How Far We've Come!

As we prepare to head to San Francisco for our Spring Conference, my head is immersed in our five-year strategic plan. The Board and staff have been working together over the past eight months to create a valuable framework to help the National Alliance for Musical Theatre grow. The Board will be discussing the final version at our board meeting next week, and our President Marilynn Sheldon will share some of the highlights with conference attendees.

I have been struck, during this process, by how far NAMT has come. In the past five years, our membership has grown from 130 to 150 organizations; we launched a new website with many more features; and our conferences, Festival of New Musicals, and New Works Summits have helped spawn a myriad of new musicals across the country. I am particularly proud of the National Fund for New Musicals, which has awarded 31 grants totaling nearly $150,000 to support producers and writers in new work development. There is much more we plan to do for our membership with new granting programs. We'll have to use some of the fundraising ideas we learn at the conference to help NAMT grow! Details to come...stay tuned!

Residency is key!

I had the privilege a couple weeks ago to speak to a group of donors from Zach Theatre who were in NYC on a theatre trip. My charge was to not only tell the donors about NAMT and our Festival but to also excite them about developing new musicals. As many of you can guess, this is a joy for me to do and topics I can discuss for hours. Elisbeth Challener from Zach asked me to advise the group on simple ways they can get started with new musical development. My answer was quite simple: bring in a writing team for a residency. To have devoted time away from life in a room with a piano is always sought after by our writers. It is how theatres can start to build relationships with writers and vice versa. It is not even that pricey. Plane tickets, hotel rooms, a stipend for the writers and maybe a rental car are the only real expenses. If you ask nicely, I bet the writers would even play some of the songs they worked on at a cocktail party for donors at the end of week. It is also a great way energize the winter doldrums!

I’m a big fan of having writers in residence as part of the development process, which is why we have the Writers Residency Grants. The next round is not until September but I wanted to plant the seed now. Do you have access to space, a piano and want to help develop a new musical? If so, I know a couple hundred writers you should meet!

NAMT's New Strategic Plan

After a long year of work, the Board of Directors approved a five-year strategic plan in March. The process was thorough and incorporated valuable input from many stakeholders, including the membership. 50% of you completed a survey last fall -- a remarkable result. I was particularly pleased to see that 90% rated NAMT membership as having either High Value or Very High Value– a wonderful stamp of approval for the impact of this organization.

The strategic plan has 3 Key Goals, incorporating the stakeholders’ belief that NAMT become a primary resource for best practices among musical theatre producers; make a bold commitment to growing our funding programs; and evaluate and strengthen our programs in ways that assure even greater impact. This plan will serve as the roadmap for our future, starting with the search for the new Executive Director. We are happy to share the plan with all of you. A summary will be mailed to all the members in the coming weeks, and you can review it online now at namt.org/plan. We remain committed to our mission, our membership, and this art form that we all love.

New Works Director on the Road

I just got back from two weekends of catching great Festival shows. First I was in Seattle to catch Vanities a new musical (Fest '06) at The 5th Avenue and Iron Curtain (Fest '09) at The Village Theatre. Then this past weekend I swung down to see Liberty Smith (Fest '00) at Ford's Theatre in Washington, DC. All three productions were fantastic, inspiring and very worthy of future productions.

The Festival is just the first step in the process of getting great new musicals out into the field. The next steps rely on theatres seeing each other's work, sharing work and spreading great musicals around the country. I know the economy is still rough but when you set your next budget, try to find money to include some travel for your key staff to see other work around the NAMT membership and maybe even find a little more to help host a NAMT member at your theatre during your next great project. No one wants a new musical to only have one production, and that can change with you taking one quick trip to a fellow NAMT member to see their great work!

Following Along

The massive South by Southwest Interactive conference just wrapped up in Austin, and thanks to the Internet I was able to follow along a little bit from here. A handful of arts and other non-profit people ventured into these deeply techy waters, and I hope more of us get to go in the future. It's not (just) about gadgets and toys; increasingly, technology is dictating how we engage our customers, both to get them in the door and provide them with service. For us, working in an art form that's all about live human interaction, this can seem counter-intuitive, but the beauty of all this technology is how we can engage with people outside of the theatre. People at SXSW were talking about customer behavior, the customer experience, and paying attention to how people behave vs. what they say they want. A lot of this is social media, but there are bigger things coming down the pike, like new ways to pay for tickets, new ways to provide discounts, and new ways your audiences will want to communicate with you.

It's hard to know what trends will stick, which ones are worth spending our limited resources on, which is exactly why conferences like this are important, so that we know what's out there and what people are buzzing about. We can follow the leads of deeper-pocketed corporations or charities...but not too far behind.

The NAMT conference is much smaller than SXSW, of course, but we'll be experimenting next month with letting people engage online as well. Follow @NAMTevents or search #namtsc11 on Twitter, or follow along at namt.org/twitter even if you don't have an account.

How do we select shows for the Festival?

Thank you to everyone who submitted shows to this year's Festival...160 scripts were sent in for review! Many people ask me: What happens next? Well it is a simple process to explain but a long and hard process to carry out.

Shows submitted to the Festival are sent on to the Festival Committee, a group of 13 brilliant and brave NAMT members who will each read and evaluate 25 or so shows between now and late April. The shows are all "blind," meaning the Committee knows nothing (no authors' names or production history) but the art in front of them. I send each show on to committee members who are most likely to love the show and advocate for it.

Then, we meet in late April in NYC and discuss all of the shows. Our goal for that meeting is to leave with a list of the 20 best, most diverse, exciting, fresh new musicals we can find that represents the breadth of work happening out there but also moves the art form forward. Then we repeat the process with the Top 20...but this time every show is read by every committee member.

By mid-June we will have taken 160 shows, divided them by 20 and gotten the 8 shows we will present at the Festival in October. It is a big task, a daunting task...but anyone on the Committee will tell you: it is a whole lot of fun!

Have you heard of the controversy surrounding Rocco Landesman's remarks at last week's new play convening at Arena Stage? To simplify, Rocco questions the increase in arts institutions in the last 20 years, when audience participation in the arts has decreased, begging the question -- Is there too much supply and not enough demand? You can read his blog post and comment as well on the NEA's site.

The NAMT Board is about to embark on our strategic plan retreat. One of the key questions raised by our members in the survey you completed in December mirrors the issues addressed by Rocco: audiences. How can we keep current audiences and attract new audiences to the theatre? What innovative methods can we find, as a field, to bring audiences to musicals? What role does new work play? These are big questions. I am excited to tackle these issues with our dedicated board members. Our goal is to have the final plan approved by the Board for our Spring Conference in San Francisco, to present to the membership. NAMT is in a strong position today, as an organization, and we look forward to great things to come.