Some nights you want theater and cannot have theater. It's a Monday. It's raining sideways. The thing you actually want to see is sold out until March and the rush line starts at 2 a.m. So you end up on the couch looking for something in the general vicinity of the feeling.
The good news is that this world has been extremely well documented, often by people who were in the room. Sondheim in a recording studio at two in the morning while everyone slowly loses their minds. Three thousand dancers turning up to audition for A Chorus Line. The original Spring Awakening cast together again fifteen years later. A Stranger Things stage show being built from nothing by people who are not certain it will work. A flop from 1981 that its cast is still processing.
Every documentary below is streaming right now without a separate rental, and the whole list is worth your time. Watching nineteen films about theater is not the same as seeing theater, obviously. We support both activities.
These are the ones to watch if what you want is access. Auditions, rehearsals, arguments, tech problems, recording sessions, all the things that happen before an audience is allowed in the room.
Streaming: HBO Max and the Criterion Channel
Year: 1970
If you watch one documentary from this list, watch this one.
D.A. Pennebaker took a small crew into Columbia's 30th Street studio the Sunday after Company opened and filmed Stephen Sondheim, Hal Prince, the cast and a full orchestra recording the original Broadway cast album in one session that ran most of a day and deep into the night.
What makes a 53-minute film from 1970 this watchable is that nobody in it is explaining anything. There are no interviews conducted years later, no one being gracious about how it all turned out. You're in the room while it happens, which means you get the boredom, the technical bickering, the singer who cannot land the tempo, and the slow accumulation of exhaustion in everyone's face.
And then, somewhere around 2 a.m., Elaine Stritch tries to record "The Ladies Who Lunch." Pennebaker was reportedly packing up his equipment when he heard her start. He stayed. The footage that resulted is the reason people still talk about this film.
A note for planning purposes: HBO Max currently lists it as available through October 1, 2026. The Criterion Channel has it either way.
Streaming: YouTube, free with ads
Year: 2008
A documentary about performers auditioning for a musical about performers auditioning for a musical. The structure is so tidy it almost feels engineered, except it isn't.
The film follows the casting of the 2006 Broadway revival of A Chorus Line, from an open call of roughly 3,000 dancers down to a company, while cutting back to how Michael Bennett built the original in the first place: a series of late-night taped conversations with Broadway dancers in 1974, talking about their childhoods and their bodies and why they kept doing this. Some of that original audio is in the film.
If you have ever wondered how Broadway auditions actually work, or wanted to watch someone find out in real time whether the last twenty years of their life were worth it, this is the one.
Streaming: Netflix
Year: 2025
Less a Broadway history lesson, more an extremely elaborate making-of. Director Jon Halperin follows the cast and crew of Stranger Things: The First Shadow through the frantic run-up to the show's West End premiere at the Phoenix Theatre in December 2023, before the production transferred to the Marquis on Broadway in spring 2025.
Watch it for the stagecraft. The illusions, the set, the way Stephen Daldry and his team try to make a live audience feel the same lurch a jump cut delivers on television. There's a specific pleasure in watching very smart people fail at a stage effect several times in a row before it works.
It's also the most useful film here on a question the industry keeps asking: what happens when a giant piece of screen IP has to become a play?
Streaming: HBO Max
Year: 2021
The Public Theater bringing Merry Wives, Jocelyn Bioh's adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor, to the Delacorte in the summer of 2021, as one of the first large-scale productions to return in New York.
This is not a general shutdown documentary, and that's what makes it good. It's one theater, one production, one outdoor stage, and a very specific stack of problems nobody had solved before: testing protocols, an all-weather set, a director and playwright working through what the show should say, and one of the rainiest Julys on record. Rudy Valdez keeps the camera on the people making decisions rather than on the abstraction of Broadway Coming Back.
If you have ever waited in the Delacorte line, this one will land differently.
Streaming: Prime Video, also free on Kanopy
Year: 2022
The companion piece to Reopening Night, at a much wider angle. Amy Rice follows the whole ecosystem back to work: stage doormen, wardrobe technicians, ushers, producers, prop masters, the costume shops and restaurants that live or die on eight shows a week.
Watch Reopening Night for one production. Watch Broadway Rising for the neighborhood.
Streaming: Disney+
Year: 2020
Andrew Fried started filming a hip-hop improv group in 2005 with no idea what he had. Lin-Manuel Miranda, Thomas Kail and Anthony Veneziale were doing shows in the basement of the Drama Book Shop and rapping on sidewalks. Fourteen years later the same group opened on Broadway.
It isn't strictly a how-a-musical-gets-made film, but it belongs in this section anyway, because it's the best available record of the thing that comes before the thing: a weird creative habit among friends that turns out to be the foundation for everything after it. Christopher Jackson, James Monroe Iglehart and Utkarsh Ambudkar all turn up, and Fried doesn't skip the part where the friendship gets complicated.
Some productions generate enough drama before, during or after opening night to support a second piece of entertainment about the first one.
Streaming: Kanopy and Hoopla, free with a library card
Year: 2016
The if-you-know-you-know pick of this entire article.
In 1981, Stephen Sondheim, George Furth and Hal Prince opened Merrily We Roll Along on Broadway with a cast of very young unknowns and enormous expectations attached. The reviews were brutal. It closed after 16 performances. The score went on to become one of the most beloved things Sondheim ever wrote.
Lonny Price, who was in that cast, made this film decades later using rehearsal footage nobody remembers being shot, and then went and found everyone. What the movie is actually about is not a flop. It's about what happens to a group of twenty-year-olds who are told they are the future and then are not, and how they each metabolized that over thirty years. Some of them kept going. Some of them didn't.
It hits differently now that the 2023 Broadway revival made Merrily a hit. You will emerge knowing considerably more about the original than the person sitting next to you at intermission.
Streaming: Prime Video, or free with ads on YouTube, also free on Kanopy
Year: 2019
Max Lewkowicz's history of how Fiddler on the Roof was built and why a musical rooted in one very specific vanished world became one of the most durable things in the repertoire, produced everywhere from Tokyo to Brooklyn middle schools.
The good stuff is in the making: Jerome Robbins interrogating the creative team about what the show was really about, Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock writing and rewriting, Joseph Stein's book, and the long argument over whether "Tradition" belonged in it at all. The film is less interesting when it drifts into testimonials, but the development story is worth your time.
Streaming: HBO Max
Year: 2022
Fifteen years after the original Broadway run, the entire original cast reunited for a one-night benefit concert for The Actors Fund. Jonathan Groff, Lea Michele, John Gallagher Jr., Lilli Cooper, Skylar Astin, Gideon Glick, Krysta Rodriguez, all of them.
The film moves between rehearsals for the concert, archival footage from 2006, and the strange experience of having been eighteen and unknown when the culturally significant thing happened to you. It is much sadder and much warmer than the concert-doc framing suggests, and it's the emotional counterweight to all the nuts-and-bolts filmmaking above.
Streaming: Free with ads on Tubi and Pluto TV, also included with Prime Video and free on Kanopy and Hoopla
Year: 2017
This is an unauthorized documentary built largely from existing interviews and commentary from critics and historians rather than fresh access to the company.
If you're here for documentary filmmaking, start almost anywhere else in this article. If you are specifically fascinated by Hamilton and want the fullest possible account of how it went from a mixtape idea to the defining Broadway show of its decade, there's plenty here, and it costs you nothing.
Streaming: Netflix
Year: 2020
Under half an hour, so treat it as a short rather than a feature.
Mart Crowley and the cast and creative team look back at The Boys in the Band, from the 1968 Off-Broadway premiere through the 2018 Broadway revival and the Netflix film. The reason it's on this list rather than filed away as a bonus feature is that it's really about the history of gay life on the American stage: what it cost to put those characters in front of an audience in 1968, how the play was received by the community it depicted, and how differently it reads now.
Wider lens. Sondheim, Elaine Stritch, Howard Ashman, Mike Nichols, María Irene Fornés, and the American musical itself.
Streaming: HBO Max
Year: 2013
Stephen Sondheim's life and career told through six songs: "Something's Coming," "Opening Doors," "Send in the Clowns," "I'm Still Here," "Being Alive" and "Sunday."
Calling this "a Sondheim documentary" undersells the device. James Lapine, who knew him and worked with him for decades, assembles fifty years of interviews into what plays like one long continuous conversation, and each song becomes a way into how Sondheim actually thought about the work: what a lyric owes a character, why collaboration is the whole job, how a career gets built out of specific decisions. Audra McDonald, Jeremy Jordan and Darren Criss appear in newly staged performances.
The best starting point on this list for someone who likes Sondheim but has never read a word about him.
Streaming: Disney+
Year: 2020
Don Hahn's portrait of lyricist Howard Ashman, and yes, this is a theater documentary, not a Disney documentary with a theater section.
Ashman ran a small theater in New York, wrote and directed Little Shop of Horrors with Alan Menken Off-Off-Broadway, had a painful failure on Broadway with Smile, and then took everything he knew about how a musical is built and applied it to a struggling animation department. The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin are structured like stage musicals because a stage musical writer structured them. He died of AIDS in 1991, at 40, having largely kept his diagnosis private.
Told through archival audio and footage rather than talking heads, which makes it feel less like a tribute and more like being handed someone's papers.
Streaming: AMC+ and Sundance Now, free on Kanopy
Year: 2013
Chiemi Karasawa spent a year with Elaine Stritch at 87, in her rooms at the Carlyle, in rehearsal, on set at 30 Rock, dealing with her health and her memory and the question of whether to stop.
Don't come for a career retrospective. The whole proposition is 80 minutes in Stritch's company, which is bracing, very funny, occasionally unkind, and completely without vanity. Alec Baldwin, Tina Fey, Nathan Lane, Cherry Jones and Hal Prince appear, but she is not sharing the frame with anyone.
If the recording-studio sequence in Original Cast Album: Company sends you down a rabbit hole, continue here.
Streaming: HBO Max
Year: 2016
Two nights of conversation between Mike Nichols and director Jack O'Brien at the John Golden Theatre, filmed shortly before Nichols died, in the same house where An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May had opened 54 years earlier.
It is not a comprehensive career survey and doesn't pretend to be. Nichols talks about the beginning: improvising with Elaine May, directing Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple, and then Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate. Theater people should watch it because Nichols was one of the defining American stage directors of the postwar era, and because his account of how a director actually decides anything is unusually concrete.
Streaming: Prime Video, also free on Kanopy
Year: 2018
María Irene Fornés wrote more than forty plays, won nine Obies, and taught a generation of American playwrights. Tony Kushner, Paula Vogel, Lanford Wilson and Edward Albee all pointed at her as an influence. Outside the theater she is largely unknown, and inside it she is often introduced as Susan Sontag's ex.
Michelle Memran met her to write an article, became her friend, and picked up a camera. The film covers a decade, most of it as Fornés's dementia advances, and it is not a decline narrative. It's a record of two people making something together, and of what remains of a creative mind when the memory goes. The New Yorker called it one of the best movies of 2018 and was not exaggerating.
Streaming: Netflix
Year: 2020
Six high school students compete in the August Wilson Monologue Competition, which ends with the finalists performing on a Broadway stage. Viola Davis, Denzel Washington and Stephen McKinley Henderson appear.
It's in this section rather than the making-of section because it's about inheritance: what happens when a teenager encounters Fences or Two Trains Running for the first time and recognizes the room, the rhythm, the family. Every generation of theater artists starts somewhere, and this is a film about the somewhere.
Kanopy and Hoopla require a card from a participating library. If you have an NYPL, Brooklyn Public Library or Queens Public Library card, you already have access.
1. Original Cast Album: Company. The essential one. Fifty-three minutes, no retrospective narration, one legendary recording session captured while it was falling apart and coming together.
2. Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened. The best story here, and the most emotionally complicated. A flop, thirty years later, told by the people it happened to.
3. Every Little Step. The clearest look anyone has ever gotten at what actually happens inside a Broadway casting process.
4. Six by Sondheim. The best introduction to how Sondheim thought about building a song, and by extension a musical.
5. Behind the Curtain: Stranger Things: The First Shadow. The strongest recent film on large-scale modern stagecraft, and the one to watch if the technical side is what you love.
If you only watch one, we'd pick Original Cast Album: Company, D.A. Pennebaker's 1970 film about the recording of the original Broadway cast album of Company. It's 53 minutes, it's streaming on HBO Max and the Criterion Channel, and unlike almost every other film on this list, it isn't a retrospective. You watch Sondheim, Hal Prince, Elaine Stritch and the cast make the album in real time, including the parts that go badly.
Four, each capturing a different stage of the process. Every Little Step covers casting, following the 2006 A Chorus Line revival from open call to company. Original Cast Album: Company covers the recording session. Behind the Curtain: Stranger Things: The First Shadow covers technical production and tech week. Reopening Night covers producing under constraints, in this case the Public Theater reopening the Delacorte in 2021.
Yes, three. Behind the Curtain: Stranger Things: The First Shadow, about building the West End production of the Stranger Things play; The Boys in the Band: Something Personal, a short film about the landmark 1968 play and its Broadway revival; and Giving Voice, about students competing in the August Wilson Monologue Competition.
Five: Original Cast Album: Company, Six by Sondheim, Spring Awakening: Those You've Known, Reopening Night and Becoming Mike Nichols. HBO Max is the strongest single platform for theater documentaries by a wide margin, largely because HBO Documentary Films produced several of them.
Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened, directed by Lonny Price, who was in the cast. It's about the original 1981 Broadway production of Sondheim and George Furth's Merrily We Roll Along, which closed after 16 performances, and what happened to its very young company in the decades afterward. Stream it free on Kanopy or Hoopla with a library card.
Yes: Every Little Step, free with ads on YouTube. It follows the casting of the 2006 Broadway revival while also telling the story of how Michael Bennett built the original out of taped late-night conversations with Broadway dancers in 1974. A documentary about auditioning for a musical about auditioning.
Depends what you're after. Six by Sondheim (HBO Max) is the best portrait of the man and how he thought. Original Cast Album: Company (HBO Max, Criterion) is the best footage of him actually at work. Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened (Kanopy, Hoopla) is the deepest dive into a single Sondheim show and its afterlife.
Yes, nine of the nineteen here. Every Little Step, Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles and Hamilton: One Shot to Broadway stream free with ads on YouTube, Tubi or Pluto TV. Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened, On Broadway, Broadway Rising, Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me and The Rest I Make Up are on Kanopy or Hoopla, which are free with a card from a participating library. Broadway Musicals: A Jewish Legacy streams free at pbs.org. Library-backed catalogs rotate, so check before you commit an evening.
There is a minor danger to watching this many documentaries about Broadway, which is that eventually you want to go see some.
Field Trip is an NYC arts and culture social club. We go to Broadway and Off-Broadway shows, museums, galleries and other cultural things in small groups of twelve, usually with a happy hour first so everyone actually knows each other's names by curtain.