The venerable Playbill On-line site has grown by leaps and bounds since its early, more casual beginnings. Sponsored (for the most part) by American Express, the site is now a massive, sprawling (in a good way) view into the world of big time theatre, with data and silliness, hard news, gossip, details, bargains, sights, and sounds on thousands of pages. This article will serve only as an overview -- for much more detail, go ahead and check out the site yourself.
What's most exciting about Playbill On-line (POL, henceforth), is that it's essentially a large database of archived articles, interviews, and information, with an attractive and easy to use front end. As we travel the site, you'll discover how much of it is easily searchable, quickly getting you to the information or gossip you're looking for.
When you first hit the Home Page, you're met with a newspaper-styled layout. As with all of the site's pages, this one is set up in a pseudo-frame manner , with a navigation list along the left side of the page, and all of the real material on the right. Although it appears to be done in frames, it's actually a large table, with the navigation list filling the left-most column of every page. This is slightly unfortunate since it means that your browser needs to spend the time loading the navigation text on every new page -- I say slightly, since for most surfers the time spent on the download of this text will be negligible. The main body of the Home Page is devoted to whatever POL's editors feel is worthy of pushing for the current week. Most of the links you find here are duplicated in the navigation list. The site is updated fairly frequently, and the Home Page is always changing to show what articles and pages have been recently uploaded. Here you'll find the News Extras, and links to features. The features may be articles about new shows, celebrities, theatre events , or interviews with theatre personalities, written by well-known theatre writers (including several from the now defunct TheaterWeek magazine: Ken Mandelbaum and Peter Filichia). There may be links to articles about what's coming up in a specific region (i.e., "Regional Highlights"), or a link to the weekly "Ask Blair" column, in which Blair Glaser, a NYC-based theatre coach, responds to questions from the acting community (sub-titled "Practical Advice to Actors"). This page is also spruced up with a number of cute graphics, looking like characters cut from the cartoon version of Monopoly.
