The current crisis has had a devastating effect on the performing arts. Broadway has shut down, and the ban on gatherings in New York extends to all other performance spaces as well. So the show must go online—and, luckily, streaming video makes that possible. Here are some of the best theater, opera, dance and cabaret performances you can watch today without leaving home, many of which will help you support the artists involved.
Events that go live today are at the top of the list; be sure to scroll down past the daily listings to find major events that you can still stream for a limited time and, below that, a bonus section of videos that have no expiration date. We update this page every day, so please feel free to bookmark it and check back. (Refresh the bookmark every week or so for optimal use.)
Puffs, Or: Seven Increasingly Eventful Years at a Certain School of Magic and Magic
Noon EDT / 5pm BST (available through May 31)
Matt Cox's not-officially-a-Harry-Potter-comedy Harry Potter comedy Puffs takes an affectionate look at the underachieving but good-hearted denizens of the catch-all house in J.K. Rowling's world of wizardry. As in the books, things start off cutely but get increasingly darker, with a good amount of heart woven in with the spoofing. If you missed the show in its four-year run in New York, which ended last year, you can catch up with it now: Starting today, Playbill's Playback series is streaming the show in its entirety, in a performance that was filmed in 2018. (Starting at 8pm tomorrow night, members of the cast will live-tweet the show as part of a virtual watch party, with the hashtag #PlaybillPlayback.) Tickets cost $8.99, part of which benefits the local charity Frontline Foods.
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Puffs | Photograph: Hunter Canning
Berliner Ensemble: Macbeth: Nach Shakespeare
Noon EDT / 5pm BST (available for one week)
Last week, Bertolt Brecht's old company, the Berliner Ensemble, streamed a 1957 recording of Mother Courage, but without English subtitles. Somewhat more accessible to most U.S. audiences, if only nominally, is this week's offering, which does offer a translation: Heiner Müller's bizarre, gory and echt German Macbeth, liberally adapted from Shakespeare's tragedy. The play is not well known to U.S. audiences—Müller, often considered Brecht's successor, scored a bigger international success with his dense, postmodern Hamletmachine—so this is a rare chance to see it. Michael Thalheimer directs the production.
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Macbeth | Photograph: Matthias Horn
Untitled Theater Company No. 61: The Pig, or Václav Havel's Hunt for a Pig
Noon EDT / 5pm BST (available through May 31)
In this Czech play—written by Václav Havel in 1987, expanded by Vladimír Morávek in 2010 and adapted into English by Edward Einhorn—Havel tries to literally bring home the bacon for a group of fellow dissidents. Food and drink were served at the show's 2014 multimedia production at 3LD, which was directed by Henry Akona; you can't get those from this recording, of course, but songs from Smetana's The Bartered Bride are also on the menu.
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The Pig, or Václav Havel's Hunt for a Pig | Photograph: Arthur Cornelius
The Shows Must Go On!: The Sound of Music Live!
2pm EST / 7pm BST (not available in the U.S., Asia or Latin America)
The YouTube channel The Shows Must Go On! began by rolling out a different Andrew Lloyd Webber musical every week. That well having run dry, it is moving on to musical-theater works by other writers, which will again stay up for 48 hours each. First up is NBC's The Sound of Music Live!, which drew huge ratings in 2013 thanks largely to the draw of pop singer Carrie Underwood as wayward nun Maria von Trapp. This performance of the 1959 musical differs somewhat from the Julie Andrews film, but you know the basic deal: Kids learn music, stern dad melts, sixteen goes on seventeen, la follows so. Along the way, the show delivers such beloved Rodgers and Hammerstein standards as "My Favorite Things," "Do-Re-Mi" and "Climb Every Mountain." In addition to musical-theater novice Underwood, who struggles at the start but gets a bit surer as she goes along, the principal cast of the NBC broadcast includes Stephen Moyer as Captain Von Trapp and—stealing the show entirely—Broadway ringers Audra McDonald as the Mother Abbess, Christian Borle as Max and the superb Laura Benanti as the Baroness. [Note: On Friday morning, without notice, The Shows Must Go On! posted that "Unfortunately due to rights restrictions, this show won't be available in the US, LATAM and Asia."]
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The Sound of Music | Photograph: NBC
Stars in the House: Cry-Baby Broadway cast reunion
2pm EDT / 7pm BST
Showtune savant and SiriusXM host Seth Rudetsky (Disaster!) and his husband, producer James Wesley, are the animating forces behind this ambitious and very entertaining new series to benefit the Actors Fund. Twice a day, they play host to a different theater star for a live, chatty interview interspersed with songs. Dr. Jon LaPook, the chief medical correspondent for CBS News, provides periodic updates on public health. Today's matinee edition features a cast reunion of the underrated 2008 Broadway musical Cry-Baby, which adapted from the John Waters film by Mark O'Donnell and Thomas Meehan, with a score by David Javerbaum and the late Adam Schlesinger. Gathering to dive back into the Waters are James Snyder, Elizabeth Stanley, Christopher J. Hanke, Alli Mauzey, Harriet Harris and Chester Gregory II.
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Cry-Baby | Photograph: Joan Marcus
The Royal Opera House: Cendrillon
2pm EDT / 7pm BST (available through May 28)
The Royal Opera House at Covent Garden has been streaming operas and ballets every week to help culture-hungry Brits and others get through the coronavirus pandemic. This week's selection is Cendrillon, Jules Massenet and Henri Caïn's 1899 rendition of the Cinderella story (not to be confused with Rossini's take on the same tale, La Cenerentola). Joyce DiDonato plays the ash-kicking heroine, with support from Alice Coote, in male drag as Prince Charming. Director Laurent Pelly also designed the costumes; Bertrand de Billy conducts this performance from the 2011 production that marked the opera's belated ROH debut.
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Cendrillon | Photograph: Bill Cooper
Cirque du Soleil: Behind the Curtain of Kurios
3pm EDT / 8pm BST
As part of its ongoing CirqueConnect series, the Québécois neocircus behemoth Cirque du Soleil offers an hourlong backstage tour of one of its most spectacular efforts. As we wrote when the production came to NYC in 2016, Kurios—Cabinet of Curiosities is Cirque's sharpest, sexiest, most stylish production in years. In a departure from the otherworldly themes for which the company is best known, writer-director Michel Laprise embraces a steampunk aesthetic: metal and leather, chunky robots, glowing filaments under glass, a singer with a phonograph horn on her head. The style may be retro, but the acts—and the technical ingenuity that makes them possible—are fully up-to-date.
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Kurios—Cabinet of Curiosities | Photograph: Martin Girard
Marie's Crisis Virtual Piano Bar
4pm–9:30pm EDT / 9pm–2:30am BST
The beloved West Village institution Marie's Crisis keeps the show tunes rolling merrily along every night of the week. Read all about it here. Join the Maries Group page on Facebook to watch from home, and don't forget to tip the pianist and staff through Venmo. Tonight's scheduled pianists are Kenney Green (@KenneyGreenMusic) and Adam Michael Tilford (@Adam-Tilford-1).
Acting for a Cause: Twelfth Night
5pm EDT / 10pm BST
A Chicago producer-director named Brando Crawford has set up his own charity called Acting for a Cause, and has been gathering very impressive casts of young Hollywood stars for super-casual live Zoom readings of classic plays. Today's installment stars Ruby Rose—who made international headlines this week for her dramatic departure from the CW's Batwoman—as Viola in Twelfth Night, Shakespeare's ever-popular comedy of cross-purposes, cross-dressing and cross-gartered stockings. Joining her in the cast are Brandon Thomas Lee, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Froy Gutierrez, Nicole Kang and Dear Evan Hansen graduates Will Roland, Taylor Trensch and Ben Levi Ross. Donations are welcome, and proceeds benefit Chicago's Mount Sinai Hospital and the Entertainment Industry Foundation.
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Ruby Rose | Photograph: Greg Gayne/The CW
The Builders Association: Ten Stories: A Decameron from the Builders
5pm EDT / 10pm BST (live only)
Director Marianne Weems's company, the Builders Association (House/Divided), has foregrounded technology since it launched in 1994, so it should adjust to the new reality of live theater performance like a fish to an online streaming platform. In this inventive new series, inspired by Boccaccio's 14th-century plague-story anthology, the troupe offers five original half-hour playlets—today is the last—that are structured as storytelling conversations; viewers who watch it on two devices at once can access visual extras. Performers Moe Angelos and David Pence anchor each episode, joined by two guest artists each time. The performances can only be viewed live, but all five will be released on June 1 if you miss any.
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Moe Angelos | Photograph: Stephanie Warren
Julie Halston: Virtual Halston
5pm EDT / 10pm BST
The divinely daffy Julie Halston suggests a cross between Teri Garr and Thelma Ritter, and her career includes many shows as Charles Busch's longtime muse as well as memorable supporting turns in such Broadway productions as Gypsy, You Can't Take it With You and Tootsie. This evening she launches a weekly half-hour talk show, and why not? She's one of the city's most amusing talkers. Her guest on the first episode is the energetic comic actor Mario Cantone.
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Julie Halston | Photograph: Walter McBride
Lower East Side Festival of the Arts
6pm EDT / 11pm BST (available through May 24)
More than 250 artists convene virtually to celebrate the artistic heritage of the Lower East Side in the 25th edition of this annual free-for-all at Theater for the New City. The centerpiece is a live-only performance and conversation tomorrow night at 8pm, featuring David Amram, F. Murray Abraham, Phoebe Legere, Penny Arcade, William Electric Black, Austin Pendleton and Charles Busch. The rest of the weekend is structured more loosely: Visitors to TNC's website can choose among dozens of videos submitted by actors, dancers, poets, playwrights, filmmakers, musicians, comedians, singers and puppeteers, including K.T. Sullivan, Reno, Trav SD, Marissa Mulder, Bread and Puppet Theater, Thunderbird American Indian Dancers and Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre. LES is more, indeed.
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Lower East Side Festival of the Arts | Photograph: Jonathan Slaff
San Francisco Ballet: Bound To©
6pm EDT / 11pm BST (available for one week)
San Francisco Ballet stays on its toes by streaming a different complete ballet from its archives every week. This one is Bound To©, a 2018 work by Christopher Wheeldon (An American in Paris), set to music by singer-songwriter Keaton Henson. Wheeldon's first ballet designed to be performed without pointe shoes—but with iPhones—the piece explores disconnection in the digital age, and features another Wheeldon first: same-sex couples dancing pas de deux.
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Bound To | Photograph: Erik Tomasson
Sounds of the City: Krystal Joy Brown
6:15pm and 7:15pm EDT / 11:15pm and 12:15am BST
Krystal Joy Brown, who was playing Eliza in Hamilton before the current intermission, performs a love outdoor concert at midtown's Worldwide Plaza. Neighbors can hear it from their windows; everyone else can listen in via Instagram Live. Joining her on piano is Larry O'Keefe, the gifted composer of Legally Blonde, Bat Boy and Heathers. Proceeds benefit Food Bank For New York City.
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Krystal Joy Brown | Photograph: Courtesy Sounds of the City
54 Below At Home: I Wish: The Roles That Could Have Been
6:30pm EDT / 11:30pm BST (live only)
The city's top supper club, Feinstein's/54 Below, offers shows from its archives, streamed live on YouTube for one night only, in its ongoing series #54BelowatHome. Tonight it goes in a different direction with a live-from-home edition of a series conceived and hosted by Alexandra Silber (Fiddler on the Roof), in which Broadway performers get a chance to dreamcast themselves in parts they will probably never get to play. Performers include Elizabeth Stanley, Julia Murney, Drew Gehling, Nicholas Barasch, Robyn Hurder, Samantha Massell, Isabelle McCalla, Jelani Remy, Kirsten Scott, Matthew Scott and Nik Walker. Ben Caplan serves as musical director.
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Alexandra Silber | Photograph: Rebecca Michaelson
Mad Forest
7pm EDT / midnight BST (live only)
One of the world's great playwrights, Caryl Churchill (Cloud Nine), worked with student actors to create Mad Forest, her 1990 play about the Romanian Revolution that had topped the Ceaușescu regime the year before. It's fitting, then, that student actors—in this case, acting students at Bard College—should be the ones performing this ambitious and inventive virtual revival of the play, under the guidance of experimental and opera director Ashley Tata. After mounting the piece remotely through a modified version of Zoom last month—using some 125 digital backgrounds, among other technological strategies—they are now bringing it back for three more live performances, in partnership with NYC's Theatre for a New Audience. Tickets are free, but advance reservations are required; if you miss today's deadline at noon, you can still sign up for the 5pm show on Sunday or the 3pm show on May 27.
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Mad Forest | Photograph: Courtesy the Fisher Center at Bard
Streaming Musicals: Marry Harry
7pm EDT and 10pm EDT / midnight and 3am BST (live only)
After successes with the period pieces Emma and Pride and Prejudice, Streaming Musicals goes contemporary—if still old-fashioned—in its latest offering. Two East Villagers in their late twenties try to forge new families and break free of their old ones in this musical comedy by Jennifer R. Manocherian, Dan Martin and Michael Biello, which had an Off Broadway run in 2017. (This version was recorded in a studio the next year.) Veanne Cox and Laura Osnes host the show's online premiere, which begins 15 minutes before the virtual curtain. (There's a gratis encore at 10pm and another tomorrow at 2pm; if you miss them, you can rent the show through Streaming Musicals for a modest charge.)
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Marry Harry | Photograph: Susie Hook
Astoria Performing Arts Center: Livin' the Dreamboat
7pm EDT / midnight BST
The scrappy Queens company APAC launches The Insiders: Musicals from the Quarantine, a weekly series of short-musical premieres. The inaugural offering, Livin' the Dreamboat, features book and lyrics by Claire Tran and music by Blake Allen; Daniella Caggiano directs actors Bailey Carson and Jeff Williams. A $10 donation is suggested.
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Blake Allen | Photograph: Courtesy of the artist
The Metropolitan Opera: Don Giovanni
7:30pm EDT / 12:30am BST (available for 23 hours)
The Met continues its immensely popular rollout of past performances, recorded in HD and viewable for free. A different archival production goes live at 7:30pm each night and remains online for the next 23 hours. For the four week in a row, the Viewer's Choice tonight is from before the Live in HD era: a 1978 broadcast of Mozart's Don Giovanni, with the imposing James Morris as the debauched title character and the stupendous Joan Sutherland as Donna Anna. (Morris, who made his Met debut in 1971 and has performed with the company more than 1,000 times, was also in last night's Turandot, which was recorded last year). To vote for future Viewers' Choice selections, go to the Met's Facebook or Instagram page tonight for a link to the ballot.
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Don Giovanni | Photograph: Winnie Klotz
Dicon Place: Dance Quarantine VI
7:30pm EDT / 12:30am BST
In this weekly anthology, curated by Sangeeta Yesley, homebound dancers and choreographers associated with the downtown arts incubator Dixon Place express their pent-up emotions. This edition features works created between April 27 and May 12 by Anthony Alterio, Caylee Shimizu, Grazia Capri, Julia Gleich, Ross Daniel and Shoko Tamai.
Play-PerView: Eureka Day
8pm EDT / 1am BST (live only)
The charitable virtual-theater initiative Play-PerView presents a live, one-time-only Zoom reading of Jonathan Spector's Eureka Day, a very timely play about disease and social-media rage, featuring the original company of the show's sold-out Off Broadway run last year. Under Adrienne Campbell-Holt's alert direction, the expert actors—Tina Benko, Elizabeth Carter, KK Moggie, Thomas Jay Ryan and Brian Wiles—extract comic gold from the little tugs-of-war within the executive committee of an ultraliberal elementary school. But this comedy of manners yields to a serious probing of interpersonal responsibility and the limits of consideration. Even as it stakes out a moral position on its subject, Eureka Day avoids the kind of lording dismissal that, in too much of our social-media lives, has become epidemic. Tickets cost $15–$100, and proceeds benefit Colt Coeur and No Kid Hungry.
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Eureka Day | Photograph: Robert Altman
New York City Ballet: Liturgy and Carousel (A Dance)
8pm EDT / 1am BST (available for 72 hours)
In place of City Ballet's six-week spring season at Lincoln Center, the venerable dance company is providing a month and a half of digital offerings, including workshops and movement classes as well as streamed recordings of pieces from its repertoire every Tuesday and Friday. (Each release stays live for three days.) Tonight's offering is a diptych of works by choreographer Christopher Wheeldon: the 2003 pas de deux Liturgy, set to music by Arvo Pärt and performed by Maria Kowroski and Jared Angle in 2017; and 2002's Carousel (A Dance), set to Richard Rodgers's music for the Broadway musical Carousel—specifically, "The Carousel Waltz" and "If I Loved You"—and danced in 2018 by a group led by Lauren Lovette and Tyler Angle.
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Carousel (A Dance) | Photograph: Rosalie O'Connor
Joe's Pub: Sarah Stiles: Squirrel Heart
8pm EDT / 1am BST
The essential downtown music hub Joe's Pub continues its rollout of favorites from its archives. Tonight's offering, recorded in 2018, is a delightful set by the hilariously off-kilter Sarah Stiles, whose Little Red Riding Hood put the Central Park revival of Into the Woods in her basket and earned well-deserved Tony nominations for her comically ingenious turns in Hand to God and Tootsie.
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Sarah Stiles | Photograph: Courtesy of the artist
Opera Philadelphia: Sky on Swings
8pm EDT / 1am BST (available through August 31)
Veteran mezzo-sopranos Marietta Simpson and Frederica von Stade plays women at different stages of Alzheimer's disease in this modern opera by Philadelphia Opera composer in residence Lembit Beecher and librettist Hannah Moscovitch, which premiered in 2018 as part of the company's second O festival. The production is directed by Joanna Settle and conducted by Geoffrey McDonald.
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Sky on Swings | Photograph: Courtesy Philadelphia Opera
Kurt Phelan: From NYC with Love
8pm EDT / 1am BST
Aussie triple threat Kurt Phelan celebrates his birthday—and mourns his impending departure from New York City to deal with family matters back home—with a saucy evening of song, dance and storytelling. Joining him on piano is his husband, the songwriter and Club Cumming community leader Lance Horne.
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Kurt Phelan | Photograph: Austin Ruffer
TRLive!: Nate Weida
8pm EDT / 1am BST
In its informal Friday-night series, Theatre Row provides a platform for artists to reach audiences at home. This week's guest is musical-theater composer Nate Weida, who has written more than a dozen shows and has worked with Salty Brine on multiple episodes of Brine's excellent Living Record Collection series. His in-progress collaboration with the Assembly, In Corpo, is scheduled to make its debut at Theatre Row next year.
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Nate Weida | Photograph: Courtesy of the artist
Stars in the House: Desperate Housewives TV reunion
8pm EDT / 1am BST
Tonight's edition of Stars in the House strays from the series's usual theatrical focus to reunite cast members of the 2000s water-cooler TV show Desperate Housewives. Rudetsky and Wesley already gathered the show's women for an episode last month; this time it's the men, including Ricardo Antonio Chavira, Doug Savant, James Denton, Mark Moses, Tuc Watkins and Kevin Rahm.
Trump Lear
8:30pm EDT / 1:30am BST (live only)
You may know David Carl from his portrayal of Gary Busey in his standout one-man comedy show, David Carl's Celebrity One-Man Hamlet. Now Carl plays an actor named Carl David (try to keep up), who evokes the wrath of Donald Trump by portraying the President in a solo version of King Lear, Shakespeare's portrait of a senescent ruler whose vanity tears his country apart. Carl now performs the show live on Zoom on Fridays from his home in Brooklyn. Tickets are $12.
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Trump Lear | Photograph: Anthony Velez
Steve Watts
9pm EDT / 2am BST
Once a familiar face at NYC piano bars including the Duplex and Bar Nine, the snuggly and beloved Steve Watts has since moved to Wisconsin, where there may be fewer nightclubs but at least his vote will count. In his now-weekly Friday gig, part of Milwaukee Chamber Theatre's Safer At Home Performance Series, he performs 90 minutes of piano-friendly favorites by folks like the Beatles, Elton John, David Bowie and Billy Joel. (You can put bread in his Venmo jar at @Steve-Watts-3.)
NOTE: If you would like to be considered for this page, please write to Adam Feldman at theaterfromhome@gmail.com. Listings continue below.
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