I can’t believe nobody has brought this up yet.
The production was a disaster. Airing a dress rehearsal instead of the whatever live version they had available? And what kind of production like this doesn’t hire understudies?
A low-rent one?
Saturday Night Live does it every week. Occasionally something will go wrong with the 11:30 show and they’ll insert the dress rehearsal version for the West Coast broadcast.
It’s one thing to swap out a 5-minute skit and a two-hour show.
The answer was to put a notice up and have the actor perform the role from a wheelchair. It would have been a sensation.
I actually thought it came off pretty well. I think (without really knowing what I’m talking about) that it makes a fair bit of sense to not have understudies for a one-time-only performance. Why divide all the rehearsal time and everything to have two people for every single role?
Instead, do what they did, which is tape the final dress rehearsal as a fallback, and use it if the worst happens (which, this time, it did).
That said, does it really matter too much that it wasn’t live? It’s not like they were pretending it was, given that the whole cast explained what was going on on the broadcast (going into the first commercial break).
So, as a performance, as a production?
I liked it a lot.
The good:
-The performers were universally excellent, with Mark, Maureen, Joanne and Collins being standouts.
-I really liked seeing a brand new set of directorial decisions. This was not just the broadway production restaged. Mark was not someone doing an Anthony Rapp impression. Several that stood out:
(a) Seasons of Love fitting into the storyline, rather than just being a bunch of people standing on the stage
(b) Contact being a fever dream of a dying Angel, rather than just a sex scene right before Angel dies. (I thought how Angel was the center of this song was incredibly effective.)
(c) Explicitly specifying the year. Let’s not pretend it’s timeless, it’s very much set in a specific period in the AIDS crisis.
-Making fun of the original production Mark shirt. Daaaaaamn 
The bad:
-Lots of small audio issues, where a bit of dialog or song couldn’t be heard
-I don’t disagree with how the dealt with Roger breaking his leg… but it did unfortunately distract. I kept wondering “wait, is this where he broke his leg” rather than really being into the show
-Some puzzling choices about what dialog to leave in and what to change. At the end of La Vie Boheme, when they’re describing what each of them is doing (Mark’s documentary about his inability to hold an erection on the high holy days) they replaced them all except Collins’s, which is that he caused the “MIT virtual reality equipment” to self destruct. None of which makes the slightest bit of fucking sense at all, and is SUPER dated.
-In addition to knowing it wasn’t live because of the injury, there were other points where it sure seemed like they were editing two takes together. Sometimes there would be a quick cut to another angle and the camera from the previous angle would HAVE to be visible, but it wasn’t. And in the Angel-shopping-for-clothes seen (right as they’re joking about the Mark shirt, from one angle there’s a chorus member present who isn’t there in the other angle. Not super-important, but it certainly detracted from the suspension of live theater disbelief.
Overall, definitely enjoyed it. A clear notch worse than Jesus Christ: Superstar, which remains the class of the new crop of live musicals, but better than any of the others.
The Carol Burnett Show regularly mixed clips from the dress rehearsal and “real” performance. They didn’t exactly brag about it, but they didn’t keep it a secret, either.
I get that they didn’t want to re-choreograph all the numbers around a wheelchair, but in a show that features prominent characters wasting away, maybe they should think about some of them actually using wheelchairs.
I wouldn’t call it a disaster but man the reviews were pretty brutal. It was actually better than I expected (with the acknowledgement that it makes absolutely no difference to me that it was pre-recorded…)
I was legitimately impressed by Vanessa Hudgens who I’ve always thought to be a big ol’ nothing based on the only thing I know her from, as a judge on So You Think You Can Dance
I was not impressed by Valentina, whose makeup looked fab but she is not a great singer
I was annoyed by the sound mixing because the audience cheering was way too loud in the mix
Otherwise, it was pretty much … a performance of Rent. Which is what it was supposed to be?