CMU School of Drama


Monday, October 17, 2022

Australian Theatre Live launches digital subscription platform

limelightmagazine.com.au: For anyone growing up in the eighties and nineties, the ABC television and radio simulcast was a mainstay of Australian cultural life, regularly beaming performances by our national companies into our homes. Coupled with free concerts in Sydney’s Domain – no one could forget the very first Opera in the Park in 1982, with Dame Joan Sutherland starring in La Traviata, or the Les Misérables Australia Day Concert in 1989 – it was must-see TV, and on 2 October 1990, as Sutherland gave her farewell performance in Les Huguenots, there wasn’t a car on the road, or a dry eye in the house.

1 comment:

Angie Zarrilli said...

Although I am a huge fan of technology, especially those that can transport you into a new setting like VR, I’m not quite sure how I feel about this digital subscription service for theater. The one part I really enjoy about theater, and what I think differs it from movies and TV shows is that it is an in person experience. You GO to the theater and you sit and watch the show live. Moving this onto a digital platform is not theater. It’s just TV. I understand from a COVID perspective that having shows that are usually exclusive to Broadway was nice to be able to watch from the comfort from your home, but now that we are moving away from COVID culture, I don’t see how this type of screening is productive any longer. It is just stripping away what makes Broadway shows Broadway. Personally, I’d rather pay more to get the full experience than less to watch it from a screen.