Tonight's the beginning of The New York Musical Theatre Festival, fondly known as NYMF. There will be 34 productions of what are called "new musicals" although we know the composer of one of them died in the 80's. There will be 84 "events" and some of these are readings of new musicals. 1000 artists are involved and it will all be over in three weeks.
Maybe it's a good time to think about life before NYMF existed. You'd write a musical, polish it, make it as good as you could, and then what? Blind letters to 75 theatre companies, very few of which gave the courtesy of a response. Some places just listen to one song on a CD, and, in those days, if you could only submit a cassette, you were screwed. Nobody took the time to read a script cover to cover.
Showcases get produced all the time, and nobody comes to see them. This is partly because there's no quality control. You don't know who's decided to put the thing on a stage. People go to NYMF shows with the assurance that somebody of note read the script all the way through and decided these works are stage-worthy, whether it was that esteemed panel of seven Tony-honorees or the young folks who run NYMF itself.
The Festival revels in its chaos, in the madness of stuffing so many new shows into the same day, and the same six theatres. It knows it's a ridiculous pressure cooker, seems proud of its own insanity.
We can, of course, all wish it ran more smoothly. Some chaos is unavoidable, the nature of the beast; other chaos is due to inexperience and incompetence. I wish it didn't cost so much, and admit to a certain jealousy that a witless new musical about some chain store got a One Million Dollar production while I can't raise 1% of that. Money is a cancerous part of the equation.
See as many of these as you can see, I say. Here's a quote from the [title of show] boys:
We did the math, and if one Phantom ticket costs $111.50 and one NYMF ticket is $20, you can either see Phantom, which is awesome in its own way, or you can see 5.575 different NYMF shows. We're just saying.
