Music Theatre Online, based at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, is a digital archive of texts, images, video, and audio files relating to musical theater. The best printed editions of musical theater texts cannot fully provide the experience of simultaneous expression of verbal, musical, and terpsichorean languages so necessary to fully understand the art form. Using the multimedia capabilities of the modern web browser, we hope to create a better framework for studying these important works of drama.
The intial phase of the project was funded by a Digital Humanities Startup Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). In the first year of the project we constructed the web interface and began work on our first title, the 2008 musical Glory Days. In the future, we hope to add a significant number of both historical and new musical theater titles, and present them in a way that is both intuitive and useful to scholars.
The Glory Days material is used with the kind permission of James Gardiner and Nick Blaemire.
Below is a video guide on how to use the archive.