Movies: Broadway Theatre Archive

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...

Theodore Hickman, a hardware salesman, makes by-yearly visits to Harry Hope's 1910-era waterfront bar for his periodical drinking binges. But on this visit he has decided to try to save the bar's patrons from their "lying pipe dreams."...

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....

From the elaborate Broadway revival of the 1932 Eva Le Gallienne/Florida Friebus production comes a whimsical retelling of the Lewis Carroll classic....

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...

A dramatization of the 1865 war-crimes trial of Henry Wirz, commandant of the notorious Confederate POW camp at Andersonville, Georgia....

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...

This Pirates of Penzance is primarily a historical document, part of the Broadway Theater Archive television series.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...

An affluent suburban couple's empty and gin-fueled lives are observed through the eyes of their neglected, eight-year old daughter....

Adapted from Arthur Miller's play, film focuses on a group of Frenchmen who are detained at Vichy, the capital of France while under Nazi occupation, and "investigated" under suspicion of secretly being Jewish....

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

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...

The powerful tales of seven diverse African-American women are woven together in this 1982 performance of Ntozake Shange's Obie Award-winning landmark play. A breakthrough portrayal of black women's experiences in America, the story combines music, p...

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...

High-spirited model Hazel decides that she should settle down in this stage play based on a Dorothy Parker short story. But her marriage to traveling salesman Herbie Morse fails to satisfy her due to his alcoholism and frequent absences. Dispirited a...

Three Irwin Shaw short stories are dramatized. In "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses" a young married couple stop for a drink on a Sunday morning in Manhattan, and the conversation turns to the husband's fidelity. "The Monument" centers on the confli...

A novel portrait of author Ernest Hemingway, in which four versions of the man from different points of his life exist simultaneously....

A writer (made to resemble Russian playwright Anton Chekhov) narrates a collection of his stories, all of which are written in the style of Chekhov....

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

The tale of a lonely Southern woman's longing for her handsome next-door neighbor. At once tragic and romantic, the story is a reworking of the Williams play "Summer and Smoke," which uses the same characters and setting but in dramatically different...