Top 5 Stage Performances to Stream This Weekend August 19-21
In-person shows have been back for over a year now, but sometimes we want to get our theatre fix at home. Thankfully, there are still wonderful stage performances to watch online. Our carefully curated list spotlights the five best performances to stream this weekend, Friday, August 19 to Sunday, August 21, for free or at low cost.
PBS Great Performances: Uncle Vanya Starring Toby Jones
PBS Great Performances presents Conor McPherson’s striking adaptation of Uncle Vanya, Anton Chekhov’s heartbreaking tale of loneliness and longing. Toby Jones stars in the title role, an unhappy man who believes life has unfairly passed him by. Richard Armitage, Rosalind Eleazar, Aimee Lou Wood, Anna Calder Marshall, Dearbhla Molloy, Roger Allam and Peter Wight costar in this production, which was filmed live at London’s Harold Pinter Theatre where the show enjoyed a critically acclaimed but truncated run due to the pandemic.
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PBS Thirteen: Uncle Vanya Starring Jay O. Sanders
PBS Thirteen presents a different mounting of Uncle Vanya, this one adapted and directed by Tony winner Richard Nelson (The Apple Family Plays) and recorded live at NYC’s Hunter Theater Project in 2018. Nelson’s frequent collaborator, the fabulous character actor Jay O. Sanders, stars as the morose title character in this intimate and affecting production.
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Attention avant-garde theatre lovers: New Ohio Theatre’s 29th annual, Obie-winning fest is all about emerging artists taking risks. Over the past two months, Ice Factory has presented seven works in progress from cutting-edge NYC companies on stage in the West Village, but you can also stream recordings of all the shows at home. Highlights include ISLA, a devised piece using actors and shadow puppetry to tell the true story of one family’s escape from Cuba; the surreal, Spanish-language immigration meditation Acheron: The River of Tragedy and the operatic monologue Salt about one woman’s dead-end life.
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Live from 54 Below: DUETS: The Concert Series
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BONUS:
PBS Thirteen: The Last Cyclist
Watch on PBS Thirteen on TV Sunday, August 21 at 11 p.m. and Monday, August 22 at 10 p.m. ET for FREE
You have to watch this one in real time on broadcast TV, there’s no streaming option. But this fascinating play has such an incredible backstory, it’s worth staying up to catch live. Recorded on stage at La MaMa in 2017 and directed by the perennially inventive Edward Einhorn, The Last Cyclist is a 1944 dark comedy that was almost lost to history. Written and rehearsed by Jewish prisoners at the Terezín concentration camp, the play was shut down by the Nazis because its absurdist story was a bold indictment of their fascism. When patients escape from an insane asylum, they hatch a plot to murder all bicyclists and their families because they loathe their bike-riding doctor. After decades of intense research, playwright Naomi Patz reconstructed and reimagined the original script by Karel Švenk, who died on a Nazi death march.
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Top image: Toby Jones and Richard Armitage in Uncle Vanya, which is streaming for free through the end of the month. Photo by Johan Persson.
RAVEN SNOOK