Movies: Broadway Theatre Archive

This 1977 drama by Phillip Hayes Dean, deals with the sad division between what a man hopes for and what he achieves. In the title role, Dick Anthony Williams portrays a naïve, ambitious, recklessly optimistic man who is not understood by those close...

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."...

Norman Lloyd directed this televised production of Jean Renoir's World War II-era play. Taking place backstage at a theatrical performance in Nazi-occupied France, Carola is a tale of passion and intrigue that involves a beautiful stage actress and h...

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...

Cornelius "Con" Melody is an Irish tavern keeper in New England who lives in reverence of his former days as a nobleman and decorated officer in the British army during the Napoleonic wars. Impoverished now, he struts about in his uniform and plots t...

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 monologue of a woman talking on the phone with her longterm lover who is about to marry another girl....

This Pirates of Penzance is primarily a historical document, part of the Broadway Theater Archive television series.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

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...

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...

In a sun-dappled garden in provincial Russia in 1905, some factory owners and their wives discuss the unrest among the workers. Rather than submit to a strike, they decide to close down the factory. When an owner is slain in a scuffle with a workman,...

Just before the Salem Witch Trials, an embittered old woman, who has learned witchcraft, teams up with the Devil, and brings a scarecrow to life as part of her diabolical revenge on the judge who was once her lover....

Amanda Wingfield dominates her children with her faded gentility and exaggerated tales of her Southern belle past. Her son plans escape; her daughter withdraws into a dream world. When a gentleman caller appears, things move to crisis point....

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...

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...

Willy Loman is an over-the-hill salesman who faces a personal turning point when he loses his job and attempts to make peace with his family: Willy's long-suffering wife Linda, and Biff and Happy, his troubled sons and his life....

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

A humble and long-suffering New York waiter finally turns the tables on a regular, insufferable customer who delights in pestering him about the service. Based on the playwright’s personal experiences as a waiter at a resort in the Catskill Mountains...

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...

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...