Shakespeare in the Park Returns to 'Great Performances' with 'Twelfth Night'

Since Great Performances rekindled its relationship with The Public Theater and its long-running Shakespeare in the Park summer festival series in the mid-2010s, the recording of the live show has been the endcap of the PBS series' TV season, arriving in early to mid-May. Those who couldn't make it to the summer show in Central Park had to wait almost a year before finally getting to see what they missed, a scheduling decision that made plenty of sense in the pre-streaming era, but was already dated before the 2020s commenced.

However, the theater's recent year-long renovation of The Delacorte Theater space in the park (which, after decades of outdoor living, desperately needed it) accidentally broke that pattern. Great Performances' producers were forced to find other British theater fare to air in May 2025, and wound up with multiple West End and Broadway substitutions that ended up covering the entire month.

Regular viewers of Great Performances understandably assumed this was a one-off, and that when the Delacorte reopened in August 2025, the Shakespeare play selected for the grand reopening, Twelfth Night, would once again not air on PBS until May of the following year. However, it seems that Great Performances is using the disruption as an opportunity to course correct, with the stage performance arriving much earlier, airing on PBS stations in November 2025, mere weeks after the show closes.