Broadway in your living room

On the far side of the continent, on an island covered in concrete, there runs a street of dreams familiarly called the Great White Way. And the fact that we know this, even if we have not traveled east of the Colorado (or even of Colorado Boulevard), is due as much as anything to television. A medium whose own early years were spent -- to re-punctuate George M. Cohan -- “4.5 minutes from Broadway,” it has, across the years, transmitted glimpses of what goes on there to the far world.

This weekend, the unlikely organ of this enlightenment is MTV, which will broadcast a complete performance of the hit musical “Legally Blonde,” based on the movie of the same name and taped last month at the Palace Theatre in New York. The show at hand may not be “Oklahoma!” or even “Avenue Q,” but it nevertheless continues a long and honorable (if too infrequently observed) tradition of bringing remote culture into the homes of those without the means to experience it firsthand. (See accompanying photo essay.)

The easy explanation for this particular marriage of art and commerce is that it’s a low-overhead way for MTV to carve itself a little piece of the “High School Musical” market. Yet there are more interesting affinities, beginning with the fact that MTV does its business right in the heart of the Times Square theater district, as any “TRL” fan knows. More significant, the network from its inception has propagated what might be called musical comedy values. Indeed, in some way yet to be made the subject of a master’s thesis, it can be argued that the current health of the musical is directly indebted to the music video, which instructed generations in the all-singing, all-dancing aesthetic even as it died out elsewhere.

Still, there is a fundamental difference between a music video or Hollywood musical, and a live performance, even a recorded one. What separates them is the excitement of a real thing transpiring in real time. Theater always contains the possibility of failure -- the botched note, the dropped cue -- whose flip side is the possibility of success of a sort that changes lives. Only there can an audience stop a show -- not at all the same thing, kids, as hitting the pause button on a DVD.

This is the place where you can go out a youngster and come back a star. Many more people will know “Legally Blonde” star Laura Bell Bundy by the end of this weekend than will have at the beginning. And some will want to follow in her footsteps.

Born into the golden age of the Broadway musical, television has regularly turned to the legitimate stage for a touch of class. Here are some highlights from a long and fruitful relationship.

robert.lloyd@latimes.com

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‘Legally Blonde: The Musical’

Where: MTV

When: 1 p.m. today

Rating: Unrated