You don't have to be the type that hums show tunes to warm up to the songs and performances here. Some of the talent involved in these tapings have been eclipsed by movie versions that replaced them with movie stars. For instance, seeing Gwen Verdon and Chita Rivera in Chicago is a different experience than last year's overblown Oscar winner, even if the clip is rather short.

The format is painless, and doesn't overburden the clips with elaborate intros we don't want to see. The producers break the show up into four categories - Divas, Leading Men, Dancin' and Record Breakers. An extra category called Bonus Performances is actually just the last act of the unbroken show; the box text says these weren't shown on television. The official length of the program is 80 minutes, plus 30 more of bonus material. The play Annie gets four songs, which seems a bit much, but at least they're all good.

One has to study the disc a bit to figure it out how it was put together. Hosts like Jerry Orbach (a musical star long before he became a grim TV cop) are shot bluescreen and tend to have blue rims around their ears. The 'audience' we see as we zoom into the Sweeney Todd number has been sampled and turned into a title graphic element; either that or it's been cleverly composited to frame the beginning of the Sweeney number. It's not spelled out exactly where the clips come from. A bunch hail from an unnamed 1971 show that featured individual musical numbers on a blank stage with only big dates ('1964', '1957') as decoration. It must have been an impressive night to get Robert Preston and Yul Brynner back doing their stuff.

The quality varies with the year of the taping. Barbara Harris in The Apple Tree is the worst, but her show is a surviving tape from 1967. The 1971 performances are okay to good, and the later ones look fine for pre-digital tape formats. In every case, the rarity and verve of the numbers outweighs considerations of image quality.

It's also difficult to figure out if some of the performances are lip-synched. Robert Preston and Angela Lansbury go out of synch for a moment here and there, but the patter-songs they are doing are so fast, It's hard to believe they'd try to do them to playback. Perhaps after hundreds of performances, it's easy. I do see microphones in at least one show, and a real orchestra is often visible. If some of the performances aren't live, I was fooled.

As a person who has attended only 3 or 4 stage musicals, I always need to be reminded that most were radically altered on the way to the movie screen. The staging of Cabaret as seen here is so elaborate and clever, that it would seem to be a different experience altogether from Bob Fosse's (good) film version. And where else can one see Zero Mostel as Tevye instead of Topol? The only regret one has after seeing this show is that all older original shows weren't filmed right from the stage, to record them for posterity. What was Pal Joey like originally, with Gene Kelly? I'm grateful for the Stephen Sondheim taped plays (on a compilation soon to be reviewed at DVD Savant). But what ever happened to television tapings of fare like The Year the Senators Won the Pennant? I remember seeing that one back in the 60s. Wasn't there a musical of Superman that was shown on network television?

Acorn Media's DVD of Broadway's Lost Treasures is a good production that looks a bit cleaner than the PBS broadcasts. Extras include extensive cast and credits (and performance history) information on all the original plays involved, and a gallery of PLAYBILL cover art.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, Broadway's Lost Treasures rates:
Movie: Very Good
Video: Good
Sound: Very Good
Supplements: Playbill art, Show stats and credits
Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: November 11, 2003