Just like this maiden voyage, but with fewer boats.

This is the maiden post of the NewMusicalTheatre.com blog. Welcome! I have the great honor and responsibility of popping the proverbial cork. Clearly, it shouldn’t be me. I made a boat allusion. Like, we were about to embark on something more Anything Goes than blog. Though perhaps “anything goes” isn’t such a bad description. We want this blog to be a sandbox for writers and singers and new musical theater aficionados alike. Rather than further define the themes of the blog, we’d like them to emerge from our collective consciousness.

You may or may not know that I’m one of the founders of NewMusicalTheatre.com. Like all enormous projects – businesses, musicals… blogs posts – everything takes longer than you think it will. Everything is more complex in execution than it seemed in theory and a couple years in, you have to go back to your mission statement and remind yourself why the hell you decided to do this in the first place.

This website was always envisioned as a new kind of community would connect writers and fans in a way that they’d never been connected before. So far, it’s done that by allowing singers to find sheet music that isn’t published by major companies. It allows writers to get their songs sung before they, too, find international fame with their musical about an unlikely friendship between a green girl and a blonde girl. Maybe more importantly, it suggests that perhaps writing a musical that defies gravity and box office grosses isn’t the only way to make a living as a musical theater writer. Perhaps, just perhaps, you can make a living without making a killing. While it might be pretty hard to do, it is becoming more possible and in some small way, NewMusicalTheatre.com has helped.

But there’s more to do, especially in terms of creating and developing our community. This blog is the beginning of that. We’re going to start with NMT writers (that’s our new hashtag – #nmtwriter – use it, love it) and a few select bloggers and then we’re going to open it up to guest bloggers from the industry as well as singers and fans. We fondly remember being involved in our first musicals when we were still teenagers. We remember the way it felt to join that community and be accepted. We learned from the people who had been there longer. We challenged them to do their best by trying to do our best. We might be a bigger community now thanks to the internet but we’re still small and tight-knit. We can all learn from each other.

Over the past couple years, NewMusicalTheatre.com has been our own little “room of requirement.” Singers come looking for fresh and new material that fits their concert or audition needs. Writers come in the hopes of finding new singers and fans to sing their songs. And voila! New tunes! New audiences! New singers! But maybe we’re not asking enough of it yet. I think this blog can be a place where we start looking at the bigger picture.

This is our sandbox, our playground. This is where we get to dream big. We don’t have to have answers but we have to ask big questions. We have to push our own boundaries and try to connect the dots. And because this is, at its heart, a blog about musical theater, we have to quote Sondheim…

“Give us more to see.”