Recently uncovered theatrical web sites
Ya cast out yer lines, and ya get what ya get. Here are a bunch o' links unearthed during the last coupla weeks of March. They range from the sublime to the execrable.
Bahgins 4 Yoots!
New York City high schoolers can find the best bargains in show
biz at the High 5
tickets site. Kids between the ages of 13 and 18 can buy tickets
to shows, concerts, operas, dance performances, museums, and more
for FIVE DOLLARS! And for performances that take place
during the week, that's $5 for TWO TICKETS!!! In
addition to specific performances of shows on and off-Broadway,
a number of organizations have contributed tickets, including:
The 92nd Street Y, American Symphony Orchestra, Asia Society,
Brooklyn Academy of Music, Carnegie Hall, Chamber Music Society
of Lincoln Center, Dance Theater Workshop, Film Society of Lincoln
Center, Great Performers at Lincoln Center, International Center
of Photography, Japan Society, Jazz at Lincoln Center, The Joyce
Theater, The Kitchen, The Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Ballet, New York City Opera, New York Philharmonic, The Public
Theater, The Regina Opera Company, and the Whitney Museum of American
Art. (These organizations appear on High
5's link page.)
To get the tickets, students need to bring proof of age or a high
school ID or transportation pass.
What's Playing in the City?
A simple, straightforward listing of shows and show
times is Theatre New York.
Their listings are broken into Broadway, off-Broadway, off-off-Broadway,
and For Kids (with one of the scariest background color choices
I've ever seen), with each of the first three categories broken
down further into Drama, Comedy, and Musicals. The listings are
not always quite current (shows that have already opened were
listed as Coming Soon the last time I visited), but they
do have contact/ticket information for each show listed. The site
contains exactly two links: to the Tony
Awards® and Playbill
On-Line sites -- which is odd, since if you're really looking
for theatre listings you should have gone to the Playbill pages
in the first place.Webmaster is Joyce Sarnar.
What's Playing in Deutschland?
Where do you go to find out what's playing at the National
Theatres of Mannheim? Where else, but to the Nationtheater
Mannheim page. This is a beautiful, well-designed and constructed
site, filled with lovely images, and with detailed information
about what's currently playing and what's coming up at the three
theatres. The site is entirely auf Deutsch.
All the writers
What did Harry Akst write? (Music for "Dinah,"
"Baby Face," "Am I Blue," among others.) Whom
did Hy Zaret ("Unchained Melody") most frequently collaborate
with? (Alec Kramer and Joan Whitney. ) You'll find them all (well,
a whole lot of 'em anyway) at Murry L. Pfeffer's Tunesmith
site, the self-proclaimed "world's First, Largest, and Finest
Online COMPOSERS and LYRICISTS DATABASE." And who are we
to argue? This is a huge valuable resources with brief biographies
on hundreds of songwriters. The site is a companion to Mr. Pfeffer's
massive Big
Band Database site.
April Fools?
Every once in a while you stumble across a site that
is so heinous, so despicably designed, so laughably produced that
you wonder whether it was executed by an 8-month-old, if it's
a simply a joke, or if you somehow managed to discover a portion
of a lesson which demonstrates what not to do with HTML. Punch
In is such a site. Brought to you by "Punch In International
Travel & Entertainment Syndicate," the site is supposed
to be a demo of the quality of the reviews you can purchase
from the company. I visited because they maintain(?) a group
of theatre reviews.
Not only are the reviews pitifully inept (although mercifully
short), the site is riddled with typos, misprints, broken links,
and absurd categorization (concert performances, cabaret, and
off-off-off-off-Broadway are in the Broadway section), but it's
UGLYUGLYUGLY. You get endlessly long pages, a total absence of
form or sense of style, bizarre background colors, and multicolored text
titles (oooh, pretty!).
This place looks like it was designed by an untalented preschooler
bored with looking for porn sites on his Daddy's AOL account.
Garth Vader's Homepage
In the opposite direction, here's an example of what you can get
when you have limitless resources to throw at a site: Livent.
Everything about this site spells class, from the floating, spinning
golden Livent logo (in Director format) that flies at you when
you first enter while excerpts from the Showboat overture
play, to the RealAudio previews of the shows. We're so used to
see advertising banners scattered all over pages that when I first
thought about trying to describe the gorgeous front page's links
to the Livent shows, I couldn't think of the word for what they
are -- which is "banners," but the kinds that hang out
in front of theatres. The site really contains the nitty-gritty
about Livent, not only including details about Livent's
shows (Show Boat, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,
The Phantom of the Opera, Andrew Lloyd Webber - Music of the Night,
Candide, and Ragtime) and concert
series, but dramaturgical essays behind the shows, bios, schedules,
links to sites that tie in with the shows, and histories of the
Livent-owned theatres. They even list their board of directors,
current stock quote, and summary
financial info! You want to find out about Garth Drabinsky's
Livent?, you come here!
Just wanted to let you know that Elyse Sommer took my offhand dig at the "informal design" of her CurtainUp site very seriously. The site has undergone a minor facelift. It's always worth a visit. Check it out.
Originally published at Suite101.com Theatre, 4/1/97
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