NewMusicalTheatre.com Adds Larson Award Winner Gaby Alter

NewMusicalTheatre.com, the first website ever exclusively devoted to selling sheet music by musical theater writers, launches the sheet music catalogue of 2008 Jonathan Larson Award Winner Gaby Alter today. Over the course of the next few weeks and leading up to an April launch concert, NewMusicalTheatre.com will be adding a new writer to the site every Friday. Gaby Alter is the winner of a 2008 Jonathan Larson Award, the 2004 New York Fringe Festival Songwriting Award, and the 1998 San Francisco Bay Area Theater Critics' Circle Award. His musical Band
Geeks! will be appearing at Goodspeed Musicals in May 2010. He also co-wrote 29, a pop rock song cycle produced in Greenwich Village by NYU Steinhardt's vocal performance program. His work has been showcased at the Summer Play Festival at the Public Theater, Lincoln Center Library, Joe's Pub, and by William Finn at Barrington Stage. Gaby also writes songs and music for PBS, public radio, films and video games. He is an alumnus of Tisch School of the Art's Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program.

The e-commerce site already sells sheet music written by Nick Blaemire (Glory Days), Jeff Blumenkrantz (Tony-nominee for Urban Cowboy), Ryan Cunningham and Josh Salzman (I Love You Because), Adam Gwon (Ordinary Days), Joe Iconis (The Black Suits, The Plant that Ate
the Dirty Socks, Things to Ruin), Paul Gordon (Tony-nominee for Jane Eyre), 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), Jeremy Schonfeld (Drift), Georgia Stitt (Ordinary Thursday) and most recently Jonathan Reid Gealt (Forward). "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 netted five Jonathan Larson awards, two Ed Kleban awards, two Rodgers awards, one Fred Ebb award, and two Tony nominations, 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."