How BroadwayHD Anticipated Theater in a Pandemic (and Post-Pandemic) World
Friday 12/02 2022 at 5:00 eastern time
Community Gathering on Zoom - register with the bright red reservation box to receive the Zoom link. These gatherings are a service for the theater community and are offered free for TRU members; we ask that non-members help keep us running by making a donation or joining as a member.
In the room: Bonnie Comley (Tony Award®-winner for A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder, War Horse, Jay Johnson: The Two & Only) and Stewart Lane (Tony Award®-winner for A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder, War Horse, Jay Johnson: The Two & Only, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Will Rogers Follies and La Cage Aux Folles), co-founders of BroadwayHD, the subscription-based streaming service for stage performances with a mission to promote and preserve live theater. Created in 2015, BroadwayHD started out by making Broadway calibre entertainment accessible and affordable to people everywhere. Is filmed theater still theater? How do you recreate the live experience with digital capture? Was this streaming service particularly well-positioned to serve a world in shutdown? And did two years of shutdown normalize the idea of filmed theater, especially for audiences reluctant to embrace the talking-heads-in-frames esthetic of Zoom performance?
Panelists
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BONNIE COMLEY
is a three-time Tony Award-winning producer. She has, also, won an Olivier Award and two Drama Desk Awards for her stage productions. She was recently re-elected as the Board President of The Drama League. She is a full member of The Broadway League and the Audience Engagement and Education Committee. Comley has produced over 40 films, winning five Telly Awards and one W3 Award. She is the founder and CEO of BroadwayHD, the world’s premier online streaming platform delivering over 300 premium live productions to theatre fans globally. The theatre community has honored Comley for her philanthropic work; she is the recipient of The Actors Fund Medal of Honor, The Drama League Special Contribution to the Theater Award, The Paul Newman Award from Arts Horizons and The Theater Museum Distinguished Service Award.
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STEWART LANE
is the founder of BroadwayHD (broadwayhd.com), a stage to screen production and distribution company expanding the reach of Broadway shows by making them available in cinemas, PPV and streaming on-line. BroadwayHD is in the Guinness book of World Records for the first ever live stream of the Broadway show She Loves Me. Mr. Lane is a six-time Tony award winning producer for A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder, War Horse, Jay Johnson: The Two & Only, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Will Rogers Follies and La Cage Aux Folles, as well as an additional eight-time nominee. He received four Drama Desks, a Drama Critics Circle, Outer Critics Circle, Actors Fund Award, Paul Newman Award, and Drama-League awards. In 2013 he won his first Olivier Award for Irving Berlin’s Top Hat in the West End. Currently, he is producing the Gloria and Emilio Estefan musical biography On Your Feet and Sunset Boulevard starring Glenn Close. He is co-owner and operator of the legendary Palace Theatre on Broadway. In addition, he has written the critically acclaimed “Black Broadway: African Americans on the Great White Way” (Square One Publishers), "Jews on Broadway" (McFarland Publishers), "Let's Put on a Show,"(Working Arts Library) which is also on DVD, and the plays In The Wings (published in the spring 2008 by Hal Leonard), If It Was Easy (published by Performing Books and nominated for Best New Play by the American Theatre Critics Association), and Back Home Again formally A Moment In Time (with music and lyrics by John Denver) which he was awarded The 2011 John Denver Spirit Award for his work.
