Research Guides: Theatre: Streaming Video and Media

Databases for Finding Streaming Video

Theatre in Video
Online access to hundreds of plays captured in live performance, as well as theatre documentaries featuring discussions with actors, playwrights, and directors.
Opera in Video
A comprehensive collection of Western operas. Performances represent the world's best performers, conductors, and opera houses. The database also includes interviews and documentaries on opera.
BBC Shakespeare Plays
This streaming video collection contains many Shakespeare plays, all with closed captions available.
Kanopy
Access streaming videos including documentaries, educational programming, award winning films, silent films, and foreign feature films. If we don't have access to a film yet, fill out the request form within Kanopy.
Digital Theatre+
Digital Theatre+ contains primarily video and audio recordings for theatre and performance studies. It includes plays, poetry recitations, video production lessons, technical guidelines, and much more. This database was purchased with funds from the MSU Denver Theatre Department.

Variety Stage Sound Recordings and Motion Pictures
The 61 motion pictures in the Variety Stage Sound Recordings and Motion Pictures include animal acts, burlesque, dance, comic sketches, dramatic excerpts, dramatic sketches, physical culture acts, and tableaus. The films represented date from copyrights of 1897 to 1920; the majority are drawn from the Library's extensive Paper Print Collection.
American Theatre Wing: Working in the Theatre
Bringing together performers, directors, playwrights, designers, choreographers, producers and behind-the-scenes personnel from the American and international theatre, the program offers a rare opportunity for students and audiences to see the people who create theatre engaged in theatre engaged in thoughtful conversation with one another. Other programs featuring even more expert conversations are also on this site.
Archive of American Television
Founded in 1997, the Television Academy Foundation’s Archive of American Television has conducted over 700 oral history interviews with the legends of television. These interviews chronicle the birth and growth of American TV History. The Archive’s vision is to chronicle electronic media history as it evolves, and make the interviews available worldwide. The Archive continues to produce new interviews every year. The collection covers a variety of professions, genres, and topics in television history

JSTOR
ARTstor has been reabsorbed back into JSTOR, but you can still find all the image resources there!
JSTOR is a multidisciplinary image database supporting education and research in art, architecture, the humanities.

Federal Theatre Project, 1935 to 1939
The Federal Theatre Project was one of five arts-related projects established during the first term of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to create work during the depression. This collection features images of stage and costume designs, posters, playscripts, and more.
The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
Includes visual images drawn from their extensive archival collections.
Ringling Collection: Images of 19th Century Actors and Actresses
These images trace the history of stagecraft through Shakespearean prints, 18th, 19th and 20th century European and American handbills, posters and heralds, photographs and prints of the legendary performers of the past three centuries including stars of minstrel, vaudeville and burlesque.