Unless we’re talking about Rocky Balboa, it’s not every day you’ll find a link between the sports world and the Great White Way. But with BroadwayHD, husband and wife Broadway producers Stewart F. Lane and Bonnie Comley are rolling out theater classics for the screen like it’s Sunday Night Football.
“We’ve been comparing what we have to sports,” Comley says. “There’s the live sports where you actually go to the football stadium and watch, which is great. And then there’s the people who stay at home and watch because it’s in a different city at that time, or they just don’t want to go that day. We just want to extend the reach of live theater.”
“That’s our motto,” Lane adds. “If you can’t make it to Broadway, go to BroadwayHD.” As such, the Internet’s latest entertainment streaming service is bringing theater greats like Bette Midler, Elaine Stritch, and Judi Dench straight to your living room.
Comley and Lane—who have nine Tonys between them and have worked on “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder,” “War Horse,” “Legally Blonde,” and more—first launched BroadwayHD with over 100 titles in October 2015, and it’s since seen substantial catalog growth due to consumer demand. While the site predominantly features Broadway classics via Broadway Worldwide (the most recent being 2010’s “Memphis”) and BBC productions like its Shakespeare Collection series, BroadwayHD has quickly piqued the interest of audiences from around the country who can’t get to the Big Apple for a live performance. According to Comley, they have every intention of continuing the site’s expansion, noting the early beginnings of Netflix, which started as a home delivery rental service before revolutionizing streaming media as we know it.
“When we launched this thing at the end of October, I wasn’t sure if anybody wanted to see this besides me and Stew,” Comley says. “But the response was, ‘When are you getting “Lion King”? When are you getting all these shows on Broadway?’ I don’t really see that as a negative. I see that as people wanting more of this.”
The production duo’s hope is to begin streaming live, current-run Broadway productions over BroadwayHD, much like the Metropolitan Opera’s Live in HD cinema series, or even the one-off, record-breaking productions of NBC’s “The Wiz” and Fox’s “Grease: Live.” A concern, of course, is that such livestream productions may lessen interest in seeing shows in the flesh. While Lane and Comley are still gathering the data to prove this wouldn’t be the case, Lane cites their collaboration with MTV for the television premiere of “Legally Blonde: The Musical” as a promising case study.
“When MTV showed it on their cable station, it actually branded the show so well that it did better on the road than it did in New York,” Lane says. He believes comparable live theater successes are likely with BroadwayHD streams.
“Stew and I are members of the Broadway League, and Stew’s also a theater owner. We’re not coming in to exploit the business,” Comley stresses. “Already, [producers] are sort of looking to us, like, ‘Can you make money with this? How much money do we make?’ The biggest fear is cannibalizing the ticket sales of the live show, and even though Stew and I don’t agree entirely that that’s the case, we’re [getting] the data to prove that that’s not true.”
So how do you sign up? Creating a BroadwayHD account at broadwayhd.com is free, and prices scale from two-day rentals for $7.99 to one-month subscriptions for $14.99 to one-year subscriptions for $169.99. The site also features a Broadway blog and additional streaming content, like Lane’s 1994 interview series, “Curtain Time,” free of charge.
“We aggregate all of this content into one place [so] all the theater people can come here,” Comley says. “This is a destination for people who want to find out what’s out there. This is the theater people’s site.”
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