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By: Brett Singer P. Diddy’s best friend in New York theatre is a former hotel executive from Maryland. Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration. But when Martin Denton’s review of Raisin In The Sun, starring P. Diddy (a.k.a. Sean Combs) in his Broadway debut, went live on his website, NYTheatre.com, overnight the page had been viewed over 1,000 times. More telling, though, were the 600-plus hits on the seating chart for the Royale Theatre where Raisin is playing. “No one clicks on a seating chart unless they want to buy tickets,” said Denton. At $91.25 for orchestra seats, that translates into well over $50,000 worth of ticket sales. NYTheatre.com (officially known as The New York Theatre Experience) has become one of the most popular theatre sites on the Internet; it is the first to come up if one searches Google for “New York Theatre” (try it, and hit “I’m Feeling Lucky”). In October 1996, Denton, then an executive working for the Marriott hotel chain and living in suburban Maryland, took an Internet class. This introduction to a fledgling technology inspired him to create a website dedicated to one of his favorite pastimes – Manhattan theatre. In February 1997, the site launched as “Martin’s Guide To New York Theatre,” featuring a dozen or so Broadway reviews, listings of Broadway and off-Broadway shows and an email newsletter that he sent to six subscribers. Fast forward to 2004. Denton now lives in Manhattan, on John Street, two blocks from the site of the World Trade Center. The website is now an official not-for-profit organization – in 2002, they received their first government grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. What started out as a site chronicling Denton’s weekend NYC theatre jaunts has blossomed into a full-time job, with Denton and his mother Rochelle Denton (with whom he manages the site) seeing up to ten shows a week. The newsletter now has 6,700 subscribers; the site had over eight million page views in 2003, with more than two million unique visitors; and has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Time Out New York. All of this success is important to Denton because his main goals for the site are: “Encouraging people to go to the theatre” and “Encouraging people to make theatre.” “Theatre is one big community,” said Denton over French Dip sandwiches at Suspenders. “It is socially important, and we don’t want to be adversaries of the people who create theatre. We want to be part of the community.” In the name of community, Denton also runs a play-publishing program called Publish Emerging Playwrights (PEP). The first volume, Plays and Playwrights for the New Millennium appeared in 1999 and featured eight plays; the program has since spawned four volumes. All rights and royalties go straight to the authors and allows “these people to get known,” said Rochelle Denton. The first person in the theatre community to welcome Denton was Jonathan Bank, artistic director of the Mint Theater Company. After reading Denton’s review of the Mint’s production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Bank invited Denton to review their next production, and sit in on a rehearsal. For Denton, this was an eye-opening experience. “I learned what goes on behind the scenes,” he said. Bank has only praise for Denton. “Martin has never been afraid to express his enthusiasm for things that he likes,” he said. That enthusiasm also extends to Broadway, as seen in his review of Raisin, which had far more praise for the show than many of his fellow critics. Although Denton admits he can be tougher on Broadway than he is on off and off-off Broadway (“When it costs 19 bucks, it doesn’t have to perfect,” he says with a smile. “When you’re charging $100, my expectations are, you’d better entertain me”), clearly he is willing to write what he believes, regardless of venue. That refreshing honesty leads to a connection with his readers. Tom O’Neil, a senior editor at In Touch Weekly and the host of GoldDerby.com, an entertainment awards website, touted NYtheatre.com in an email to this writer, saying it gets his vote as “the ONLY trustworthy resource theater fans have for solid info on those scores of small guerilla shows running Off-Broadway that make a huge impact on the future of American theater.” For information about Broadway, off-Broadway, and off-off Broadway, visit NYTheatre.com. Brett Singer is a freelance writer and consultant living and working in New York City. He goes downtown as often as possible because the food is better. back to writing samples |
