Videos: John Miller, Broadway music contractor

I’m pleased to announce the release of a very much new-and-improved version of what used to be my “Woodwind doubling in Broadway musicals” page. Now it’s just “Woodwind Doubling in Musicals,” since I long ago abandoned any idea of limiting it to shows produced on Broadway.

Here is what’s new, besides the title:

• Each show now has its own page. I know some of you will object to this change. Sorry. This has been a long time coming; almost 1,100 shows is clearly way too many for one page. Splitting things up shouldn’t really slow you down if you are using the list as a reference and looking up shows using the navigation at the top of the page; it is, admittedly, less convenient for idle browsing. It is also kinder bandwidth-wise to those visiting from mobile devices, which is more and more of you.
• This is huge: there is now a commenting system. Many of you who have contributed over the years (since about 2005!) have included insightful commentary along with the specifics of instrumentation for each show, and I haven’t had a good way to incorporate that information. Please go to town sharing useful information on each show’s individual page.
• There are some new ways to browse, including by production location, year, etc. This information is far from complete, so please please help me fill in the blanks. In the earliest days of the list, I didn’t keep track of sources or of any background info on each show, so there are still a lot of listings that are pretty bare other than instrumentation.
• If you want to keep track of the very latest updates and are RSS-savvy, you can hook up to feeds. The most useful ones are probably the main site feed, which delivers the most recently modified listings, the whole-site comments feed, and the comments feeds for individual shows that you care about.
• You can now “register.” There aren’t a lot of really clear reasons to do so at this point, but it creates the possibility in the future that I could extend editing privileges to trusted contributors. And I’ll tell you what: if you register for an account and send a donation of any amount at all (except I think the PayPal minimum is a buck), then I’ll turn off advertisements for you when you’re signed in.
• Which reminds me, there are ads on the individual show pages. I know. But I have put many, many hours into this thing. Also, I would happily consider running your ads instead if you have something relevant to promote and want to purchase some space.
• I have brought back the Frequently Asked Questions, and created a new page with hints and guidelines for submitting information.

Please do check it out.