| re: There are $1499 Orchestra seats now for 'Merrily' tomorrow afternoon! | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 05:24 pm EDT 07/12/24 | |
| In reply to: re: There are $1499 Orchestra seats now for 'Merrily' tomorrow afternoon! - WWriter 03:32 pm EDT 07/08/24 | |
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| Sorry that it's taken me four days to reply. I typed this up a couple of days ago, and then I thought it was way too long and unnecessarily detailed, and I wanted to drastically shorten it, but it's taking me too long to do that so I'm just going to post this excessively long version. Thanks for the reply. Yeah, theatre was so much affordable back then, including student rush, which I didn't even mention. I didn't do student rush all that often because regular price tickets along with easily available discounts via twofers and the TKTS booth, once it opened, made everything so affordable, but I definitely saw shows via student rush sometimes. Also, the Quiktix line at the Public. And some, maybe most, of the nonprofit companies that sold subscriptions also sold lower-priced student subscriptions. I subscribed to the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center, Circle in the Square and Circle Rep that way, and also the NYSF seasons at the Beaumont. Since you brought it up, it is wonderful that there is so much more theatre that was shot live available on television now. But I often find it difficult to watch because of the way the productions are shot and edited. I find the constant cutting from one shot to another very annoying. In particular, in the concerts they show on PBS and other places, it can be particularly annoying because it's just the same angles over and over again. Obviously, that’s true for all of these present-day filmings, but it becomes particularly obvious when watching concerts. These kinds of concerts used to be shot so much better. So while there are more stage productions being shot live now than in the past, I generally prefer watching older TV productions of plays. And although most of that was produced directly for television, there was more theatre on television at many times in the past if we count productions of stage plays that were produced for television. There was no shortage of plays on television back in the 1960s and 1970s and earlier, too, for that matter, although I was not born till 1958 so I wasn’t watching television in the 1950a. But I know about it, and some of that earlier stuff has shown up in various places. Most of the productions were produced for television, rather than being stage productions that were shot live, but so many of these mesmerized me when I was young. Before PBS even started, which was around 1971, there was the collection of public television stations around the country that shared and produced shows, most of the productions at the time coming from WNET in New York. In particular, Play of the Week, even though it lasted only two years and I was just an infant at the time, was extraordinary. And, fortunately, all or nearly all of them exist. Some were issued by Broadway Theatre Archive, and a few were issued by other companies. Unfortunately, Ely Landau, who had copies of them all, left the complete collection to UCLA, and it seems that because of provisions in the will, they cannot be shared with the Paley Center (or UCLA is unwilling to do so). The Paley Center has relatively few Play of the Week productions and so you must go to Los Angeles to see those that are otherwise unavailable and that sound very interesting. And then a bit later in the 1960s there was New York Television Theatre, Hollywood Television Theatre, and a whole bunch of British television productions that were shown. And in the 1970s, Theater in America came along, which did shoot productions that had originated onstage, although usually (but not always) they were not shot live, and there was also a series called Classic Theatre, which showed BBC productions of plays. Some of the productions from these various series have been issued on DVD. It is so sad to me that public television once telecast so much homegrown theatre (along with some that was not homegrown), and now there is almost never anything like that. The results may have been uneven, but some of the productions were wonderful. And they certainly meant a lot to me back in the late 1960s, when I first started watching them, and through the 1970s, and even in the 1980s with American Playhouse sometimes showing plays, when there was less theatre on PBS but still some. And although most of it was over by the 1970s, commercial television used to regularly produce so many plays on television. All that was really left by the time I was watching was NBC’s Hallmark Hall of Fame, which for its first 20 years or so, focused almost exclusively on famous plays and still was doing a good many into the 1970s. Sadly, these were almost always cut down to fit into a 90-minute slots. Many were cut rather drastically, but the best productions nonetheless hold up very well. And some of those did feature original cast members. Still, there were periodic special events that were longer than 90 minutes, and even a couple of times when the main networks presented a series of plays over a period of time. ABC did several in the late 1960s and then in the early 1970s presented the filmings of Jonathan Miller’s production of The Merchant of Venice with Olivier, Plowright and Jeremy Brett, and the Long Day’s Journey with Olivier, Constance Cummings, Denis Quilley, Ronald Pickup and Maureen Lipman. Around 1968, CBS offered the American premiere of Peter Hall’s Midsummer film with, I believe, most of the cast of a stage production he’d directed. In the early 1980s, NBC mounted four stage productions specifically to be shown live on the network in prime time. And from time to time, one of the networks would unexpectedly produce a play for television, such as NBC’s After the Fall with Christopher Plummer and Faye Dunaway, At least into the 1960s, CBS occasionally came up with something, such as the famous 1966 Death of a Salesman. I can't remember offhand which network showed the Robards-Dewhurst-Flanders-Quintero A Moon for the Misbegotten, but it was one of the commercial networks, not public television. Nothing like that happens any more. So I think that back in the 1960s and 1970s at least, there was more theatre on television than there is now, although most of it was not filmings of stage productions. I am sad that Theatre Close-Up has not come back, even though the productions were shot (or perhaps I should say edited) in the way that I generally find so annoying. |
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