At 12:19 PM -0500 8/21/09, Patrick Sheehan wrote:
You should contact Music Theatre International (MTI.com) (a musical rental company) and find out what they charge for a school or professional company.
Or Rodgers & Hammerstein Theatricals <www.rnhtheatricals.com> or Tams-Witmark <ww.tams-witmark.com>, the other two major licensing agencies for musical theater.
They have a by-month rate for any musical they rent out, which does not include the rights.
I'm not at all sure any of them will accept a contract that does not include performance royalties (which I assume is what you mean by "rights"), always payable up front. But all our dealings with them HAVE been for performances, so I might not be entirely up to date on this. I don't think, though, that you can get performance materials without scheduling and paying for performances, and the royalties ARE included in the contracts.
It's like an insurance company (how many people in the cast, how many seats in your theatre, how many shows are you doing)...and then maybe you can formulate your answer from there.
I'm not sure the number in the cast is part of the computation, since that differs for each show. It WILL control how many copies of the script/vocal score they provide in a standard rental. I'm looking right now at the R&H homepage, and there are links for requesting (a) an amateur theater application, (b) a professional theater application, and (c) a perusal copy (which usually includes one script and one piano-vocal score).
But Patrick's basic premise is correct: rental/performance fees vary according to a number of different parameters, and the only way to get a quote is to ask for a specific quote. That's what Grand Rights are all about. They have ABSOLUTE CONTROL and charge what the market will bear!
One other thing the rental agencies try to do is reduce competition by not licensing performances of the same show within a certain time period in a certain geographical area. The summer we did "Annie," we competed with a professional company and a semi-professional company in the area, and we got the rights because we were a totally non-professional community theater company (or so they told us). This summer we're doing "Joseph & the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat," and about the time we started rehearsals R&H posted a notice that, "For the foreseeable future, there will be no tours of JOSEPH in the U.S. and Canada. This means R&H will now be able to license JOSEPH with an absolute minimum of restrictions." (Translation: the amateur productions are making them more money than the touring companies!)
Call them up and ask for their librarian or musicologist;
Musicologist??????? You've got to be kidding! There should be such jobs for Ph.D graduates with literally no job prospects!!! And the librarians are not (generally) musicians and are incapable of answering any musical questions you might have! Nor are they interested in the slightest in getting errata lists or making any corrections in their parts, which would cost money, which means every new production is stuck with the same errors that every other production has tried to find and correct. And we all manage to miss a few.
John -- John R. Howell, Assoc. Prof. of Music Virginia Tech Department of Music College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A. 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:john.how...@vt.edu) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html "We never play anything the same way once." Shelly Manne's definition of jazz musicians. _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
