When American composer, actor Lin-Manuel Miranda appears on screen and sings the lines: "Alexander Hamilton, my name is Alexander Hamilton", I bristle with excitement.

I'm watching the award-winning musical Hamilton, which took Broadway by storm when it opened in 2015. It was filmed on stage and meant to be released on the big screen next year. Instead, it was released in July this year on subscription service Disney+ amid the pandemic.

The weekend it was released, the Disney+ app was downloaded 752,451 times globally, a 46.6 per cent jump from the average number of downloads over the four weekends prior, according to analytics firm Apptopia.

Obviously, many others around the world were as excited as I was about watching Hamilton at home.

Any reservations I had about the show not living up to the live version - which I had watched on Broadway - were obliterated as the show progressed.

I was once again pulled into the story of an immigrant making his way in America and becoming one of the country's founding fathers - laughing and crying alongside the filmed audience.

It was a melding of theatrical form and filmic medium, but at the end, it still felt like I had just stepped out of the theatre - emotionally charged, brimming with energy, and somewhat transformed.

Simply put, it had succeeded in going from stage to screen.

There are only two other pre-recorded productions that I have watched this season with similar affect: A Streetcar Named Desire, a co-production by London arts venue the Young Vic and producer Joshua Andrews, and Emily Of Emerald Hill by Singapore theatre company Wild Rice.

As the pandemic continues, many theatre practitioners, myself included, are still trying to make theatre happen in some form or other: putting up pre-recorded productions, turning shows into audio experiences or embracing online platforms such as Zoom.

Some have succeeded, others not, but many are pushing boundaries way beyond a fourth wall, which makes for an exciting, amorphous phase in theatre as it negotiates its relationship with an audience on screen.

As a journalist, I have seen the media industry swing from an emphasis on print to digital, but I never thought that as a theatre practitioner, I would have to pivot in the same way and create something for an online audience - that was the job of film directors and YouTubers.

I run theatre company How Drama together with my co-artistic director Ross Nasir and this year, when we realised our annual production Fat Kids Are Harder To Kidnap could not be staged according to plan, we started looking for alternatives.

The show has been around for 12 years. We perform 31 plays in an hour, and the audience decides the order of the plays by shouting out the number of the play they wish to watch.

The plays riff off current affairs, and with so much happening in the world, it felt like a real waste to let the year slip by without a show.

Because it is an interactive performance, we had the extra challenge of translating that element of audience participation to the online experience.

We toyed with the idea of Facebook live and interacting with the audience through its chatroom. But the interactivity wasn't as visceral.

Then, a friend told me about her daughter's ballet classes on Zoom and how the teacher was able to highlight the individual students at home using the "spotlight" function. Perhaps we could use that function to spotlight the actors at home as they performed live and the audience could still shout out numbers while in the Zoom meeting?

At that point, I didn't even have a Zoom account, but I told Ross about it and we set to work getting funding, assembling the team and asking for advice from friends who had produced live online events.

The distinction between theatre and film began to blur, as we waded into digital territory.

Rehearsals took place entirely online during the shutdown, we bought props and lights from domestic sellers on e-commerce sites and couriered wine to the actors' families to thank them for sacrificing their kitchens, bathrooms and living rooms for the show.

As Singapore entered phase one of the circuit breaker, we premiered Singapore's first live, interactive theatre production - Fat Kids Are Harder To Kidnap on Zoom.

As artists, we felt the rush of theatre again each night as we preset our props, ran lines and did sound and mic checks in preparation for our live show (none of it is pre-recorded).

We were as vulnerable to an audience's cheers and jeers as ever before. We were also at the mercy of our home Internet connections and a fickle Zoom platform.

Originally supposed to be a one-night-only performance, the sold-out show ran for six nights. And nearly every night, there were moments of panic triggered by lagging connections, actors losing audio or screens going black for no apparent reason. An updated version of the show will be part of the Melbourne Fringe in November.

Others, too, have been innovating in this space, Murder At Mandai Camp by Sight Lines Entertainment used Telegram to communicate with the audience, while director and Cultural Medallion recipient Alvin Tan and New-York based Sim Yan Ying co-directed a project called Who's There?, which involved an international cast from Singapore, Malaysia and America.

As conditions improve, theatre practitioners continue to innovate online. But things are coming full circle as companies apply their creativity to developing physical shows on stage, which adhere to rules that keep audiences and artists safe.

Last week, The New York Times' podcast The Daily featured a regional theatre in New England which is putting up a socially distanced version of the musical Godspell. The actors stay physically apart, put on and remove masks, and occasionally stand behind screens for their scenes.

According to the report, this is the only musical with union actors taking place in the United States this summer. The show runs till Sunday and checks online show that tickets are all sold out.

As laws and guidelines about community gatherings change, the international theatre community has to constantly adapt and innovate. And who knows what theatre may evolve into or what form it might ultimately take.

The lights may have dimmed on theatre for now, but to borrow a line from Hamilton - there's a million things artists haven't done, just you wait.