A little bit of incredulous griping today.

With all the discussions and advice we get about keeping our organizations relevant in our communities, refining our marketing approaches to be more efficient and using technology to meet the expectations of our customers, I often wonder if Tams Witmark Music Library either doesn’t get it or is just complacent from their success.

The company administers the rights to some of the biggest classics in musical theatre. They send out a catalog every year and I am amazed at how unappealing it makes their shows look. Most of the photos are from the original Broadway productions back in the 1960s and 70s.

Yes, it is nice to see what Julie Andrews looked like in her late 20s when she was in Camelot. But the dated costumes and hairstyles just scream “this is staid show with nothing to offer your audiences in 2006” every time I get the catalogue in the mail. I have seen and been a part of these shows and it makes me cringe when I think that people will be turned off from producing them because of these godawful pictures.

The only saving grace I see is that they don’t have these awful pictures on the website. (There are almost no pictures at all.) So between Broadway revivals and seeing/participating in productions, people will have a positive enough impression of the shows that they don’t need images to help them make a choice when they visit the website.

I am sure the catalog works for the company just fine but I wonder if business might increase if they solicited images from even good amateur productions with which to update their catalog.

One thing that is depressing is that the catalog is that by putting in pictures of the original casts, the publication bears witness to the fact that there have been so few great original musicals produced in the last few decades.