The Ides of Links: Recently uncovered theatrical web sites
) 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,
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