STREAMING SAVED THIS THEATER FAN
FOR MUCH of 2020, the theater has been accessible only by screen. This is like experiencing the cold through a picture of a snowman. It’s obviously not the same thing. But in a year of manifold losses, plays and musicals have found ways not simply to survive but to thrive in new mediums.
The Broadway productions of “Hamilton” and “What the Constitution Means to Me” reemerged as films that give a wider audience the best seats in the house. These are stage performances filmed and edited to preserve as much theatrical dynamism as possible.
Director Thomas Kail, who staged “Hamilton” on Broadway, captures on-screen how Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop-infused musical moves. The film, released by Disney+, allows us to feel the pulse of the original Broadway cast, with camera angles that slide from actor to audience view.
I first saw “Hamilton” off-Broadway at the Public Theater. When the show moved to Broadway, it was a cultural watershed. Casting performers of color in the roles of the Founding Fathers and their revolutionary associates was made more thrilling by the transformation of a group of solid working professionals into a company of stars.
The actors knew this was a careermaking moment (Leslie Odom Jr., Daveed Diggs and Renée Elise Goldsberry won Tonys), and their awareness galvanized their playing. Just being there felt like history.
Kail’s film registers this excitement. The perspective, shifting kaleidoscopically from actor to character to spectator, is as choreographed as the show itself. Was my experience enhanced by having attended the show? My memory was certainly awakened, but there was an added frisson of seeing the actors in closeup.
The film of “Hamilton” documents a theatrical milestone but lives in parallel to the original. I’d happily see “Hamilton” again onstage even with the movie available 24/7 on Disney+. Kail and company have whetted my appetite.
The same holds true for Heidi Schreck’s “What the Constitution Means to Me,” which I saw last year on Broadway and at the Mark Taper Forum in January with Maria Dizzia in Schreck’s role. Its charm is thoroughly intact on-screen. Watching on my laptop only intensified my admiration.
Who could have predicted that this category-defying performance work would be so comfortable in front of the camera? Part testimonial, part civics lesson, part game show, the production — a guided tour through the legal struggle for equal rights and reproductive freedom — doesn’t play by the rules of traditional scripted drama. It morphs, calls attention to its own shifting format, invites actors to break character and generally revels in its own liberty.
Marielle Heller’s film for Amazon Prime Video was shot during the last week of the show’s Broadway run. Schreck, who re-creates the oratory contests she excelled in as a teen, speaks directly to the audience. The tone is playful, but the subject matter is profoundly serious. While discussing landmark Supreme Court opinions, Schreck confides to us about the domestic abuse suffered by her grandmother and about her own decision to have an abortion as a 21-year-old.
The show’s setup presents some of the same filming challenges as stand-up comedy. But Heller (on a hot streak after “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” and “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”) creates a work that is complicated aesthetically and emotionally by getting us as close as technologically possible to Schreck’s physical performing presence. Schreck’s interactions with cast members Mike Iveson and ace teenage debater Rosdely Ciprian — jocular one minute, deeply empathetic the next — palpably come through.
Film has an advantage in monitoring subtle emotional shifts in a performance. One can see traumatic family memories washing over Schreck as she relates the difficult stories of the female relatives who came before her. When she recalls her younger self ’s awkwardness, her cringe is humorously contagious.
Heller incorporates audience reactions as they laugh, wipe away tears or simply listen. Liveness, the current generated when theatergoers coalesce their attention in the same physical space, can’t be replicated, but it can be intimated.
Spike Lee’s vibrant HBO film of David Byrne’s Broadway concert show “American Utopia,” another example of 2020 offering some recompense for theatrical losses, wouldn’t be the same without the euphoric roar of those in attendance. The audible delight of the audience fuels our own, giving us permission to dance along in our living rooms to “Once in a Lifetime” and “Burning Down the House.”
Even more traditional screen adaptations, such as George C. Wolfe’s stirring version of August Wilson’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” are enlivened by glimpses of theatrical witnesses. The film, on Netflix starting Friday, begins with Viola Davis in full concert makeup as blues singer Ma Rainey whipping an avid crowd of paying customers into an ecstasy of honky-tonk.
It’s as visceral a performance as you’ll ever see on-screen. Sweat and greasepaint sluicing off her, her gold teeth glinting, Davis’ Ma Rainey reveals the way the blues are wrung not just from a voice but also from a defiant body containing historical multitudes.
In inhabiting her character’s full frame, a padded Davis makes clear that to understand Ma Rainey you must confront her in the flesh. There can be no abstraction of this woman, no distancing of physical facts.
Davis’ performance sets the tone for a film that creates enough theatrical freedom for the full range of Wilson’s playwriting. The drama unfolds at a recording studio, where Ma Rainey’s white manager is urging her to make a record on the white record company owner’s timetable, while she’s determined to use her leverage to get more respect, if not a better deal, from those exploiting her moneymaking gift.
A different artistic struggle plays out among her band members. Ambitious trumpeter Levee (a potent Chadwick Boseman in his last role) cares more about artistic integrity than a paycheck. He wants to express himself through the music, but Ma Rainey and the suits are in charge. But Levee isn’t yet willing to go along to get along.
The character has ferocious riffs that build toward a confrontation with God for allowing so much injustice to rain down on Black people. This is writing meant to be performed on a stage, but the thunder that’s unleashed seems completely natural.
Boseman brings to this anguished scene the same embodied truth that Davis delivers in the title role. To say the film left me pulverized is to acknowledge the power of great theatrical acting in any medium.
If theater has an inherent edge in proximity, film and TV have the advantage in reach. Ryan Murphy brought to a wider audience via Netflix Mart Crowley’s landmark drama “The Boys in the Band” and the 2018 Broadway musical “The Prom,” two works advancing the conversation on LGBTQ acceptance.
Joe Mantello’s 2018 Tony-winning revival of “Boys” was filmed with the Broadway cast, led by Jim Parsons and Zachary Quinto with a flat-out sensational Robin de Jesús in the flaming role of Emory. The movie version took cinematic liberties but was largely faithful to the dramatic situation of a group of gay men reckoning with their pre-Stonewall lives at a celebration that begins in comedy and ends in psychodrama.
“The Prom,” which Murphy directed, is a splashy camp-fest about Broadway hams who take up the cause of Emma (Jo Ellen Pellman), a lesbian high school student in Indiana whose prom has been canceled to prevent her from attending with her girlfriend (Ariana DeBose). With a starry cast that includes Meryl Streep, James Corden and Nicole Kidman, the film delivers its progressive message about tolerance to the heartland.
Neither screen version is entirely comfortable in the medium. Adaptation is a fraught enterprise, and celebrity casting isn’t an unalloyed benefit. But Murphy takes inspiration from the theater’s long-standing commitment to LGBTQ equality, and it was heartening to see this moral mission on such a grand and glitzy scale.
Nothing can replace being inside a theater. But in this difficult pandemic year, directors have found ways of transmitting the power of an indestructible art form.