Photo Coverage: Inside The MAESTRA May Seminar, Featuring Bonnie Comley and More

Bonnie Comley, Founder of www.BroadwayHD.com, was the guest speaker at MAESTRA's May seminar at SongSpace. Composer/lyricist and music director Georgia Stitt founded the MAESTRA organization in 2017 to give support, visibility, and community to the women who make the music in the musical theater industry. The MAESTRA membership is made up of female-identifying, non-binary, and gender non-conforming composers, music directors, orchestrators, arrangers, copyists, rehearsal pianists and other musicians who are underrepresented minorities in musical theater. Songwriter and composer, Kathy Sommer, moderated the seminar.

Comley explained that, "www.BroadwayHD.com is extending the life of shows by women composers like Shaina Taub and Val Vigoda, directors like Rebecca Teischman, and playwrights, like Paula Vogel and Dominique Morisseau and sharing them with a global audience long after the curtain comes down on their final performance. Thanks to BroadwayHD's multi-camera, HD digital captures, these beautiful shows, at the height of their production values, will be seen around the world and inspire others to use their voices to create inspiring theater. "

Launched in 2015, www.BroadwayHD.com tape productions with a line-up that includes such recognizable titles as Phantom of the Opera, The King and I, Sound of Music, Cats, Les Misérables, Jesus Christ Superstar, Oklahoma, 42ndStreet, Peter Pan, a series from Cirque du Soleil, and Riverdance, and of course, Shakespeare. BroadwayHD is not only, sharing the magic of Broadway with recognizable titles and celebrities but more importantly amplifying stories by and about women, LGBTQ and other under represented or marginalized, playwrights and composers that might otherwise be lost or forgotten. The www.BroadwayHD.com website allows lesser-known artists to be showcased and enjoyed in HD videos alongside icons like Andrew Lloyd Webber and Stephen Sondheim.

In addition to the MAESTRA monthly seminars, the organization's initiatives include educational forums, mentorship programs, technical skills workshops, networking events, and online resources and partnerships that aim to promote diversity and equality in the musical theater. The MAESTRA Directory was created as a searchable on-line database to find women of the theater who are hirable as composers, music directors, orchestrators, conductors, arrangers, rehearsal pianists, songwriters, music assistants, lyricists, transcribers, music producers, and pit musicians.

For more information on MAESTRA see: https://maestramusic.org/