Broadway waged war on YouTube – now it's keeping theatre alive

In 2015, Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda fired a shot in Broadway's fiercest battle. In response to a Tumblr user complaining about the wait for a bootleg - an illicit recording - of his musical, Miranda wrote: "Here I am. The composer. Actively rooting against you." When the poster replied that "poor people who can't afford to pay for a show" would like to see it too, Miranda explained his stance:

"I'm thrilled you haven't heard a s_____, half-iphone recorded version yet, because I spent 6 years writing this and when you hear it, I want you to hear what I intended. I'm sorry theater only exists in one place at a time but that is also its magic. A bootleg cannot capture it."

The post sparked a debate on the morality of bootlegging, yet there had never been any doubt about Miranda's stance. He'd often testily chastised phone-wielding audiences, even changing the lyrics of his songs to attack them. But he's far from alone.

Producers and actors have taken drastic steps to prevent clips or full versions of their performances appearing on video sharing platforms such as YouTube, engaging in a cat-and-mouse game with tech-savvy theatre lovers who have secretly uploaded bootleg versions to the internet. Some Broadway musicals have even asked guests to place their phones in lockable foam pouches to prevent the temptation to film.

Those surreptitiously filmed versions of musicals have ended up online, shared within a community of often-teenage theatre nerds - then promptly taken down by the rights holders. However, some semi-formal forays into developing a Netflix for illegal theatre content have started up: one site, Iconic Arts, used to offer bootleg versions of musicals for payment until it was highlighted as a problem by an industry website. Now, it is at pains to say it no longer provides “videos of any kind through our website”.

That was before the coronavirus changed everything. In a matter of weeks, cultural institutions worldwide have performed the kind of about-turn usually saved for the dramatic third act of a redemption pot boiler. They’ve turned from technophobes into technophiles, and you’re now able to access a cultural cornucopia from the comfort of your own sofa and a visit to YouTube.

It’s a shocking volte-face, one highlighted by Broadway playwright Jeremy O Harris, who highlighted the hypocrisy in an industry who claimed videotaped productions were a mortal threat now embracing them less than six months later. In the great war pitting the promise of online video against the fearful theatrical world, a truce has been called – or is it a capitulation?

In the last few weeks, storied institutions such as the National Theatre and Royal Opera House have begun offering full performances on YouTube for free. Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre has taken to the streaming site, as has Saddler Wells, the English National Ballet and The Globe Theatre. Andrew Lloyd Weber has been posting versions of his musicals to a specially established channel called The Shows Must Go On!. For theatre lovers who have previously had to root out surreptitiously shot versions of performances online, it’s a gold mine. For those in the industry, it’s a shock.

“It’s absolutely staggering,” says Terri Paddock, founder of theatre websites StageFaves and MyTheatreMates. “I personally don’t have time to watch all this stuff, never mind write about it.” But such are the stark realities of the new world in which the cultural sector finds itself that it’s turning to the site that had previously been considered the mortal enemy and a real risk to theatre’s future viability. (Now there’s the uneasy knowledge that on the same site that hosts the newly-arrived sanctioned versions of West End musicals, illicit versions of the same shows are just a simple search away.)

Theatre had long treated the idea of recording and posting videotaped versions of its performances online as a threat to its future. Allow audiences access to taped versions of plays, the thinking went, and you risk them not turning up to the theatre and forking out big money for a seat to see it live.

As a result, very few productions decided to officially videotape their productions. But some tech rehearsal footage made available for actors secretly found its way into the theatre bootleg trading community, which generally comprises avid teenage fans who spend hours swapping links with each other to the latest productions that surface. Others ventured into theatres with cameraphones hidden in bags and jackets, avoiding ushers’ checks along the way.

Some within the industry, while not condoning piracy, believe old habits have prevented innovation. “Theatre has been reticent about the idea of meaningfully developing audiences for the last few years,” says Suba Das, artistic director of HighTide, a theatre company based in East Anglia. “Necessity is the mother of invention, and we find ourselves in a moment where a lot of theatre companies and organisations are in some cases straining for relevance.”

It’s an argument that those trading the tapes would agree with. They recognised that the filmed productions couldn’t replace the vibrancy and emotion of seeing live theatre, and instead argued it was a good shop window for productions. Seeing a musical on YouTube and enjoying it would encourage people to then make the leap to paying for an expensive ticket, they said by way of justifying their decision to shirk the law. Many believe a 2018 London production of Heathers: The Musical was a direct result of the off-Broadway production's popularity among bootleggers.

For years, both sides have remained intractably opposed. Until the Society of London Theatres announced the closure of all West End productions on 16 March, following a decision by Broadway the week before. “Within 48 hours, pretty much all the theatres had shut,” says Paddock.

“As soon as lockdown really kicked in, we were getting more and more approaches from players in the sector,” explains Ben McOwen Wilson, YouTube’s managing director in the UK and Ireland. “We had a bunch of industry-wide conversations about how these institutions keep going.”

The risk for cultural institutions is obvious: social distancing measures can’t work in the cramped confines of a theatre, and while the arts are vital to society, they’re likely to sit low on the totem pole for the government when it decides how to re-open the economy. Thousands of theatre staff have been furloughed or laid off, and there’s a real risk that many theatres – inside and outside the main hubs of London and New York – won’t return from lockdown. But for those that will, it’s important that they do so on the front foot, keeping their theatres at the front of their audiences’ minds.

“They’re trying to keep in contact with their audience and keep people entertained,” says Paddock. “As long as they are growing their social media followings that will put them in a better place for when they reopen.”

“We can’t simply sit and wait as a sector, because that means we probably won’t reopen until next year,” says Das. “There is something about how we now try to get out in front and start to bring artists together to really interrogate those opportunities in depth and detail.”

The first theatre to approach YouTube with an idea of maintaining that connection with their audience was the National Theatre, which already had a pre-existing library of videotaped performances thanks to their NT Live collaboration with cinemas – which also have shut nationwide. They drew up the idea of a weekly show on YouTube until the end of June. Their successes, with tens of thousands of people signing up to be notified when the production premieres on YouTube, and hundreds of thousands joining within the first few minutes of a broadcast beginning, have encouraged other theatres to explore what until now had been seen as a non-starter of an idea.

“200,000 or 300,000 concurrent viewers is good numbers by any YouTube channel’s reckoning,” says McOwen Wilson. “As each of these institutions has found their successes, it’s beginning to snowball.” YouTube’s ability to offer monetisation options, such as a way to solicit donations from viewers to tide over theatres during the lockdown, has also encouraged some onto the video sharing site as a way of generating revenue even while the lights are dimmed.

And it’s not just theatres: the Cannes, Tribeca, Tokyo International and Sundance film festivals will all be premiering content on YouTube at the end of May as part of a 10-day global film festival, called We Are One. They too are coming around to the idea of YouTube as a place to show their premieres, having spent the best part of a decade using YouTube’s copyright tools to prevent the spread of illicit versions online.

“What we’re finding is they’re in a place where it aligns more closely with the current realities of running their operations, to think: ‘Is there a sensible way?’,” says McOwen Wilson. “They’ve got more time. When you’re in the thick of a run, the number of people working on YouTube is very small in most of these places. We’ve got a bit more of their mindspace at the moment.”

The theatres are able to control the time their footage appears on the website, with performances taken down after a week, limiting some of the fears that once theatres reopen, the existence of a version on YouTube could cannibalise their in-person audience. But at the same time, YouTube is trying to see whether the limited-time partnership in extraordinary circumstances could become something more long-lasting.

“We’re beginning to have conversations with them around what might longer-term engagement look like, either as we’re coming out of lockdown or even beyond,” says McOwen Wilson. It’s been a success for many in the sector: content from British cultural institutions has been viewed more than 50 million times since March 1 on YouTube, according to the platform. What's more, new data from the ONS says that nine per cent of people have found watching online performances of theatrical productions have helped them cope with lockdown.

Yet some in the industry are worried. “None of this is earning anybody any money,” says Paddock. She’s also concerned that decisions made in extraordinary circumstances could have a longer-lasting impact. “There is a danger that people are going to expect this level of theatrical content for free forever.”

That’s something Das is concerned about as well. “I’m quite anxious about the rush to quite generously chuck things online for free. That doesn’t seem like a particularly intelligent business model. There’s a question now of how we create for that medium and how it’s theatrical, rather than every theatre straining to become a film company on 20 per cent of the budget.”

However, McOwen Wilson sees the argument differently – and oddly, echoes some of the proponents of bootlegging who have in the past used his platform to share illicit versions of musicals. “There’s a huge role we can play in helping to democratise – especially outside London – some of the access to this incredible cultural and creative heritage that the UK has and has built,” he says.

He also points to another industry that had previously foresworn working with YouTube in any way, fearing it would destroy their business model, but now counts the video website as its close partner. “Four years ago, people would have told us Sky and BT would never be working with us on their Premier League rights or their Champions League rights,” he says. “But they do, and are really leaning into building their audiences there. What we’ve got now with the cultural institutions is a real chance to work out how can we be net additive to everything they’ve got going on.”