A Night at the Theater From Your Couch? No Apologies Needed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/theater/theater-streaming-services-cennarium-broadwayhd.html

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This will be anathema to stage purists, but here goes: I like watching theater on television.

Of course, it is not the real thing. There is no smell of the greasepaint, no roar of the crowd. There is no sense of the actors’ physical presence, their breathing and sweat, the way they physically interact with one another. There is no communal joy.

But there is theater, and that is something.

For many of us growing up in the analog era without access to the stage, television was the only resource. New Yorkers of a certain age would have been familiar with the series “Play of the Week,” which was broadcast in 1959-61, and with PBS’s “American Playhouse,” from 1982-1994. I grew up in rural France with just three channels, but at least they regularly showed classics and middlebrow comedies; I learned to enjoy both.

Now I see a lot of live theater, and yet I still love it on the small screen. Partly so I can see productions that don’t make it to New York, and partly because, although theater is distinguished by the uniqueness of the moment, sometimes you just want to rewind that moment as soon as it’s over.

As the Thanksgiving weekend rolls around, with its abundant downtime, here are some online destinations for theater on-demand. Feel free to use your cellphone whenever you want and to crinkle candy wrappers — nobody will mind.

Shakespeare dominates on-demand theater the way he dominates classical stages, and few institutions have embraced streaming as wholeheartedly as Shakespeare’s Globe (Available worldwide, 3.99 to 5.99 pounds to rent, 5.99 to 11.99 pounds to buy). If you are already familiar with the major works, you should check out the subtitled productions from the Globe to Globe festival, like a “Hamlet” in Lithuanian or a “Much Ado About Nothing” in French.

The Stratford Festival in Canada has eight Shakespeare plays available via iTunes, Amazon and Google Play ($4.99 for rental, $14.99 for purchase), including “Hamlet” and “The Taming of the Shrew,” with “Romeo and Juliet” and “Timon of Athens” coming in the spring. Fans of “Slings & Arrows” — the best-ever small-screen depiction of stage shenanigans — will get a kick from seeing Stephen Ouimette, who portrayed the ghost of a director in that series, as the Fool in “King Lear.”

In less than two years, BroadwayHD ($8.99 a month, $99.99 a year) has become a big player in the on-demand realm. Despite its name, the channel has a diverse roster, from splashy musicals to intimate black-box shows, from American productions to subtitled imports.

Broadway-wise, the selection consists essentially of crowd pleasers: “Memphis,” the recent revival of “Falsettos” (thanks for enabling my obsession with Stephanie J. Block’s “I’m Breaking Down”), “Present Laughter” (ditto Kevin Kline’s entrance), Audra McDonald in “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill,” Nathan Lane in the 2000 revival of “The Man Who Came to Dinner.”

BroadwayHD’s collaboration with the Roundabout Theater Company in New York has helped preserve its wonderful revival of “She Loves Me,” but look deeper and you’ll discover its Off Broadway production, “If I Forget.” I’d tremendously enjoyed Steven Levenson’s play and it transferred smoothly to my living room — the close-ups really pay off in this family drama, and Kate Walsh’s performance is even spikier than I remembered it.

BroadwayHD’s Off Broadway selection is interestingly haphazard, ranging from Richard Nelson’s “The Gabriels” cycle at the Public Theater to Julie Taymor’s exquisite “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at Theater for a New Audience and the New Group’s revival of “Buried Child” with Ed Harris and Amy Madigan.

Look also for gems from the American Film Theater, a quixotic project from 1973 to 1975 that involved filming plays as if they were movies and showing them in theaters, complete with subscription plans and programs. Go straight to “The Maids” starring Glenda Jackson and Susannah York; “Rhinoceros” with Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder and Karen Black; and Harold Pinter directing Alan Bates in “Butley.”

And then there are BroadwayHD’s non-American offerings. I admit turning the volume way up for the fantastically gaudy 2012 British arena tour of “Jesus Christ Superstar” starring Tim Minchin, while the West End’s “Gypsy” with Imelda Staunton allows us to add a contender to the evergreen argument over who is the best Mama Rose.

Making the Atlantic crossing soon: “The Wind in the Willows” (starting on Thursday), adapted by the “Downton Abbey” creator Julian Fellowes and the songwriters George Stiles and Anthony Drewe (“Mary Poppins”), and “From Here to Eternity,” a musical of the eponymous 1953 movie featuring new songs by Stuart Brayson and Tim Rice (starting on Dec. 7).

I barely scratched the surface of subtitled productions, but did enjoy “La Casa de Bernarda Alba,” a classic from Federico García Lorca that is rarely produced on English-language stages. This also gave me the opportunity to discover the Argentine stage veteran María Rosa Fugazot, whose raspy voice is a thing of wonder.

Another fairly recent arrival on the streaming scene is Kanopy, which is free with a public-library card in 200 systems nationwide. A big chunk of bandwidth is occupied by Shakespeare telecasts the BBC produced in the 1970s and ’80s with a dizzying array of star (or not-yet-star) actors. We’re talking Helen Mirren in “As You Like It” and a 1981 “Othello” with Anthony Hopkins as the title character (this wouldn’t fly anymore) facing Bob Hoskins’s Iago. I was happy to rewatch my favorite Lady Macbeth, Jane Lapotaire, whom I had discovered when that BBC production was shown in France way back when. Offerings of more recent vintage include a “Julius Caesar” transposed by the director Gregory Doran to the Arab Spring.

Just as good are the documentaries, especially a 1990 interview with the performance artist Karen Finley; a chat with Martha Wilson, founder of the experimental performance space Franklin Furnace; and an illuminating exploration of “Hamlet” with David Tennant, Simon Russell Beale and Ben Whishaw. For me, though, the biggest find was “Theater of War,” about the 2006 production of “Mother Courage and Her Children,” starring Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline, at the Delacorte Theater, with rehearsal footage and a step-by-step breakdown of the production’s evolution.

This relatively new outfit rewards open-minded explorers, especially those with many stamps in their passports: Little of the material on offer is American.

Cennarium ($9.97 a month; $95.64 a year) is especially strong in genres that are more popular outside the United States — tellingly, its menu lists categories for circus and magic. In terms of theater, the channel’s selection appears fairly random from an American perspective, so the best for those willing to broaden their drama horizons is to just dive in — I have the German musical based on “Dangerous Liaisons” bookmarked for a rainy day, because why not?

This alone would make Cennarium stand out, but in September it broke new ground with Promenade, a virtual 10-day festival that attempted to foster appointment streaming by broadcasting simultaneous shows every night at 8 p.m. Promenade even tried to create a virtual community with hosts introducing the shows and chat rooms where viewers could discuss what they had just seen.

This would have been a godsend to 14-year-old me, alone in the boondocks — and it might just be a lifeline to isolated arts lovers around the world. We can only hope there will be more Promenades in the future.

Considering its potential catalog, PBS is lagging in terms of streaming. What of “American Playhouse,” for instance? And there are not even that many “Great Performances” available on demand. Still, while the selection isn’t huge, it’s quite good. It’s wonderful that Paula Vogel’s “Indecent” was captured for posterity. Less incandescent but perhaps more appropriate for the season is “Holiday Inn — The Broadway Musical,” which starts on Saturday.

Catalog items right now include the David Esbjornson production of “Driving Miss Daisy,” featuring the original stars James Earl Jones and Boyd Gaines, but with Angela Lansbury replacing Vanessa Redgrave — a rather drastic, yet fascinating, switcheroo.

Some of the selections, like “Present Laughter,” are free, but others, like the recent Broadway revival of “She Loves Me,” require a Thirteen Passport (starting at $5 a month), which gives members access to more PBS programming — but then, “The Great British Baking Show” may well qualify as theater.