It's a natural progression. For about two years, dozens of productions from the golden age of drama on television have been available on VHS from the Broadway Theater Archive; www.broadwayarchive.com. On March 26, five of them are to be released in stores by Kultur, one of video's best-known distributors of performing arts programming. And they will be available on DVD.
The first of Kultur's five is the 1966 CBS production of Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman," with Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock repeating their acclaimed Broadway roles. The other four titles are Clifford Odets' "Awake and Sing!" with Walter Matthau; Jean Cocteau's "Human Voice" with Ingrid Bergman; Ronald Ribman's "Journey of the Fifth Horse" with Dustin Hoffman; and George S. Kaufman and Ring Lardner's "June Moon" with Estelle Parsons and Susan Sarandon.
According to the plan, Kultur will eventually issue all of the archive's video-ready roster. Currently that includes about 140 titles, all of them digitally remastered. Some of these are also appearing on television. On Jan. 5, for example, WNET broadcast Eugene O'Neill's "Moon for the Misbegotten" (1975), directed by Jose Quintero, with Jason Robards and Colleen Dewhurst.
With several partners, among them WNET, the Broadway Theater Archive set out to chase down about 320 shows that made television a dramatic wonderland from the '50s to the '70s. Among the teleplays in the wings are "Hedda Gabler" (1963), with Bergman, Michael Redgrave and Ralph Richardson; "Wuthering Heights" (1958), with Richard Burton and Rosemary Harris; and "The Moon and Sixpence" (1959), with Judith Anderson, Laurence Olivier, Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn.
Dennis Hedlund, Kultur's president, had been watching the archive's progress. "I found their emphasis was more on television," he said. There was the Web site, but video wasn't a priority. "They didn't want to get involved with retailing," he added. Now Kultur will handle all of that.
Basil Hero, the archive's president and co-founder, said that arrangements were being discussed to transfer Web sales to Kultur's site www.kultur.com. In stores, he said, the stress would be on DVD, a format that suits an audience receptive to arts titles.
Hedlund said that about 25 titles were being prepared for disc, with the others to follow. Partnership with the archive benefits Kultur in at least two respects. Hero's organization has already cleared rights, removing a complicated task that often burdens Kultur in its global search for opera, dance and classical music. The second advantage is that the plays are coming to Kultur digitally remastered and ready for conversion to DVD.
Like all distributors, Hedlund finds the popularity of DVD a good reason to recycle older titles. In Kultur's case, viewers are looking for performances by artists at their peak — for example, Luciano Pavarotti in "La Boheme" in 1988, or Placido Domingo in "Otello" in 1992. One best seller is "The Nutcracker," with Rudolf Nureyev in 1968. "People were waiting for that," Hedlund said.