Broadway is evanescent: The legendary performances and productions of the past loom larger for being written only in memory. Wouldn't it be amazing to see Jason Robards in his 1960 career-peak role of Hickey in O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh? What theater lover wouldn't sell off a child or two to experience Lee J. Cobb as Death of a Salesman's original Willy Loman?
Easy now. Those two vintage productions and more than 85 others are on video, with more on the way. The Manhattan-based Broadway Theater Archive (www.broadwayarchive.com), founded in 1996 by former TV journalist Basil Hero with financial backing by ex-HBO capo Michael Fuchs, has dedicated itself to the collection, restoration, and rights clearance of more than 300 plays taped for television from the late 1950s through the 1980s. Primary sources are PBS and the networks; it's hard to believe, but CBS televised the Cobb Salesman in 1966 -- and saw it play second banana to Bonanza in the ratings. Eventually, the nets left the field to public stations like New York's WNET and L.A.'s KCET.
Hero has arranged with video specialty label Kultur (www.kultur.com) to distribute 50 of the digitally restored plays on VHS and DVD (14 titles remain available through a previous deal with Image Entertainment; another 35 are available solely through the archive's site). In the first batch of disc releases, you can see Cobb in Salesman, a devilishly nerdy pre-Graduate Dustin Hoffman in the Turgenev adaptation The Journey of the Fifth Horse, Walter Matthau waxing serious in Clifford Odets' Awake and Sing! and Ingrid Bergman in the trippy Jean Cocteau monologue The Human Voice. ''There's a lot of fascinating stuff,'' says Hero about goods still in the pipeline. ''We have a version of Diary of Anne Frank with Max von Sydow.'' Sounds great -- but, personally, we're jonesing for that 1958 production of Little Women starring Florence Henderson and Joel Grey. Call it The March Bunch.
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