The best live theater to stream online this week

Director-choreographer Vanessa White presents the lucky 13th edition of her version of the classic holiday ballet: an adults-only, feminist, body-positive depiction of the grown-up Clara’s adventures in sexual freedom, in which toys play an important but quite different function than before. The Boston-area cast includes burlesque performers, belly dancers, hula hoopers and others along with the usual ballet types. This year’s filmed version, assembled from archival recordings of last year’s live show, can be streamed from Thanksgiving through the end of the year for $10. 

Thursday 4pm and 8pm EST / 9pm and 1am GMT (live only)
The lovely-voiced pop-classical crossover phenom Josh Groban, the star of Broadway’s Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 and your aunt’s favorite singer in the world, performs the second installment of a fall virtual-performance series to promote his brand-new album, Harmony. Among the songs on the new release are covers of “Both Sides Now,” “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” “Celebrate Me Home” and Man of La Mancha’s “The Impossible Dream.” There are two performances today; tickets start at $25.

Thursday 7pm EST / midnight GMT (through November 29)
Jason Robert Brown’s 2001 musical The Last Five Years has grown, in the last 20 years, into a staple of college stages, regional theaters, audition rooms and piano bars. The show tracks soon-to-be exes along different lines of an X-shaped structure, in which his story moves forward and hers is told in reverse. Brown’s work overflows with verbal acuity, deftly combining Broadway and pop influences into music that is catchy, surprising and character-specific; each number is in essence a theatrical monologue, because the central couple shares only a single scene. This weekend, Broadway On Demand is sharing a recording of the show’s 2020 revival at London’s Southwark Playhouse, directed by Jonathan O’Boyle and starring Molly Lynch and Oli Higginson as the doomed couple. Tickets cost $15.

Betsy Wolfe (Waitress) plays the title character, a Wall Street predator who just might have a thing or two to learn about the Christmas spirit, in an original holiday musical by Paul Gordon (Jane Eyre) and director John Caird (Les Misérables). The project was shot remotely during the pandemic, using green screens and other technological workarounds. The cast of Broadway pros also includes Clifton Duncan, Lauren Patten, Carolee Carmello, Patrick Page and—as Estella’s famous ancestor Ebenezer—the beloved Danny Burstein. The show lifts characters and story ideas from several Dickens works beyond its principal source, A Christmas Carol. Tickets cost $25 for a three-day rental.

Friday (available through December 20)
Sarah DeLappe's hit 2016 play about a teenage girls' soccer team, which was a Pulitzer finalist and returned for an encore run at Lincoln Center the next year, gets back on the playing field, courtesy of Philadelphia Theatre Company. As the team members differentiate themselves from the pack, DeLappe teases out larger questions hidden amid the keen naturalism; her hopeful, respectful play is an implicit reproach to those who worry or complain about kids today. Nell Bang-Jensen directs this digital version, which has been recorded remotely and is streaming on demand through December 20 on a pay-what-you-can basis.

Friday 2pm EST / 7pm GMT (available for 48 hours)
Universal’s YouTube channel The Shows Must Go On! began by rolling out a different Andrew Lloyd Webber musical every week, and has since moved on other offerings. After a month of Shakespeare, the series returns to its musical-theater roots this week with An American in Paris. The ballet world's Christopher Wheeldon directed and choreographed this elegant 2015 adaptation of Vincente Minnelli’s 1951 movie musical about—guess what?—an American in Paris. On Broadway, a pre-Cats Robbie Fairchild played an American soldier in the wake of World War II, and Leanne Cope was the lovely local dancer who captured his heart; they reprise their roles in this version, filmed in London in 2018. Songs by George and Ira Gershwin and sets by Bob Crowley help transport you to a world of retro romance in the City of Lights. The centerpiece is a long ballet sequence set to the George Gershwin orchestral piece that gives the musical its name and that includes a ravishing four-minute pas de deux between Fairchild and Cope.

Friday 2pm EST / 7pm GMT (available for 24 hours)
Clint Dyer and Roy Williams’s powerful depiction of a working-class Black Englishman had the misfortune of opening at the National Theatre on the very night the second lockdown went into effect. Happily, the show was recorded, and now NT is sharing it for free on YouTube for one day only. Read all about it here, including a review of the play by Time Out London’s Andrzej Lukowski that singles out Michael Balogun “superb” and “star-making” performance along with the production itself: “It’s a rollercoaster ride of a play, directed by Dyer at terrific pace and wittily enlivened by Jackie Shemesh’s staccato lighting and the hidden surprises of Ultz’s set.”

Friday 5pm EST / 10pm GMT
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. Now she hosts a weekly half-hour talk show, and why not? She’s one of the city’s most amusing talkers. Her guest this time is Beth Leavel, the gutsy, funny, Tony-winning star of The Prom and he Drowsy Chaperone (and survivor of Baby, It's You!) 

Friday 7pm EDT / midnight BST 
One of NYC’s most appealing piano-bar entertainers, British transplant William TN Hall has tickled keys and audiences alike at the Duplex, Brandy’s and Don’t Tell Mama for years. Now he shows off his versatility in a live, two-hour weekly set. Requests are welcome, as of course are tips (Venmo: @WilliamTNHall).

Friday 8pm EST / 1am GMT
Showtune savant and SiriusXM host Seth Rudetsky (Disaster!) and his husband, producer James Wesley, are the animating forces behind this ambitious and very entertaining series, in which they play host to theater stars in live, chatty interviews interspersed with clips and songs. In this special edition, a host of Broadway performers—including Jessie Mueller, Sierra Boggess, Lilli Cooper, Darius de Haas, Andy Karl and Orfeh, Jose Llana, Paige Price, Kate Rockwell, Doug Sills and Will Swenson—perform with their pets to raise money for the Humane Society of New York.

Friday 8pm EST / 1am GMT (available through December 2)
The experimental-theater company City Garage has been blowing minds in Santa Monica, California, since the 1980s. This week it streams a video of its 1999 production of The White Wedding, an absurdist erotic fairy tale written in 1968 by Poland’s Tadeuz Rozewizc and directed here by Frédérique Michel. As always, the stream is free but donations are welcome.

Friday 9pm EST / 2am GMT (available for four weeks)
Lea Salonga, the radiant star of Broadway’s Miss Saigon and Allegiance (and Disney’s Mulan and Aladdin), sings all the songs you want to hear her sing, backed by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, in this new episode of PBS’s indispensable series Great Performances. The episode will remain available for streaming on PBS’s website for a month after the world premiere.

The marvelous Jefferson Mays, who played a mere eight characters in A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, ups the ante to 50 in this solo version of Charles Dickens’s holiday chestnut, adapted by the Tony-winning actor with Susan Lyons and director Michael Arden (Spring Awakening). The show—let’s call it I Am My Own Ghosts—premiered at L.A.’s Geffen Playhouse in 2018 and has been filmed for streaming this year as a benefit for regional theaters across the country whose own holiday programming has been upended by the pandemic. Tickets cost $50 and proceeds are distributed to participating partner theaters according to ZIP code. (If you’d rather buy through them directly, you can find a list of them here.)  

Saturday 9am EST / 2pm GMT (available through December 6)
Morris’s joyful contemporary dance company continues to share archival videos from its long history in its Dance On! Video Vault series. This week’s document is the very first show the company performed as the Mark Morris Dance Group, exactly 40 years ago, at New York’s Merce Cunningham Studio. The program comprises five early Morris works: Barstow (1973), Ženska (1975), Brummagem (1978), Dad’s Charts (1980) and Castor and Pollux (1980).

Saturday 8pm EST / 1am GMT (live only)
Pianist Jim Brickman gathers talented friends to spread holiday cheer in a live holiday benefit for the Actors Fund. Guests include Kelli O’Hara, Matt Doyle, Sierra Boggess, Megan Hilty, Wayne Brady, Shoshana Bean, Santino Fontana, Adrienne Warren, Norm Lewis, Max Von Essen and Jane Lynch. Tickets start at $20.

Saturday 8pm EST / 1am GMT (available for four days)
For Thanksgiving weekend, the dramatic archaeologists of the Metropolitan Playhouse unearth a double bill of old rarities: Kate Tillman’s Aunt Betsy's Thanksgiving, directed by Linda Kuriloff, and an anonymous 18th-century curio called The Downfall of Justice, and the Farmer Just Returned from Meeting on Thanksgiving Day, directed by Alex Roe. The readings are followed by a discussion with playwright Michael Dinwiddie and historian Timothy H. Breen.

Monday (available for one week)
Each year, the American Dance Guild honors prominent modern dance figures with awards for Distinguished Artistry and Lifetime Achievement. For its virtual incarnation this fall, ADG is offering a survey of the past decade, with archival recordings every week that celebrate the work of each year’s honorees.  This episode looks back to 2017 and features salutes to Garth Fagan, Martha Myers and Thunderbird American Indian Dancers.

Monday 3pm EST / 8pm GMT (live only)
Seth Rudetsky’s intimate chat-and-sing series at the Art House in Provincetown has drawn top Broadway stars to the tip of the Cape for nearly a decade. He knows exactly what stories and songs people need to hear from each of his A-list guests, and now he brings the magic online in a weekly series that uses a new approach to sound design to make it possible to accompany his guests in real time. Joining him this week is the very talented musical-theater power couple of Patti Murin (Frozen) and Colin Donnell (Anything Goes). Virtual tickets cost $25; last night’s live edition at 8pm was recorded and is being rerun today.  

Monday 8pm EST / 1am GMT (live only)
The global-minded, experimental Theater Mitu revisits its 2018 show, Remnant, a wide-ranging investigation into what makes people go to war. Devised by the company and directed by Rubén Polendo, the piece is based partly on interviews with soldiers, doctors and scholars around the world. The reconceived virtual edition, platformed by New York Theatre Workshop, is being streamed four times. Tickets cost $10.

Monday 7pm and 9pm EST / midnight and 2am GMT
East Village director-performer Joshua William Gelb (jazz singer) has been making theater in his closet every other week. Tonight’s offering, performed twice, is part of Closet Works, a monthly series of short dance-based pieces; this one, presented by the Invisible Dog Art Center, features choreography by France’s Van-Kim Tran.

Monday 7:30pm EST / 12:30am GMT 
Project Y Theatre, which mounts an annual Women in Theatre festival in NYC, takes a dash of WIT online with three Zoom plays this week, culled from hundreds of submissions. The first is Colleen O'Doherty’s Missing Ingredient, directed by Jennifer Chang and featuring Joy Osmanski, Elizabeth Ho and Corey Brill.

Monday 8pm EST / 1am GMT
Part cabaret, part piano bar and part social set, Birdland's long-running Monday-night open mic Cast Party offers a chance to hear rising and established talents step up to the spotlight. The waggish Jim Caruso presides as host, and now he brings the show online via YouTube. This week’s guest list includes Broadway’s James Snyder (Cry-Baby), Charl Brown (Motown: The Musical) and Kara Lindsay (Newsies) along with the superb musical-comedy impersonator Christine Pedi (Forbidden Broadway) and caricaturist Justin “Squigs” Robertson. The show is free, but tips are appreciated (Venmo: @Jim-Caruso-1).

Monday 8pm EST / 1am GMT (live only)
For more than two decades, the proudly old-school Monday Night Magic has offered a different lineup of professional tricksters every week. It is an heir to the vaudeville tradition; many of the acts incorporate comedic elements, and audience participation is common. In contrast to some fancier magic shows, this one feels like comfort food: an all-you-can-eat buffet to which you’re encouraged to return until you’re as stuffed as a hat full of rabbits. The virtual edition of the series features two live performers every week as well as video highlights from past shows at the Players Theater. Tickets cost $20–$35. 

Monday 8pm EST / 1am GMT (available for one week)
Mounted by the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus gang, this exhibition of curious human endeavors features everything from stripping clowns to heavy-metal magicians. A remote edition of the vaudevillian variety pageant now hits YouTube every week. Bindlestiff’s Keith Nelson plays host. Contributions are welcome via Venmo (@BindlestiffFamilyCirkus).

Two of Drag Race's most legendary dames serve nog till you gag in this virtual edition of their now-annual holiday camp fest. The plot of the hour-long spectacular finds the queens at odds over the direction of a Christmas TV special they are creating together. Expect plenty of musical comedy and spiked punchlines. Two-day rentals cost $14.

Tuesday (available through December 13)
Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning, a portrait of deeply conservative alumni of a Catholic university in rural Wyoming, was arguably the best new play of 2019; a finalist for this year's Pulitzer Prize for Drama, it also won the Best Play award from both the New York Drama Critics' Circle and the Lucille Lortel Awards. As we try to move forward after the election, Arbery's deep dive into religious right-wing worldviews seems as essential as ever. "Arbery’s plays are important explorations of language," wrote Helen Shaw in her five-star Time Out review. “His own family comes from this world, and he has clearly steeped long in its heady, often keenly intellectual poetry." The play’s original company has reunited several times to perform it virtually this year, and now Philadelphia’s esteemed Wilma Theater is taking a crack at it. This production, directed by Blanka Zizka, was filmed site-specifically in the Poconos with a quarantined cast. Tickets are limited and cost $37.

Tuesday 2pm EST / 7pm GMT (available for four days)
MTC continues its virtual Ted Snowdon Reading Series with a free reading of Brittany K. Allen’s Ball Change, which tracks a celebrity answering service through decades of change and increasing obsolescence, starting in the 1960s. Margot Bordelon directs.

Tuesday 5pm EST / 10pm GMT (available through December 5)
A superb lineup of stars help observe World AIDS Day with a performance of Janet Hood and Bill Russell's 1989 song cycle about people who have died of the disease and the friends and family they have left behind. Nathan Lane and Norm Lewis lead a cast that also includes, among many others, Cherry Jones, Jessie Mueller, Cynthia Nixon, Fran Drescher, JK Simmons, Richard Chamberlain, James Monroe Iglehart, Famke Janssen, Anthony Rapp, Jayne Houdyshell, Brooks Ashmanskas, Laura Bell Bundy, Gideon Glick, Lena Hall, Jay Armstrong Johnson, Robin de Jesús, Joaquina Kalukango, Francis Jue, Vicki Lewis, Telly Leung, Okieriete Onaodowan, Jeffrey Roberson, Alysha Umphress, Mariand Torres, Alyse Alan Louis and Robin Lord Taylor.

Tuesday 7pm EST / midnight GMT (live only)
The masterful Liev Schreiber reads Plaguey Hill, a new work by the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Paul Muldoon that is structured as an interlocking series of 15 sonnets. The piece deals with life in upstate New York during the COVID-19 crisis while harking back to a cholera epidemic in Belfast in the 1830s. The Irish Rep is streaming the event for free, with a $10 suggested donation.

Tuesday 7pm EST / midnight GST (available through December 31)
James Monroe Iglehart, who won a Tony as the Genie in Aladdin, plays another magical wish-granter—jolly old Saint Nick himself—in a free new family musical that explores the inner workings of the toy workshop at the North Pole. Telly Leung, Ann Harada, Julia Mattison, Jennifer Barnhart, Nick Kohn and Don Darryl Rivera play the elves who have to deal with inventory and classification problems while the big man is away. Alan Muraoka directs the show, which features a book and lyrics by Phoebe Kreutz and original tunes by Gary Adler.

Tuesday 7pm EST / midnight GMT (available through December 31) 
Atlanta’s Horizon Theatre Company marks World AIDS Day with the virtual premiere of Clarinda Ross’s Love, M., which depicts maternal relationships and AIDS activism in the early years of the crisis through the lens of two women—a white socialite and a Black Southern Baptist—and their sons. Heidi McKerley directs a cast that comprises Lamman Rucker, Terry Burrell, Chris Hecke and Ross herself.

Tuesday 7pm EST / midnight GMT (live only) 
Jane Catherine Shaw curates a collection of quirky puppet quickies by innovative artists including Paul Zaloom, Maiko Kikuchi, Spica Wobbe, Concrete Temple Theater, Maria Camia, Hobey Ford, Larry Reed/Shadow Light Productions, Adelka Polak, Anurupa Roy Katkatha Puppet Arts Trust and Lake Simons.

Tuesday 7:30pm EDT / 12:30am BST (available for 23 hours)
Tonight's 1985 production of Aida predates the HD era, but what is lost in image clarity is more than made up in artistry and emotion. One of the leading sopranos of the 20th century, Leontyne Price had been a Met star since 1961, and this performance marked her permanent retirement from the opera stage at the age of 57. Her rendition of the Act III aria "O Patria Mia," in which Aida bids goodbye to her homeland, was chosen by viewers in 2007 as the most memorable moment in the then-30-year history of Met broadcasts. Not only is the singing gorgeous—she glides with astonishing ease into the aria's famously difficult high C—but as Price absorbs the crowd's three-minute ovation, a close-up on her face captures the deep well of feeling behind the singer's normally steely mien. It's breathtaking. James Levine conducts the performance, which costars James McCracken and Fiorenza Cossotto.

Tuesday 8pm EST / 1am GMT (live only)
The 24 Hour Plays’ free Virtual Monologues series on Instagram has been a reliable source of pandemic-era entertainment. Now comes the group’s tentpole benefit event, in which a group of playwrights, directors and actors write, rehearse and perform a collection of 10-minute plays in the span of one day. The 20th annual edition—virtual, of course—has a typically fabulous cast of actors: Marcia Gay Harden, Jesse Eisenberg, Bebe Neuwirth, Hugh Dancy, David Cross, Rachel Dratch, Gillian Jacobs, Josh Hamilton, Vella Lovell, Andra Day, Merle Dandridge, Dagmara Domínczyk, Portia, Solea Pfeiffer, Noah Galvin and Tommy Dorfman, to name just some. The writers are Rachel Axler, J. Holtham, David Lindsay-Abaire, christopher oscar peña, Jonathan Marc Sherman and Lauren Yee. Tickets start at $30.

Wednesday (available through December 6)
Dylan McDermott, Phylicia Rashad, Roberta Maxwell, Jean Lichty and the always busy Austin Pendleton star in this virtual performance of Tennessee Williams’s 1961 drama, in which a disenchanted former priest leads a tour group of women through Mexico in the 1940s. McCarter Theatre Center’s Emily Mann directs the excellent cast for the women-forward La Femme Theatre Productions. Tickets start at $10, and proceeds benefit the Actors Fund. 

Wednesday 2:30pm EST / 7:30pm GMT (live only)
The excellent Andrew Scott, who played the wicked Moriarty on Sherlock and the Hot Priest on Fleabag, and his performance in Sea Wall was one of the highlights of the quarantine season. Here he stars Stephen Beresford’s Three Kings, a solo play about fathers and sons written especially for Scott to perform during the lockdown. Matthew Marchus directs the production, which was performed live onstage at London’s the empty Old Vic in September and is now getting a recorded encore run for just three days (through December 4). Seating is limited; tickets start at £10 (about $13.50) and must be booked in advance.

Wednesday 5pm EDT / 10pm BST (available for 48 hours)
In addition to its nightly full productions (see above), the Met offers an additional free opera from its Live in HD series every Wednesday through its Free Student Streams program. The videos stay live for 48 hours, and supplemental materials help newcomers unpack each offering. 

Wednesday 7pm EST / midnight GMT (live only)
Off Broadway’s York Theatre Company, which specializes in musicals, continues its series of virtual cabaret shows dedicated to classic showtunes from the Great American Songbook. Standards bearer Michael Feinstein acts as host, and Barry Kleinbort directs. Each edition premieres on Wednesday night and is then repeated five times over the next three days; tickets cost $20. This week’s double bill features Fosse muse, jazz cat and showbiz triple-threat entertainer Ben Vereen—of Pippin, Jesus Christ Superstar and All That Jazz fame—and the trumpet-voiced Klea Blackhurst, best known for her excellent Ethel Merman tribute show, Everything the Traffic Will Allow. Gary Adler serves as musical director.

Wednesday 7pm EST / midnight GMT
In this weekly 45-minute show, hosted by Jen Sandler and Joe Barros, New York Theatre Barn's development series Zooms in on musicals-in-progress. This week’s selections are Justin Mortelliti and Shannon Hunt’s The Ladies Man, about a young gay man from an Italian-American New Jersey family, and Nico Juber’s comedy Millennials Are Killing Musicals, in which an anxious single mother tries to reach for her dreams.

Wednesday 7:30pm EST / 12:30am GMT (available for one week)
In lieu of its usual December residency at City Center, the beloved Ailey dance company is presenting a series of virtual offerings, each running for one week. At the core of many of them is Alvin Ailey's 1960 signature classic, the enormously popular 1960 group piece Revelations, which explores the African-American soul in a group dance set to spirituals, gospel songs and other religious music. The virtual run begins with a virtual benefit, Revelations Reimagined, that features excerpts from a performance of the work at the Bronx’s Wave Hill Public Garden & Cultural Center. A dance party follows the December 2 premiere.

Wednesday 7:30pm EST / 12:30am GMT (available for 23 hours)
The Met shares a 2013 performance of Richard Wagner’s final opera, 1882’s Parsifal, a tale of Arthurian knights and the Holy Grail that is not to be confused with Spamalot. Daniele Gatti conducts this 2013 recording, which stars Jonas Kaufmann, Katarina Dalayman, Peter Mattei and René Pape.

Wednesday 7:30pm EST / 12:30am GMT  
Project Y Theatre, which mounts an annual Women in Theatre Festival in NYC, takes a dash of WIT online with three Zoom plays this week, culled from hundreds of submissions. The first is Rachael Carnes’s Soup, directed by Shelley Butler and featuring Bernardo Cubrio and Valerie Terranova.

Wednesday 8pm EST / 1am GMT (live only)
The global-minded, experimental Theater Mitu revisits its 2018 show, Remnant, a wide-ranging investigation into what makes people go to war. Devised by the company and directed by Rubén Polendo, the piece is based partly on interviews with soldiers, doctors and scholars around the world. The reconceived virtual edition, platformed by New York Theatre Workshop, is now being streamed a total of ten times. Tickets cost $10.

Most of this content that gets listed on this page is only available live or for a limited time, but some of it remains viewable indefinitely. As a supplement to our daily listings, here is the permanent collection: musicals, plays, dance works, cabaret sets, awards nights, special events more that have been released online since March and that you can still watch or rewatch at your leisure.

The streaming service BroadwayHD offers roughly 300 whole, high-quality, professionally filmed live theater performances from Broadway, London's West End and beyond, including 42nd Street, The King and I, Bob Fosse's Pippin and Hugh Jackman in Oklahoma! For new subscribers, the first week is free. Here are the musicals currently featured there that you won't want to miss.

The Tony Awards provide a national showcase and public record of performances that are otherwise local and fleeting, and the most memorable numbers from Broadway musicals on the Tonys can echo in theater history for decades to come. But which are the best of the best? We've surveyed every televised number from a nominated musical or musical revival since the very first Tony telecast in 1967 to create this list of the all-time classics.

For several years now, the engaging trickster Noah Levine has been performing Magic After Hours, an evening of cozy evening of prestidigitation held at the city’s oldest magic shop, Tannen’s, after closing time. Since cramming 20 people into a tiny room is not currently an option, Levine has teamed up with Atlas Obscura for a new show, Backstage with a Magician, that he performs from home four times a week (Mondays through Wednesdays and Fridays) for a maximum of 10 households at a time. Expect an entertaining shuffle of audience interaction, close-up magic and magic history. Tickets cost $25 per device; bring a deck of cards, a rubber band, a marker and 15 socks to take full advantage of the home-participation element.

Zoom has proved surprisingly fertile territory for magicians of various kinds during the shutdown period. Now the highly skilled New York mentalist Jason Suran (The Other Side) joins the virtual party on Friday and Saturday nights with an intimate evening of diversions that he plans to perform in person once safety guidelines permit it. The limited audience size permits a pleasing degree of interaction. Tickets cost $50.

The Riant Theatre, best known for its Strawberry One-Act Festival, now offers several Zoom readings each week as part of its ongoing Jocunda Music, Film and Theatre Festival. Tickets cost $15 and advance reservations are required; conversations with the playwright and cast usually follow the performance.

Writer-director Edward Einhorn’s suggestive microplay about memory and connection was originally performed as a brief encounter between one actor and one audience member at a time. Now Einhorn has adapted it so that homebound viewers can connect with actors via Skype, with the 1:1 ratio intact. It’s an unusually intimate experience, and a lovely way to feel a personal connection through theater. Email Einhorn directly to book a slot; it is currently being performed by Yvonne Roen, for whom it was written. Tickets cost $25.