Channeling Broadway.

REMEMBER YOUR FIRST theater experience? Maybe it was Babes in Toyland or something a bit more grown up, but will you ever forget the excited anticipation, the usher showing you to your seat, the program rustle, and the biggest thrill of all, the curtain rising on a magical scene?

If two and maybe more entertainment companies have their way, this unique experience may be rarer in the future. In what is admittedly an enterprising move, Broadway Television Network (BTN) and Broadway Digital Entertainment (BDE) are spearheading a way to bring "live" theater to the widest audience possible via TV. It's an idea that far exceeds pay-per-view (PPV) TV as we know it. BTN plans to record Broadway shows, packaging them somewhat like sports events, with behind-the-scenes interviews, peeks at backstage doings, magazine-style profiles of stars, and a barrage of commercials shilling the show. Viewers will pay around $35 for this not-going-to-the-theater privilege made possible by today's big technical advances. "Electronic studios" and direct broadcast satellites will give Broadway "a television face" says BTV chief executive Kay Koplovitz.

Obviously PPV isn't a new concept. But its potential hasn't been fully exploited over the years, partly because of the difficulties with theatrical unions and the belief by some theater managements that putting a show on TV kills box office sales. One musical, Sophisticated Ladies, and more recently, Death of a Salesman, were made available on a PPV basis. Great Performances and Dance in America have for many years brought such shows as Black and Blue, Crazy for You, and evening-long performances by many dance companies to viewers for free. BTN's approach, however, aims to enfold the latest technical gadgetry into recording the play or musical in high-definition TV, with surround sound and robotic cameras strung among the audience.

In January, just as Smokey Joe's Cafe was heading (with its closing notices) toward a fifth year, BTN taped the final matinee. After it's seen later this year, other shows, at the rate of a dozen or more over the next five years, will be available in real time--aired as they are actually in progress, says Susan E. Lee, a spokesperson for BTN. "We'll go into a regularly scheduled performance with our technicians in the auditorium and mike audiences as well to capture that greater feeling of immediacy and get even better sound ambience." Eventually after BTN's licensing operation reaches limits, forecasts Lee, "these shows may find their way to TV for a lower or even no fee."

BDE, the other company intent on bringing Broadway to the home, is concentrating on building an archive of 300 studio productions of well-known plays and musicals that have been shown over the years on TV. (It may be remembered that sponsors such as Hallmark greeting cards often produced such star-studded shows.) They will be sold and syndicated with new digital and broadband technology. With the proceeds from such sales, BDN hopes it can finance new plays and musicals that would be on Broadway for a short time only, then, recorded, become TV's answer to the theater's packaged subscription series, available to TV and computer screens for a fee of around $125 and up. Perhaps the most sanguine view of these theater-to-TV developments comes from Lee, who enthuses "parents and children, teachers and students ... friends of all ages [will] gather around their television sets to see great shows." With theater manners at their lowest, imagine the effect when audiences used to the laissezfaire of the living room visit a real theater.

Meanwhile, more and more actors and actresses who've made names on TV are heading Broadway marquees. Susan Lucci, who for thirty years has starred on the soap opera All My Children, may not be familiar to theatergoers, but she suddenly became a pistol-packing Annie (Get Your Gun), replacing Bernadette Peters in the Irving Berlin musical. Jack Wagner, known for his roles in General Hospital and Melrose Place, in January metamorphosed into Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde on Broadway; and recently Kathie Lee Gifford, of Live With Regis and Kathie Lee, stood in for Carol Burnett in Stephen Sondheim's Putting it Together.

Yet many who saw Bebe Neuwirth, a seasoned Broadway star, in Chicago were amazed at her dancing and singing expertise, recognizing her only through her appearances as Lilith in Cheers and Frasier. Non-theatergoers, too, think of Nathan Lane as a movie and TV star. The problem is, no matter how interchangeable film, TV, and stage actors are in various mediums, the theater demands types of skills that actors mostly experienced in movies and TV lack, and it shows to their detriment when they step on the stage.