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Encore Awards

232 new musicals—one of which, Next to Normal, just won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. Another 60+ have gone on to productions on and Off-Broadway, in almost every U.S. state, and in twelve other countries. 

The New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF), founded in 2004, does the impossible: mounting 30 simultaneous new works of musical theater each fall, each with its own artistic and producing teams, alongside an array of readings, concerts, and other special events.  This launch pad for the next generation of musicals and their creators insures the continuing vitality of what some consider America’s greatest art form.  The annual Festival blends the economy of scale and grassroots mechanisms of an independent film festival with a professional support network and technical framework, all situated in the heart of New York City’s theater district.  Artists—writers, composers, directors, choreographers, designers, performers, and producers—get to realize their shows in three dimensions before a live and responsive audience.

From the start, the challenge was to be able to market and sell both the Festival as a whole and the myriad individual productions under that umbrella.  TheaterMania understood the marketing tools that would be needed to enable more people to be involved in the Festival process.  They were a founding sponsor and have worked each year to develop affordable ways to promote the platform—the Festival—as well as the individual marketing for each production. 

TheaterMania.com, now celebrating its tenth anniversary, was founded to help performing arts organizations market, promote, and process ticket sales.  Through the company’s website, www.theatermania.com, theater companies of every size receive free editorial coverage and listings, which are now viewed by 750,000 consumers each month.  TheaterMania offers effective online advertising and e-mail communications at affordable rates, and owns and operates a web-based ticketing and fundraising system, OvationTix, used by hundreds of organizations and events nationwide. 

TheaterMania helped by dedicating editorial resources to covering NYMF, yielding news stories, features, and reviews of compelling interest to their extensive online readership.  In addition, TheaterMania created special, low-cost marketing campaign packages for individual productions, through e-mail blasts and elevated placement on TheaterMania’s now-annual Guide to NYMF, enabling them to connect with TheaterMania’s musical theater-hungry audience.  Individual productions are empowered to create their own promotions and manage their own seating, without all of this administrative work having to be coordinated by the NYMF staff.  At NYMF’s request, TheaterMania built a special function to allow individual nonprofit theater company producers to collect their own donations.  They also worked with NYMF to create flexible ticket-packaging services—Festival subscription opportunities.

When NYMF developed its “Next Broadway Sensation” competition and performances, now extending the life of the Festival, TheaterMania provided streaming, live video coverage, more editorial, and text voting.  NYMF artists are being exposed to an increasingly national and international audience.

With TheaterMania’s help, hundreds of thousands of arts enthusiasts are informed of and inspired by the work of NYMF’s artists, and tens of thousands of them sell out half a dozen theater venues each fall.  The NYMF challenges have inspired TheaterMania in developing its online marketing and ticketing products and services, and individual producers’ positive experiences in NYMF have created many lasting partnerships for TheaterMania.  The collaboration between NYMF and TheaterMania has yielded results that serve both organizations and the greater creative community (nonprofit and commercial both): a model partnership between arts and business.