Michael McElroy
PBS is bound for Broadway with a three-hour primetime documentary series that tracks the real life stories of America’s top high school musical performers, vying in the ultimate competition to find the nation’s best young theater stars. Part competition, part performance, and part non-fiction drama, the series starts in regional competitions, where judges select the best performers in the country. The 60 finalists then descend on Broadway, where they plunge into the eye of the theatrical storm for one intense week of rehearsals, coaching, mentoring, performance and competition. The week culminates in The National High School Musical Theater Awards , a one night, star-studded event held at the Minskoff Theatre in New York. Here the judges select and anoint the nation’s leading male and female high school musical theater performers. Follow the build-up and the heartbreak, the drama and disappointment. It’s BROADWAY OR BUST, on PBS.
Rent: Filmed Live on Broadway is a 2008 film of the final performance of the original Broadway production of the musical Rent on September 7, 2008, with some footage of the closing night celebration. The film had a limited theatrical release between September 24 and 28, 2008, in more than 500 theaters with high definition digital projection systems in the US and Canada. The film is assembled from footage shot at the September 7 performance as well as a day of shooting on August 20. It includes a reprise of "Seasons of Love" featuring both the final cast and cast members from past productions, including the original Broadway cast following the finale of the show proper.
Based on an actual incident at the University of Virginia Medical Center, this made-for-TV drama (also known as "Switched At Birth") tells the story of Sarah and Linda, two mothers who give birth on the same day in the same hospital. 18 months after the two women had contentedly gone home with the babies, a DNA test proves the infants were switched at birth by the hospital...
Michelle Pfeiffer is ferocious in the role of a desperate mother whose 3-year-old son disappears during her high school reunion. Nine years later, by chance, he turns up in the town in which the family has just relocated. Based on Jacquelyn Mitchard's best-selling novel (an Oprah book club selection), the movie effectively presents the troubling dynamics that exist between family members who've suffered such an unsettling loss.
