NewMusicalTheatre.com Adds Tony-nominee Paul Gordon's Sheet Music To Catalogue

NewMusicalTheatre.com, the first website ever exclusively devoted to selling sheet music by musical theater writers, launches Tony-nominee Paul Gordon's sheet music catalogue today.
The e-commerce site already sells sheet music written by Nick Blaemire (Glory Days), Adam Gwon (Ordinary Days), Joe Iconis (The Black Suits, The Plant that Ate the Dirty Socks, Things to Ruin), Kait Kerrigan and Brian Lowdermilk (Henry & Mudge, Tales from the Bad Years, The Unauthorized Autobiography of Samantha Brown), Ryan Scott Oliver (Darling, Mrs. Sharp, Rated RSO), Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (Dogfight, Edges), and most recently Jeremy Schonfeld (Drift).

Over the course of the next severAl Weeks and leading up to an April launch concert, NewMusicalTheatre.com will be adding a new writer to the site every Friday. Paul Gordon is the first Tony-nominated writer to add his work to the site. Gordon says he is honored to have his catalogue on NewMusicalTheatre.com: "As a composer, I'm grateful that fans can now have a place to find the sheet music to my songs online."

Paul Gordon was nominated for a 2000 Tony Award for composing the music and lyrics to the Broadway musical Jane Eyre directed by John Caird and Scott Schwartz. Gordon's musical, Emma, based on the novel by Jane Austen, premiered at TheatreWorks in Palo Alto in September 2007, breaking box office records. Emma has since had successful regional productions at The Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park and Repertory Theater of St. Louis. Daddy-Long-Legs, written with John Caird, had its world premiere at The Rubicon Theater in Ventura, California in the fall of 2009. His other works include Lucky Break, written with Jay Gruska and Seth Friedman, based on the 1976 film The Front; Death: The Musical; as well as Analogue and Vinyl. Gordon is currently working on Little Miss Scrooge, a contemporary retelling of the Dickens classic. Gordon has written several number one pop songs and is the recipient of nine ASCAP awards.

"In order for musical theatre to keep evolving, it is crucial that new voices be heard, developed, and nurtured. Some of the most memorable and critically acclaimed productions of the recent past have been created by "new" musical theatre writers: RENT, Avenue Q, Spring Awakening, [title of show], The Drowsy Chaperone, In the Heights...to name a few. I am glad to support a forum that showcases writers just a few steps away from their big break!" says Sutton Foster (Young Frankenstein, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Drowsy Chaperone). The up-and-coming writers represented on NewMusicalTheatre.com have netted many of the prizes and laurels available to writers in the theater community. Among them, they've won four Jonathan Larson awards, two Ed Kleban awards, two Rodgers awards, one Fred Ebb award, as well as having had songs featured on television, and several Broadway, off-Broadway and regional productions.

The goal of NewMusicalTheatre.com is to create a direct connection between people who write music and people who want to perform and listen to it. It provides an affordable and legal one-stop shop for musical theater fans and performers to discover and share the work of self-published writers. Site features include custom songbooks, song ratings, and a search functionality that caters to singers browsing for new audition songs. It aspires to foster a dynamic community where fans and actors can directly connect and impact writers while they're still struggling to make a living on their music.

NewMusicalTheatre.com will bring writers, actors, and fans together to share music in a safe, dynamic - and most importantly - legal way. "The site's an extension of what we all do in the real world -- support each other's work. To have a site that not only gets our music out to people who want to sing it, but helps those people discover other young writers, is amazing. It's bursting the doors of the new musical theater community open to the whole world," says site member Adam Gwon, composer of Ordinary Days.

The site was created by writers for writers as an alternative to traditional publishing. Most songs have mp3s or video samples. NewMusicalTheatre.com uses new technology to protect writers from having their sheet music illegally downloaded by password protecting the downloaded file with the customer's credit card number. While protecting the writer, it also allows customers to have more control over their purchase. Rather than having to print their sheet music right away, they can keep the sheet music on their computer for continued access to the file and multiple printings.

When Jeff Marx (co-creator of Avenue Q) previewed the site, he said, "Whoever thought of making your credit card number the password to unlock the downloaded file was an absolute genius. That changes everything and serves everyone. This is going to be bigger than porn."