Who'd'a thunk it?
A scant five years ago when I began writing about theatre and theatre on the web for Suite101, if you wanted to read about a production on the net you'd be hard pressed to find as much as a review on a major newspaper's site. Enthusiastic fans with a modicum of HTML knowledge were creating huge theatrical resource sites in the tiny amounts of hard drive space allotted by their local ISPs. Playbill Online was just finding its legs, with nary a competitor in sight, and Toby Simkin was meeting with blank stares and incomprehension when attempting to convince producers of the value of building a show-specific site within his new BuyBroadway.com.
What a difference a half decade makes! BuyBroadway.com is now BroadwayOnline, one of those Playbill competitors there were nary of back then. No self-respecting news outlet is without a few theatre review links. A number of those fan-created theatrical resource sites have been absorbed by the current crop of theatre site giants. And it's become positively de rigeur for any new show to have an associated web site.(1)
And so we begin our brief survey of sites devoted to specific shows. As within the real world, the web sites of the shows vary with their overall budgets: shows running or opening on Broadway will have fancy or adorable graphics, Shockwave videos, audio, and etc.; in general, the further you get from the big budgets, the fewer bells and whistles (although the sites are not necessarily any less interesting or informative).
This week we'll look at beautiful examples of each type.
Bat Boy opened with a little fanfare at the tiny Actors' Gang theatre in Hollywood n 1997, workshopped its way around, opened with a little more fanfare earlier this year off-Broadway at the Union Square Theatre to great acclaim and success. With a book by Keythe Farley and Brian Flemming, and music and lyrics by Laurence O'Keefe, the show was directed by Scott Schwartz and features Deven May as the Bat Boy, and Sean McCourt and Kaitlin Hopkins as the veterinarian family that takes him in. Lighting design is by Howell Binkley, sets by Richard Hoover & Bryan Johnson, costumes by Sunil Rajan, and costumes by Fabio Toblini.
The Bat Boy website is clear, clean and sparse. Its attractive layout is designed, by Six-Two Productions, to look like a tabloid paper (like theWeekly World News, the rag that originally told the Bat Boy "story"). The simple site is broken into seven main sections: News, Tickets (online through Ticketmaster), Story (as told through the Weekly World News), Cast (and creators and production team), Media (opening night, backstage, promotion event photos, etc.), Press (blurbs), and Interact (a busy bulletin board and mailing list).
After an initial appearance at the 1999 New York International Fringe Festival, a sell-out off-Broadway production at the cramped American Theatre of Actors, Urinetown opens on Broadway later this week. The title alone was enough to make success surprising for this semi-Brechtian story of city forced to charge its populace for the right to micturate. The show has book and lyrics by Greg Kotis and music by Mark Hollmann, direction by John Rando and staging by John Carrafa. Its cast includes John Cullum, Hunter Foster, Spencer Kayden, Jeff McCarthy, Nancy Opel, Jennifer Laura Thompson, David Beach, Jennifer Cody, Rachel Coloff, Rick Crom, John Deyle, Victor W. Hawks, Erin Hill, Ken Jennings, Megan Lawrence, Daniel Marcus, Peter Reardon, Don Richard, Lawrence Street and Kay Walbye. Sets are by Scott Pask, costumes by Jonathan Bixby and Gregory Gale, lights by Brian MacDevitt, sound by Jeff Curtis, musical direction by Edward Strauss and orchestrations by Bruce Coughlin.
The Urinetown website is a brilliant example of the glitzy Broadway show site, albeit with the same irreverent, winking humor of the show itself (see, for example, the end of the site's intro which asks: "What do we need a website for?" The answer, of course, is: "Two words: Theatrical Marketing.") The site, designed by Mark Stevenson, is drenched in Flash, with silly audio cues and loops and Terry Gilliam-style collage animation. (There's also a non-Flash version of the site.) The site is broken into six sections: Buy Tickets Now (through Telecharge), What kind of musical is this? (reviews), Music (excerpts from the cast album), Cast (bios wackily done with rollovers), Creative Team (bios less wackily done with rollovers), and True Facts (a bulletin board, purchase link to Amazon for the cast album, and link to a Google search for "Malthus").
(1) I was told by a friend of a recent conversation with his new show's publicist in which he suggested that there might be value in a web site for the show. The publicist poo-pooed the idea, stating that show sites were merely vanity -- of course this did not stop the publicist, in press releases and articles, from mentioning the URL of the show's composer's modestly produced site!
Heck, we've had a site for information about our shows since about the time I began writing for Suite101. You can find it at www.knappalper.com, and there you'll find information about all of our produced shows. (The pages about our most recent musical, The Immigrant, currently mostly refer to last year's off-Broadway limited run, but watch the site for some exciting news!)
Originally published at Suite101.com Theatre, 9/11/01
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