The Electronic Broadway Project

Many of those whose profession or study is now
in the field of musical theater recount a similar
childhood memory of listening to a library copy of a
cast album while following along with a printed libretto.
Although this is an awkward and incomplete way
of experiencing the historical works of musical theater,
it still is the only way many fans of the genre not lucky
enough to live close to New York can read the text of
new Broadway musicals. Commercially released filmed
versions of stage shows are relatively rare and do not allow
for the careful close reading of the texts students of
other forms of drama take for granted. The Electronic
Broadway Project, based at the Maryland Institute for
Technology in the Humanities (MITH) and funded by an
NEH digital humanities startup grant, seeks to provide
a better way of accessing the important texts of musical
theater for the next generation of fans, scholars, and artists
who may even now be pausing their MP3 player and
rereading a particularly moving lyric.
In this paper, I will describe the technical, legal, and
scholarly challenges the project team faced and overcame
as we strove to create an electronic edition of the
new Broadway musical Glory Days. Glory Days was, in
many ways, an ideal first title for our series as it poses
many difficult research questions with implications that
extend beyond musical theater studies alone. Like so
many new literary works, Glory Days was mostly written
using digital tools (word processors, digital music
recorders, etc) and so the primary sources are, in many
cases, preserved as bits on magnetic media rather than as
ink on paper. The creators kept meticulous archives of
the various versions of their script during rehearsals, and
so the work of the critical editor lies in organizing and
collating electronic, rather than manuscript drafts (a process
which will become increasingly common in the future
of editing and textual criticism). The creative team
also preserved their instant message and email discussions,
thereby creating a record of the creative process
theater historians of earlier periods would envy.
Further, the collaborative nature of musical theater creates
a situation in which many different parties hold
copyrights for the component elements, each of whom
must be convinced to allow access to their work for educational purposes. This is a difficult problem, and one
perhaps best solved by clear precedents that shift the cultural
atmosphere from one of paralyzing fear of piracy to
an understanding that open access to the texts of musical
theater can promote interest in licensed productions of
their works. The copyright holders of Glory Days have
generously given us permission to produce a free and
publicly accessible edition of their work, an act that, we
hope, will set such a precedent.
Of course, the biggest technical challenge in producing
an electronic edition of a musical is finding an intuitive
way to represent and link the various languages (musical,
verbal, and terpsichorean) the form uses to communicate.
The web-based interface the project team
designed will allow the user to have complete control
over the amount of information available on the screen
at all times. Any number of windows containing various
objects from the digital collection can be opened (or
closed) as the user requires. Clicking on a lyric or a bar
of music will start the associated recording playing from
exactly that point in the song. Notes in the text will link
to critical commentary, images of artifacts in the archive
related to a particular line, or variants in other versions.
Actors will be able to choose to display only the lines
and cue lines for a particular character in order to learn
their lines. Musicians, in future versions if not in this
prototype, will be able to play along with a digital orchestra
that includes every part but their own.
Although our edition of Glory Days will focus on the text
and music of the work, we will also consider the difficult
problem of representing the visual elements of the piece
and design our interface with this sort of extensibility in
mind. How, for instance, does one present a scholarly
edition of a dance number? Is there an inexpensive way
to digitally capture and render motion in order to create
an accurate transcription of dance in the same way that
text and staves now encode spoken words and music?
Because musicals tend to privilege spectacle and are often
developed with the limitations and possibilities of a
particular theater in mind, the performance space itself
should be considered a part of the piece, but how does
one highlight this spatial component of a work in an edition
(electronic or otherwise)? How should the performance
of music and dance best be linked to their coded
representation on scores and choreographers notes? In
this paper I will explore such questions and describe the
project teams best plans for answering them in phase two
of our project.