The Pixel Curtain Descends on Broadway

Way back in 1964, long before “Reality TV,” media critic Marshall McLuhan understood the power of the screen. He was particularly interested in how the suburban picture window framed reality, as if a passerby was watching a television show based on the humans inside their own home. More than 60 years later, a picture window would frame a family on their individual phones as they watch TV together or separately. McLuhan flipped the usual way we view screens: instead of TV being a window into the world, we ourselves become the screen, enveloped by images. And these days, like picture in picture, we’re often watching (and reflecting) influencers as they film themselves. 

Increasingly, Broadway shows also present some sort of screen on stage. I first noticed this back in 2018, when the Belasco Theater was transformed into a TV news studio for Network. The play was based on the brilliant 1976 film, directed by Sidney Lumet and written by Paddy Chayefsky, about a failing network and its struggle to provide a news show that would bring back the viewers. The stage version had more than 50 video screens and a massive LED screen that immersed the audience in the news studio. McLuhan could have devoted an elegant little monograph to what it signified that a live audience was watching live actors on a stage pretending to be on television.

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More recently I’ve seen screens used to wonderful effect, as in Sunset Blvd. where the onstage screen evokes the memory of the movie. The 1950 film is a deliciously weird classic, directed by Billy Wilder, that begins and ends with an unusual death at the home of an aging silent film star, Norma Desmond. Her career began in silent films and ended with the talkies and the advent of television. Her most glorious line is even more resonant today: “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” The play’s staging includes a screen that projects several short films of the actors, and the stage Norma is well-aware of how she appears and over-emotes, just as she did before the talkies took over. The staging is a clever reminder us that the play was once a larger-than-life film noir, with oblique angles and dramatic lighting that can’t easily be replicated on stage. The effect was so haunting that I watched the movie as soon as I came back from the theater.

I’d also happily write my own love letter to the staging of Maybe Happy Ending, an exceptionally beautiful show about two aging Helperbot androids (mechanical servants, essentially) who have been placed in an apartment building somewhere in Korea by their former owners. The androids await a digital death as their hardware slowly becomes obsolete. The androids meet and fall into something like love. Can androids feel love? Do they need a home of their own? The android’s living spaces are framed by LED frames that grow and shrink and take the place of scenery. Their universe is defined and shaped by the electrical currents represented by the screens. It’s not until the androids go to Jeju Island, a romantic spot for humans, that we see any kind of natural landscape at all.

I especially loved the use of screens in Sarah Snook’s marvelous The Picture of Dorian Gray and found the frenetic pacing and the film crew, cameras, and screens an inspired solution to stage one woman playing 26 characters. A video crew follows Snook around on stage as she transforms into each persona and multimedia screens reflect her personas: some live, some prerecorded. The staging adds a layer of technological versatility to a classic story about about the relationship between an image and a real person.  

So what does it signify that Broadway stages are using not just screens but actors who’ve been on screens? I’m thinking of the enormous number of actual movie or TV stars who have been on Broadway in the last year. It’s been a boon for the Broadway box office – which desperately needs a win after the Covid losses  – but it’s been a mixed bag for the paying audiences.

The top Broadway earner for the year, indeed highest grossing week of all time, was Good Night and Good Luck, staged of course around screens and a major star of screens, George Clooney. The play is based on Clooney’s 2005 film about intrepid TV reporter Edward Murrow and his efforts to expose the corruption of the McCarthy era.  The screens onstage were a nod to Murrow, to the televised McCarthy trials, and to Clooney himself, a TV actor (Roseanne! E.R.!) and a movie star. Like Network, Good Night and Good Luck was first a movie and was then adapted to the stage. Indeed, the stage set was a detailed replica of the CBS newsroom of the 1950s, complete with a view of the Grand Central Terminal window and Murrow’s studio and the screens showed footage of the real McCarthy interspersed with Clooney’s version of Murrow. 

But these onstage screens also act as a reflection of who is on stage. In this staging, the screens served as an unpleasant reflection of the irony of Clooney playing a pioneering journalist. Clooney clearly sees himself as the wise arbiter of facts and reason. He brought Murrow’s story to life in 2005 and co-wrote the current stage production to reflect his own views about the role of journalists and politics. But he can’t change the fact that he himself has broken every rule of his beloved Murrow. Murrow was not overtly political – but Clooney is. Clooney’s own tedious political views, his alarming support for the ICC (and certainly don’t ask about his wife’s uncle), or his defection from Biden mere weeks after holding a fundraiser for him – it took viewers out of the play. Murrow was a non-partisan maverick, while Clooney is limited by the strident echo chamber of Hollywood, a chamber that he helps to orchestrate. The actor may be playing Murrow, but the stage screen reveals the real person behind the role. 

The increasing use of screens on Broadway stages does more than modernize aesthetics — it reflects deeper shifts in how productions engage with celebrity and audience expectations. When screens on the stage magnify the faces of well-known actors, they reinforce star power as a central draw. Why cast unknowns when you can use stars we already recognize? This can risk reducing live theater to a mediated experience, where presence is filtered through projection rather than proximity. As Broadway embraces digital tools, it must also grapple with whether the screen amplifies the art — or redefines it.