting but decades before Disney got around to making its Meryl Streep version – have been elbowing their way to the front of the line as a Broadway alternative. The highest-profile pro-shot so far has been Lin-Manuel Miranda’s smash Hamilton, intended to debut on the big screen but thrown to Disney+ during the pandemic-inspired yearlong break from wide theatrical releases. No surprise that the sudden ability to watch the original cast perform the most talked-about Broadway show in years from the comfort of the couch became an at-home event.
