The CD Shelf

The company sold its plays twice: once on the stage, once in a jewel case. The CD page of the old site offered five discs, one per production the company had recorded, pitched straight at the drive home: "Enjoy our Productions at Home!" It is the plainest page in the record and, for that reason, one of the most honest about how a small theatre stayed alive.

What the sheet keeps

The shelf held the catalogue in miniature. Each play that earned a disc got a small cover image on the page, the dragon, the claw, the button, the monster, the moons, each linked to a detail page of its own. The covers are the same artwork the play pages used, resized for a shelf an inch wide.

A sixth title, Macaroni Rigatoni, sat beside them with its own CD page, a reminder that the company's public count of plays was always a little behind its working catalogue. The site said nine plays, then ten; the shelf shows where the extra one lived.

What a production CD was for

The discs were not merchandise in the souvenir sense. They were the character-education loop closing: a child saw the play at assembly, heard the songs again in the car, and carried the lesson home before it faded. The company understood that its real venue was the week after the performance, and the CD was how it stayed in the room.

That model also explains the media the site kept around the shelf: song clips to preview, video clips to persuade, and the audio-adventures page that arrived later to keep the recordings alive after the tours slowed. The shelf was never just a shop; it was the company's second stage.

The shelf as a set list

Read in order, the five discs are also the company's repertoire ranked by staying power. A play only reached the shelf after it had survived enough seasons to justify a recording session, so the shelf is the record's own answer to which productions worked: the ones that got pressed.

The pricing and the postal address are gone from the captures, but the shelf's shape survives, and it says something careful about the company. It did not record everything it performed; it recorded what the audiences asked to hear again.

The shelf's little sibling, the Macaroni Rigatoni page, earns a footnote of its own. Its title sounds like dinner, and its existence beside the five main discs shows the catalogue was alive, still growing after the brochure copy was written. A company that says nine plays and sells six discs is a company still adding shelves faster than it updates the about page.

The shelf's closing detail is the order button that the record did not keep: the prices, the post office box, the turnaround promise. What survives is the display, five covers in a row, which is enough to show what the company believed its recordings were for. The commerce is gone; the catalogue remains, which is the right way round for a volume like this.

How the volume files it

Bound first in Cahier II, ahead of the clips and the video shelf, because everything else in the recordings record hung off this page. The record kept the shelf and its covers; it did not keep sales figures or the price of a disc.

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