Reading Civic

Do most new musical theater (Broadway) productions have copyrighted costumes, choreography or set designs?

I'm writing a college paper on how digital technology has affected musical theater and opera, and I think that illegal video recordings that have been posted on various video-sharing websites are probably giving directors everywhere an easy resource to copy the originals. Please include any websites if possible.

Public Comments

1. All designs are copyrighted. And all the theatrical unions [AEA, AGMA, IATSE, AFM] are actively looking into getting illegal clips pulled off of YouTube. However, pictures of designs are readily available when a show opens, such as souvenir programs or when the script is published commercially with photographs in it. So an unscrupulous producer could use them to copy some of the design elements. [By the way, whenever you see a small theatre doing a famous work and they just copied/adapted the original Broadway artwork for their posters/flyers, they're breaking the law.] And of course, there are those theatre works that have been released on video commercially. Several years ago when I did my first production of "Sweeney Todd," the idiot director copied about 95% of Hal Prince's original staging from the DVD [Angela Lansbury/George Hearn]. Several of us with ethics lodged a complaint with the producer, and she tried unsuccessfully to get the director to change his work. Terrible.