12 of the Best Plays and Musicals You Can Watch on YouTube this Weekend

Watch the Young Vic’s hit ★★★★★ production of Tennessee Williams’ timeless masterpiece, A Streetcar Named Desire, with Gillian Anderson, Vanessa Kirby and Ben Foster. As Blanche’s fragile world crumbles, she turns to her sister Stella for solace – but her downward spiral brings her face to face with the brutal, unforgiving Stanley Kowalski.

A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by Benedict Andrews, was filmed live on stage at London’s Young Vic theatre by National Theatre Live in 2014. It’s streaming for free from 7pm UK time on Thursday 21 May. Available until 7pm UK time on Thursday 28 May 2020.  The running time is 3 hours and 25 minutes with a very short interval, and it is subtitled.

Sea Wall, written by Simon Stephens for Andrew Scott has mesmerised audiences since its launch in 2012. A lot has happened since then – Andrew has won a BAFTA for his portrayal of Moriarty in Sherlock and Simon picked up a Tony for his acclaimed stage adaptation of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. But Sea Wall remains a unique, fascinating piece that is special to both the writer and the actor. On stage, it was revived memorably with Andrew at the Old Vic in 2018. The film remains a uniquely intimate portrayal of humanity by one of our finest actors, once seen never forgotten.

Grammy Award-winning music superstar Carrie Underwood stars in “The Sound of Music Live!” The three-hour telecast of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical classic also features TV and stage star Stephen Moyer as well as Tony Award winners Audra McDonald, Christian Borle and Laura Benanti.

Every Thursday, Judy tries to talk to her daughter online. Judy calls from Islington; her daughter is in Palestine. It’s 2010 and retired lawyer Judy is stuck at home, casting around for ways to occupy herself: with a women’s peace league; with local politics; with her daughter’s life. Donmar Warehouse Artistic Director Michael Longhurst directs Diana Quick in this smart one-woman play specially written for her by Adam Brace. Recorded via webcam in Diana Quick’s home during the Coronavirus lockdown in April 2020, Midnight Your Time is a wryly comic and ultimately heartbreaking exploration of what it really means to communicate remotely.

Two warring house. One ancient grudge. A whole lot of shoes. Can the warring houses of Montashoe and Keypulet be united by a pair of star-crossed lovers? Journey to Victorian London where Monty Montashoe and Keeleigh Keypulet, two young inventors bursting with ambition, strive to break free from their humdrum lives and follow their dreams all the way to the 50th annual ‘Invention Convention’!

Sponsored by Timpson Ltd. themselves, this five star, award-winning new musical explaining the origins of everyone’s favourite high street cobblers is guaranteed hilarity for the whole family.

The full performance of Pilot Theatre, Slung Low and York Theatre Royal’s production of Blood + Chocolate as streamed on October 17th 2013.

During the Christmas of 1914 the Lord Mayor of York sent out a chocolate tin, designed and made at the Rowntree’s factory, to every soldier from York who fought at the front. As news came of the young men who would never return home the women of the city stepped into the jobs at the factories and the landscape of the city changed forever as its people struggled to reconcile beliefs of conscientious objection against family loyalties.

Pilot Theatre, Slung Low and York Theatre Royal collaborated for the first time to bring the modern city of York to life with the stories of the workers and owners of the chocolate factories alongside those young men who gave their lives to defend the homeland.

Captured live at the Orange Tree Theatre in London, the UK premiere of the play AMSTERDAM by Maya Arad Yasur is available to watch online for free for a limited time.

An Israeli violinist. Living in her trendy canal-side Amsterdam apartment. Nine months pregnant. One day a mysterious unpaid gas bill from 1944 arrives. It awakens unsettling feelings of collective identity, foreignness and alienation. Stories of a devastating past are compellingly reconstructed to try and make sense of the present.

A strikingly original, audacious thriller by Maya Arad Yasur, a prize-winning Israeli playwright, whose work has been produced worldwide.

The Built by Barn production of Henry V, directed by Hal Chambers and starring West End stars Aaron Sidwell (Wicked, American Idiot, EastEnders) and Lauren Samuels (Bend It Like Beckham, We Will Rock You, BBC’s Over The Rainbow).

The full cast comprises of: Matt Ray Brown (Exeter/Orleans), Alicia Charles (Bardolph/Williams), Elin Phillips (Fluellen), Lauren Samuels (Katherine/Boy), Aaron Sidwell (Henry), Adam Sopp (Pistol/Constable), Sarah Waddell (Queen of France) and Jonathan Woolf (Nym/Dauphin).

This is the archive footage taken from The Other Palace run of Eugenius! Unlike some other shows that have recordings intended for the cinema or DVD release, It was never intended to be seen by the public, only to be used for reference so Ben Adams, Chris Wilkins & the creative team could remind themselves of where they were at, before relaunching the show next year on a larger scale.

Arlene Phillips directs a reworked version of smash-hit new rock musical ‘27’, which ran for nine performances at London’s The Other Palace. Originally premiering in summer 2016 at the Cockpit Theatre, the musical returned to the stage in a workshop version under the new title Myth: The Rise and Fall of Orpheus.

A modern retelling of the well-known Ancient Greek tale of Orpheus and the underworld, the musical is a brand-new genre that is guaranteed to resonate with every generation. Examining the link between mental illness and an inescapable addiction to the music industry, Myth examines a growing cultural problem that has stolen the lives of stars such as Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Amy Winehouse.

Lin-Manuel Miranda turns a piece of reporting broadcast in 2012 into a 14-minute Broadway musical, created by people who normally work on Broadway. You can find the original cast album of “21 Chump Street: The Musical” on, iTunes, Amazon, and Spotify.

Nearly 50 actors, singers, dancers, musicians, and comedians joined Ira Glass onstage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Opera House on June 7, 2014, to try some things they’d never tried before. The result? Journalism turned into opera, into plays, into a Broadway musical (by Lin-Manuel Miranda, starring Lindsay Mendez and Anthony Ramos). Comedy from Mike Birbiglia and Saturday Night Live’s Sasheer Zamata. Songs from Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields. Dance from Monica Bill Barnes & Company.

A meteor the size of LA is about to hit LA, ironically, and in London a couple of friends spend their last seven days watching the news, reinventing chess and rewriting the rules of some of the other games in their universe: generally putting things into perspective, at once paralysed and inspired by the ‘overallness of it all’.

Getting ready, as best they can, to die together, the enormity of what’s about to happen completely overwhelms them, but it also brings out in them a whole burst of creative energy, and so as the story to top all stories unfolds, they inadvertently become its co-authors, while in a dimension far beyond their imagination, their soulmates-in-spirit are having something of an unexpected ball…