Movies: Broadway Theatre Archive

An aging Southern belle's preoccupation with her past and her dreams for her children's futures threaten to smother her painfully shy daughter and her aspiring writer son....

This Pirates of Penzance is primarily a historical document, part of the Broadway Theater Archive television series. It presents, with some inevitable, tiny technical shortcomings, a live 1980 performance in Central Park, not the 1983 movie of the sa...

San Francisco's prize-winning American Conservatory Theater's rowdy commedia dell'arte production incorporates slapstick, pratfall and earthy humor into William Shakespeare's comedy about the two unmarried daughters of a wealthy Italian merchant. Whi...

A television adaptation of Lillian Hellman's play about the Hubbards, a rich Southern family of greedy, ruthless individuals....

Donald Moffat stars in Moliere's classic comedy about lovable scoundrel Tartuffe, who befriends the wealthy Orgon and then attempts to seduce both his new friend's wife and daughter in this TV presentation from the Broadway Theatre Archive. Tartuffe ...

Producer-director Glenn Jordan brought together two Tennessee Williams plays, written twenty years apart, that examine the theme of isolation with searching clarity. The joint presentation, entitled "Dragon Country," features the world premiere of "I...

A collection of ten vignettes by Tennessee Williams offering various viewpoints on life, love, and death....

Tandy, Merideth and assorted others unexpectedly wake up in a steambath with no easy exit. After spending some time there, it becomes clear that the steambath is a sort of Afterlife, where indifferent souls come to tell their stories to God who happe...

A rehearsal is disrupted when six figures mysteriously appear on the stage, claiming to be fictional characters from an unfinished play searching for an author to tell their tragic story. An adaptation of the classic Luigi Pirandello play, updated to...

This musical adaptation of the Studs Terkel book examines the average worker's viewpoint--showing that he or she is anything but average. Based on a series of interviews with real working people--construction workers, waitresses, firemen, secretaries...

Ken Talley, a Vietnam vet who lost his legs in combat, lives in a farmhouse in rural Missouri with his lover, Jed. Traumatized and bitter, Ken struggles to find meaning in his life. As he contemplates selling the farmhouse, old friends and family mem...

Meryl Streep stars as Alice in this production of Elizabeth Swados' musical, which was adapted from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll. Based on the acclaimed New York Shakespeare Festival production by Jo...

Dramatist Luigi Pirandello's mordant comedy of manners tells the tale of upper-crust Italians Silia Gala and her sneering spouse, Leone, who finds his impassivity tested when he has to duel his wife's frustrated paramour....

James Earl Jones delivers a riveting performance as paranoid patriarch King Lear, an aging monarch who insists that his three daughters prove their love for him, only to learn he's exalted the two who seek to destroy him. This live performance record...

Cash Bentley and his wife Louise lead an average upper-middle-class life in suburbia, with a nice home and two fine children. But Cash grows increasingly unsettled in his life, yearning for the glories of his athletic youth and watching them fade fur...

Henry Flipper is the first black West Point graduate. Assigned to serve at Fort Davis in Texas, Flipper becomes the object of a conspiracy by his fellow cadets to rid the base of its only black graduate....

A young Irish ward boss has a chance to be elected mayor, but the disgraced current mayor makes sure the candidate's wife learns about his affair with a just-deceased rich girl....

Anton Chekhov's play "The Seagull" is brought to life in this acclaimed 1975 production directed by John Desmond. Seeking to reform the theater, Konstantin (Frank Langella) has written an experimental play with the lead to be acted by his beloved, Ni...

Several different accounts of the same incident tell quite different stories about what happened....

A Danish prince and university student avenges his father's murder by his uncle, who stole the crown and married his mother....