Rodgers & Hammerstein: An Imagem Company — the owner of the Rodgers & Hammerstein properties — announced that they relaunched a freshened website on July 13. Still using the address of www.rnh.com, in use since the company first launched a site in 1997, the newest R&H website "is faster, more expansive, more user-friendly, more customer-oriented, and loaded with more new features than ever before."
In honor of the launch, rnh.com is featuring (for a limited time) a special video segment of behind-the-scenes home movies taken during the making of the film "The Sound of Music" in Salzburg in the summer of 1964. This never-before-seen footage was provided to R&H by the seven movie Von Trapp kids (now in middle age) whose autobiographical, memorabilia-stuffed book, "The Sound of Music Family Scrapbook," will be released in October.
According to R&H, fans will find the website "easily navigable for photos, videos, music, history and trivia on their favorite Broadway and Hollywood musicals."
The site includes a database listing of regional productions of R&H shows; a fan forum to connect other lovers of R&H musicals; a new shop section to buy favorite cast albums, sheet music, books, DVDs, Blu-rays and more; and a way for theatre groups to manage their rental accounts online.
Founded by Rodgers and Hammerstein and headquartered in New York City, Rodgers & Hammerstein: An Imagem Company (formerly The Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization) owns the rights to the world's most popular stage and film musicals, including Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I and The Sound of Music, among other R&H works. Composer Rodgers and lyricist-librettist Hammerstein changed the face of theatre by integrating script and song into a seamless whole, and addressing serious themes and adding psychological depth to their stories and characters. After Oklahoma! (1943), shows weren't just musical comedies, they were musical plays. Their influence continues today.
As an agency, R&H encompasses a music publishing company; a concert rental library; and a theatrical licensing branch that collectively represent more than 12,000 songs, 900 concert pieces, 200 writers, and 100 musicals, including works by Irving Berlin, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Stephen Schwartz, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Adam Guettel, Rodgers & Hart, Kern & Hammerstein, and many more.
For more, visit www.rnh.com.
