'Phèdre' live — coming to a theater near you

Save the date: June 25, 2009 (this coming Thursday) is the big day.

Long story by Ellen Gamerman in the June 19, 2009 Wall Street Journal short: The play, starring Helen Mirren (above and below), will be broadcast live in high-definition to 270 movie theaters and art spaces around the U.S. and multiple countries around the world.

Here's the article.

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Popcorn and a Play

Opera, sports and now a London theater's Greek tragedy, broadcast to screens around the world

The summer blockbustercoming to a theater near you is…a Greek tragedy?

Not quite, but a new stage production of “Phèdre” by the National Theatre in London will be getting some extra exposure starting next week. A live performance will be broadcast to 270 cinemas and arts spaces around the world, including more than 30 U.S. venues.

The Jean Racine tragedy, starring Helen Mirren (Oscar-winning star of “The Queen”), is one of four productions featured in “NT Live,” a National Theatre initiative that attempts to break down the wooden look and feel of filmed plays by using high-definition cameras and satellite technology. The result: a close-up view of a stage play that many audiences will experience in real time, or close to it.

The new series makes the stage accessible to the mainstream in a way it hasn’t been before, allowing theater lovers to see elite performances much the same way sports fans flock to high-definition broadcasts of games they can’t attend. Theatrical performances that were previously exclusive—theaters only fit so many people, and many top productions only visit a handful of big cities—are potentially open to any town with a movie screen.

The National Theatre series, similar to the Metropolitan Opera’s live broadcasts in movie theaters that began a few years ago, will be screened in more than a dozen countries. The National Theatre calls this the first time a play has ever been performed live in high definition and broadcast to a wide international audience.

High-definition broadcasts of sporting events, rock concerts and comedy shows are increasingly popular at movie theaters. Diehard fans are willing to pay more for a ticket, and many people crave the group experience. Early this year, the BCS National Championship football game played in 3D in 82 theaters simultaneously.

NCM Fathom, a division of National CineMedia that distributes broadcasts of live and pre-recorded events to cinemas, went from 22 presentations in 2006 to 43 last year, according to a company spokeswoman. Fathom has presented simulcasts of a live comedy act by Fox News personality Glenn Beck and a live recording of the radio program “This American Life.” Next month it will bring a taped version of the Off-Broadway musical “Forever Plaid” to about 400 movie theaters in the U.S. (with a live audience sing-along at the end).

Theater may not be as natural a fit for the big screen as a football game or an opera. The bigger-than-life performances in “Phèdre” required to command London’s 890-seat Lyttelton Theatre may seem forced on a movie screen, and audiences may bring Hollywood expectations to the cinema. In the French drama, Ms. Mirren plays the title role, a woman who lusts after her young stepson, believing that her husband is dead, and then accuses him of rape after her husband unexpectedly returns. “It’s a Racine tragedy, it lasts two hours, there’s no intermission—I don’t think we’re going to get the audience for a summer popcorn movie,” says Nicholas Hytner, director of the National Theatre.

On the night of Thursday’s broadcast, there will be five or six cameras, a track at the front of the auditorium and a crane to capture the performance from different angles. The feed will be unedited: the crew will work off a shooting script and practice with cameras beforehand.

The aim is for theatergoers from Ireland to Estonia to watch the play at the same moment. When time zones and satellite orbits don’t permit that, the play is meant to be broadcast as close to the performance as possible (though some U.S. venues are showing it a couple of weeks later). “It was an experiment worth undertaking,” says Mr. Hytner. “The liveness of it, or in America’s case the nearly liveness of it, will make a big difference.” (In the U.S., tickets cost about $20; prices vary depending on the theater.)

The same distributor working on “The Met: Live in HD” is involved in the National Theatre project. Audiences at the filmed productions at New York’s Metropolitan Opera have jumped from 325,000 in the first 2006-07 season to 1.7 million in the 2008-09 season, says Met general manager Peter Gelb. The movies have helped boost attendance at the opera house, he says, with ticket sales up about 12% since the program started.

In the 1950s and 60s, plays were regularly performed and presented on television and movie screens, live or on tape, though the productions were more “prestige items” than moneymakers, says Barry Monush, a researcher at the Paley Center for Media in New York.

American audiences have long taken an interest in the British stage, with London serving as an incubator for many Broadway productions. This past season, British transfers dominated the Tony awards: “Billy Elliot, the Musical” won the trophy for best musical, “God of Carnage” won best play and “The Norman Conquests” won best play revival.

In coming months, the National Theatre will broadcast Shakespeare’s “All’s Well That Ends Well,” an adaptation of a Terry Pratchett children’s novel “Nation” and a new play by Alan Bennett, “The Habit of Art.”

Bernice Baeza, executive director of the Lark Theater, an Art Deco, single-screen cinema in Larkspur, Calif., expects her 250-seat theater to sell out of the $29 “Phèdre” tickets: “What people are excited about and why they want to go see it is for a little town like Larkspur, Helen Mirren’s just not coming. We’re just not going to see her live onstage in our town.”

Though Mr. Hytner has said that viewers should expect a theatrical experience—not a major motion picture—he still sounds like a moviegoer. “I’d take in popcorn,” he says.

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FunFact: According to a June 18, 2009 Economist article, "More people are likely to see the National Theatre's 'Phèdre' on June 25 than have ever seen a single live production of a play before."

"Nicholas Hytner, director of the National Theatre and of 'Phèdre,' cannot think of a play that has reached a larger audience. The great amphitheatre at Epidaurus [below],

south-west of Athens, where Euripides’s original version of 'Phèdre' would surely have played in the 3rd century BC, and which this production will visit on July 10th and 11th, holds a mere 12,000 or so."