🎭 Revolution, Rivalry, and a Patriot Jig!

Broadside the Musical - Song: Liberty or Loyalty | Viewmark (@viewmark)

The stage is set at Boston's historic Faneuil Hall, where the Loyalists, Tories, and Whigs are going at it! Political tensions are running high, tempers are flaring, and everyone has something to say about the growing unrest in the American colonies. But in Broadside the Musical, a heated political debate can only go on for so long before someone strikes up the music!

As the arguments give way to the spirited rhythms of the “Patriot Jig,” the opening scene erupts into a lively celebration of original music, song, dance, and choreography, transforming the political divisions of colonial Boston into a theatrical spectacle. With a colorful cast of historical characters, spirited exchanges, and plenty of musical entertainment, this opening number sets the stage for a story of divided loyalties, revolutionary ideas, and the extraordinary events that would change the course of American history. Join us at Faneuil Hall, where the arguments are loud, the music is lively, and the revolution is just getting started!

Produced and Licensed by Viewmark®

#BroadsideTheMusical #PatriotJig #AmericanRevolution #FaneuilHall #MusicalTheatre #OriginalMusical #Choreography #MusicAndDance #Viewmark

🎭 Nobody Knows and Anything Goes - Welcome to the World Wide Web!

BANNED the Musical - Song: The World Wide Web | Viewmark (@viewmark)

Phones out, screens glowing, and thumbs flying! BANNED the Musical opens with “The World Wide Web,” a high-energy musical number that takes audiences headfirst into the wonderfully chaotic world of social media, digital identities, and the strange ways technology has changed how we connect. Through original music, song, dance, and inventive choreography, the cast brings two very different worlds to life. Online, our characters are confident, outspoken, and larger than life. Offline? Well, that's an entirely different story! As they move between their carefully crafted digital personas and their often awkward real-world selves, the stage becomes a playful collision of virtual reality and human interaction.

With mobile phones becoming an extension of the characters themselves, the choreography captures the familiar rituals of modern life; scrolling, swiping, posting, and desperately seeking attention, while the music and dance reveal the hilarious contradictions between who we pretend to be online and who we really are. Packed with theatrical comedy, contemporary social commentary, and plenty of entertainment, “The World Wide Web” sets the stage for BANNED, an original musical comedy that asks a delightfully uncomfortable question: In a world where everyone has a voice, is anybody actually listening? Now, put down your phone (unless you're watching this on it!), turn up the volume, and enjoy the opening number of BANNED the Musical!

🎶 “The World Wide Web” - BANNED the Musical

Produced by Viewmark®

#BANNEDTheMusical #TheWorldWideWeb #MusicalTheatre #OriginalMusical #SocialMedia #Choreography #MusicAndDance #LiveEntertainment #Viewmark

Unafraid: Where the Absurd Journey Begins

Absurd Hero Musical - Song: Unafraid | Viewmark (@viewmark)

Every musical needs an opening that tells the audience what kind of world they’ve entered. In Absurd Hero the Musical, “Unafraid” does something more, it introduces the philosophical idea underneath everything that follows. This is a world where life can be confusing, unpredictable and downright absurd, but that doesn’t mean we stop living it.

Inspired by Albert Camus and The Myth of Sisyphus, Absurd Hero asks what happens when we stop waiting for life to provide us with a tidy explanation. Camus’ Sisyphus is condemned to push his rock uphill knowing it will inevitably roll back down. In our musical theatre version of that idea, the question becomes wonderfully practical: If the rock is going to roll back down anyway, what are you going to do on the way up?

That is where “Unafraid” begins. Through music, song, dance and choreography, the opening number establishes a company of characters living in a world that doesn’t necessarily play by sensible rules. Rather than beginning with an explanation, the music invites us into the absurdity. The movement and ensemble choreography give that philosophy a physical language; people moving forward, colliding, regrouping and carrying on.

That idea runs through the entire show. Sid will try to change his community. Zeus will attempt to control it. Ari, Darby, Dawn and Tony will each stumble through their own wonderfully complicated versions of love, ambition, identity and purpose. The mythology may be ancient, but the problems are remarkably familiar. Everybody is pushing some kind of rock.

And that is what makes “Unafraid” such an important piece of the musical. It isn't simply an opening song designed to get the show moving. It establishes the argument Absurd Hero will spend the rest of the evening exploring: perhaps meaning isn't something waiting for us to discover. Perhaps we create it ourselves through living, loving, laughing, dancing, making mistakes and continuing forward anyway.

That is also where theatre and choreography become especially powerful. Philosophy can sound terribly serious on the page. Put those same ideas into music and dance, surround them with Greek gods behaving badly, and suddenly Camus becomes something an audience can laugh at, sing along with and perhaps recognize in their own lives.

The rock may roll back down tomorrow.

Today, we push it uphill unafraid.

Music, Lyrics & Libretto by April Alsup

Absurd Hero the Musical Produced by Viewmark.

Step Off the Ferry and Into Eigg the Musical

Eigg the Musical - Song: Welcome to the Isle of Eigg | Viewmark (@viewmark)

When we first arrived on the Isle of Eigg, there was something about the experience that stayed with us. You step off the ferry onto this small Hebridean island, surrounded by an extraordinary landscape, and immediately sense that you've arrived somewhere very different. When it came time to create the opening of Eigg the Musical, we wanted the audience to experience a little of what we felt when we first stepped ashore.

That became “Welcome to the Isle of Eigg,” the opening song of the musical. The visitors arrive, the islanders are there to greet them, and almost immediately the stage comes alive with music, song, dance and choreography. We didn't want to begin by telling the audience about Eigg. We wanted them to feel as though they had just stepped off the ferry themselves.

The music and choreography became a huge part of recreating that feeling. Scottish influences, ensemble movement and the communal energy of ceilidh dancing allow the entire company to become part of the welcome. There is a wonderful informality to it, the feeling that you've arrived somewhere and suddenly found yourself in the middle of the music and dance.

That first visit also changed the way we thought about Eigg the Musical as a whole. The more time we spent on the island, the more we understood that we weren't simply creating a piece of musical theatre about a series of historical events. We were telling the story of a place and the generations of people connected to it. The landscape, the history, the music and, especially, the sense of community all became part of the show.

And that is why the musical begins with a welcome. Long before we get to the lairds, land reform, changing generations and the remarkable story of community ownership, we want the audience to meet Eigg in much the same way we did: arriving by ferry, stepping ashore and discovering the island for the first time. Of course, our arrival didn't come with an entire company singing and dancing. That's where musical theatre comes in.

Welcome to the Isle of Eigg.

Music & Lyrics by April Alsup
Book by Mark Sbani
Eigg the Musical licensed through Viewmark.

Harrumph! When Choreography Becomes part of the show in Eigg the Musical

Eigg Musical - Song: Harrumph - Choreography Rehearsal | Viewmark (@viewmark)

There are some musical theatre songs where the choreography supports the music, and then there are songs where the dance becomes part of the character itself. “Harrumph” from Eigg the Musical is very much the latter. From the moment the Laird arrives, the audience needs to understand exactly who he thinks he is: the man in charge, the man who knows best and, most importantly, the man who expects everyone else on Eigg to know it too.

That makes “Harrumph” particularly fun to choreograph. The music has a wonderful sense of pomp and self-importance, and the movement can exaggerate that authority until it becomes comedy. Cliff commands; the islanders respond. He expects order; they give him just enough of it. The choreography becomes a physical conversation between the Laird and the people he believes he controls. Every formation, reaction and bit of dance can reinforce the imbalance while also allowing the audience to see that the islanders have personalities and opinions of their own.

Like much of the movement in Eigg, the goal was never simply to put dance steps behind a song. We wanted the choreography to help tell the story. “Harrumph” gives the ensemble a chance to establish the relationship between landowner and community without stopping to explain it. The Laird can dominate the stage while the islanders create another story around him through their reactions, timing and movement. That is one of the things musical theatre choreography can do particularly well: an audience can understand a relationship before anyone has to put it into words.

And, of course, it has to be fun. Eigg the Musical deals with serious ideas about land, ownership, community and who gets to determine the future of a place, but music, comedy and dance allow us to approach those ideas with a lighter touch. “Harrumph” takes authority and turns it into theatrical swagger. It lets the Laird believe he is magnificently impressive while giving the audience plenty of opportunity to see the absurdity underneath.

That is why the choreography for “Harrumph” remains such an enjoyable part of Eigg. Music, theatre, dance and storytelling are all doing the same job at the same time. It isn't choreography added to a song after the fact—it is another layer of the story, helping introduce the world of Eigg and the conflict between the people who live there and the people who believe they own it.

Music & Lyrics by April Alsup
Book by Mark Sbani

Eigg the Musical Licensed by Viewmark.

We Were Streaming Before Streaming Was Cool

Viewmark has spent decades storing, streaming, organizing and categorizing digital content. So why are we moving our own media assets to YouTube? Long before “streaming” became synonymous with Netflix, Viewmark was already working in the space. Over the years, we’ve hosted streaming content and digital media for a number of large businesses, developing the infrastructure necessary to manage and deliver substantial collections of digital assets.

But hosting the media was only part of the problem.

We learned early that storing content is relatively easy. Organizing it and making it findable is much harder. That took us into data repositories, business intelligence and database architecture. We worked extensively with taxonomies, metadata and database structures designed to establish relationships between enormous amounts of information. What is this asset? Where does it belong? What is it related to? And, perhaps most importantly, how will somebody find it five or ten years from now?

When the Platform Catches Up

For years, there were good reasons for organizations like Viewmark to build and maintain their own streaming infrastructure. We could control how assets were encoded, stored, categorized, presented and delivered. But technology changes. Google has become extraordinarily good at one thing that sits at the heart of everything we've been talking about: finding things. And YouTube has gradually evolved from a website filled with individual video uploads into a sophisticated global media platform. That evolution made us reconsider a fundamental question:

What part of this problem does Viewmark still need to solve itself?

Maintaining our own streaming infrastructure simply isn't where we can add the most value anymore. YouTube already provides the massive delivery infrastructure, device compatibility, search, streaming technology and global accessibility. More importantly for us, it provides an increasingly useful ecosystem for organizing and discovering media. Rather than continuing to devote resources to recreating the delivery layer, we can concentrate on something we've always considered more interesting: the information architecture surrounding the content.

From Streaming Repository to Digital Asset Catalog

So we've been slowly moving Viewmark's own digital streaming assets to YouTube, organizing decades of material into what we're calling the Viewmark Digital Asset Catalog. And this isn't simply dumping old videos onto a YouTube channel. A theatrical video, for example, might simultaneously be part of a production, a particular performance, a scene, an original song, choreography, a cast, a venue, a festival and a particular moment in Viewmark's history. Those relationships can be expressed through consistent titles, descriptions, playlists, keywords and metadata. In other words, we're applying some very old Viewmark thinking to a very modern repository.

Our official identity on youtube is @viewmark, giving our audience a simple and consistent home: youtube.com/@viewmark We secured the word mark "Viemark" well over twenty years and continue to maintain it as a trademark of our brand image. For more information visit the USPTO website at https://www.uspto.gov/

The Address Doesn't Have to Change

There's another lesson we've learned from decades of technology: platforms change. Addresses don't have to. That's why we've retained our own permanent media address: media.viewmark.com We've placed a permanent 301 redirect there pointing to the Viewmark catalog on YouTube. Today YouTube provides the infrastructure behind our streaming collection. Years from now, should the technology change again, the Viewmark address can remain the same. That's an important distinction.

We're not giving YouTube the identity of our archive. We're using YouTube as the infrastructure for it. There is something wonderfully full-circle about the whole thing. We've gone from data repositories and business intelligence structures, to developing taxonomies, to hosting and delivering streaming media for large businesses, to managing an increasingly substantial archive of our own theatrical and creative work. Now one of the world's largest technology companies can handle the streaming infrastructure. That leaves us to concentrate on the part we've always found fascinating: Store it. Describe it. Categorize it. Connect it. Make it findable. We've been doing that for a very long time.We just don't need to own the streaming server anymore.

Eigg: Where Our Fringe Story Began

In 2023, we took Eigg the Musical to the Edinburgh Fringe for the first time, and what a whirlwind it was. We had been invited to open the festival for Greenside at their Infirmary location, which was an extraordinary opportunity for our little company. Suddenly, we were arriving in Edinburgh not just with a new musical, but with the responsibility of helping kick off the festival.

Eigg the Musical, Greenside Gala performance at Edinburgh Fringe

The days leading up to opening were a blur of rehearsals, technical preparations, last-minute adjustments, and figuring out how the Fringe worked while we were actually doing it. There was a lot to take in, and more than a few moments when everything seemed to be happening at once. But we got through it, and when the time came, the company was ready to tell the story we had brought all the way from Denver.

Eigg the Musical, cast performs "Reform starts now!" at the Edinburgh Fringe

Our opening audience included The Guardian, The Scotsman, Getty Images, Alamy, and some of the other big names in the press. It was quite a moment to see Eigg, a musical about a small Scottish island and its remarkable community, being introduced to such a wide audience. The response was wonderful. People connected with the music, the humor, and the story, and it was especially meaningful to see how much the show resonated in Scotland.

Cooper Kaminsky as Keith Schellenberg in Eigg the Musical

That first Fringe taught us an enormous amount about producing original work, working together under pressure, and taking a show beyond the place where it was created. We came home with new friendships, unforgettable memories, and a few lessons learned the hard way. Looking back, Eigg was more than our first Edinburgh production. It was the beginning of a journey that would bring us back to the Fringe year after year.