Ways to see world-class theater without needing to sell your firstborn child for cash

In the spirit of that recent post about Broadway professional recordings, and about live shows being unaffordable - 

NT Live - London’s National Theatre broadcasts a lot of their shows, and there are screenings all over the world. Just go to that link and put in your city, it’ll show you the venues nearby, and then you can see when you can go see what. (The dates on the front page, btw, are the dates when it’s broadcast live and recorded. Most likely, your nearby place will be showing the recording some time later.)

RSC - Similarly for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Their website can be a little annoying to use, because you have to search for screenings of every play separately, instead of just going “OK, what’s showing at the Coolidge Corner movie theater this season?”

Stage Russia does the same for selected plays from the best Moscow theaters. There’s subtitles for English speakers. Also, some of last year’s season is available for free if you’re a college student, apparently. If that’s you, watch it. Now. Rimas Tuminas is a genius, and every one of the plays he directs is a masterpiece. 

Besides movie theater screenings of recordings, you can also just buy recordings to watch at home! It’s not quite as good as it is on a movie theater screen, but it’s still totally worth it. Screen size matters a lot, here. A lot of theater’s impact comes from being immersed in it, from forgetting about the fourth wall and the mechanics and so on, and it’s much tougher to be immersed when you’re watching it on a tiny computer screen. (Even a tiny computer screen is better than nothing, though.)

My favorite recording is of course the RSC Richard II recording with David Tennant, directed by Gregory Doran. It used to be up publicly on the BBC website for free streaming, but now I can’t even find it streamable anywhere for money. So the link goes to the DVD on Amazon.

The Globe Theater has recordings of their plays, which they sell for £11.99 (~$15). Renting is half of that.

The Broadway production of Into the Woods was filmed, and is available to buy or rent on Amazon Video. (Also, as @crystalandrock​ pointed out in the tags of the original post, for free on YouTube. But I’m trying to stick to the strictly legal here, and I have no idea if the YouTube video is up legally.)

Same thing for Rent. 

Digital Theater has a bunch of performances for . I haven’t tried to watch any of them yet, so I don’t know if there’s a catch anywhere.

Recordings are, for obvious reasons, more plentiful than screenings, so I won’t try to list all of them, or even all the sources. There’s a lot out there once you know to look for it. 

As I mentioned above, I’m trying to stick to the strictly legal in this post. I would be remiss not to mention, however, that just about everything that can be streamed legally for money can also be streamed or downloaded illegally for free. 

Also, bootleg recordings are a thing that exists for many of those productions that don’t have professional recordings (*cough* Hamilton *cough*). Those are usually of far inferior quality, though, so they don’t really give you the feeling that you’re watching a play, which is kind of the point of this post. 

Concert productions and film adaptations are also not Real Theater. Which is not an insult, but watching those is a distinctly different experience. 

This post is huge, but I am 100% sure that I missed something. So if people want to chime in with other resources/their favorite recordings/ways to get Broadway to be better about these things, that would be lovely!