After the Curtain Falls, the Web Gets Into the Act

League Executive Director Charlotte St. Martin notes that official show Web sites are creating increasingly sophisticated content, and she says the rise in youth-oriented productions is helping to drive the change. In bygone years, St. Martin says, "you didn't have seven, eight, nine shows that appealed to audiences of 12- to 25-year-olds. And that [online] is where they find their entertainment."

Pure bootlegs are never legal, of course, but some buffs can't be stopped, and a few "Wicked"-obsessed audience members have gone to daring lengths in pursuit of their quarry. A long, loud "zzzzip!" seems to confirm that a London performance with Menzel and Helen Dallimore -- filmed from a suspiciously low and unsteady angle -- was digitally preserved from inside a purse.

The most virulent strain of thesp-sharing is diva fever. Audra McDonald fans can adore her in concert (a PBS broadcast has been serially uploaded) and can catch what looks like bootleg of the four-time Tony winner with Jackman singing "If I Loved You" from "Carousel" at Carnegie Hall. Christine Ebersole, a 2007 Tony winner, was surreptitiously taped in concert singing "Around the World" from "Grey Gardens," much to the bittersweet delight of fans who will never see her performance in the much-praised but long-closed show.

"I would kill to see this musical!" one impressed viewer laments.

Foster is such an object of affection that two people sneaked recording devices into the same cabaret performance at Joe's Pub in Manhattan.

"This is not meant to be an infringement of any kind," one of the posters writes. "Sutton just rocks at the belting."

Media corporations are reportedly growing less interested in banning contraband video (shared yuks from TV, for instance) than in milking unplumbed advertising opportunities from whatever arrives online. As it is, much of the theater that's viewable through the virtual window is already legit in the form of commercials -- Lane doing 16-second spots as the bombastically profane U.S. president in David Mamet's "November" (recently closed), or teasing montages for such current Tony-winning shows as "In the Heights" and "Boeing-Boeing."

Less common, but more innovative, is the slickly produced music video for "Bitch of Living" from "Spring Awakening," with schoolboys strutting and grousing to the catchy Duncan Sheik tune. (It's the whole song, but it's "legal": The video is not straight-up performance footage, and Somma says the actors were paid through a contract with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.)

Of course, video has long been the place where old shows finally go to rest, with the New York Public Library's Theatre on Film and Tape Archive as a particularly authoritative repository. University libraries have increasingly sophisticated databases, too -- but why schlep to campus when you can click your way to, say, Chita Rivera and Gwen Verdon, the original Velma Kelly and Roxie Hart, doing numbers from "Chicago" on "The Mike Douglas Show"?

In less than 10 minutes, you can compare Kelli O'Hara and Paulo Szot singing "Some Enchanted Evening" from the highly acclaimed revival of "South Pacific" (on "The View" last spring) against original stars Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza (on a 1954 TV special). For the record, Martin and Pinza, posted last year, have attracted more traffic by a ratio of 3 to 1.

Ethel Merman and Judy Garland are easily available on the old Judy Garland show, but the Merman search also dredges up the Ethel Merman Experience, a dinosaur rock band in drag thundering through "Shakin' All Over," with the lead singer looking Divine in a Merman wig and red dress. The sight conjures another 1960s pop tune that sums up most computer surfing in the virtual shallows of live theater: wipeout.