Tina on Broadway
CLIENT
Situation Interactive
TECHNOLOGIES
WordPress, PHP, JavaScript
YEAR
2019
EXTERNAL URL
Full-stack development for the official Broadway website of the 12-time Tony-nominated Tina Turner biographical musical. A content-heavy WordPress build with an integrated ticket calendar, media carousel, and the production photography and press infrastructure needed to support a record-breaking run at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre.
Development lead on this project at Situation Interactive.
Background
A West End hit transferring to Broadway needed a digital platform built for the scale of the story it was telling.
TINA — The Tina Turner Musical was transferring to Broadway after a sold-out premiere at London’s Aldwych Theatre in 2018. The biographical musical — written by Katori Hall with Frank Ketelaar and Kees Prins, directed by Phyllida Lloyd — told the story of Tina Turner’s rise from Nutbush, Tennessee to global icon, with Adrienne Warren starring in the title role. The show was one of the most anticipated Broadway openings of the 2019-20 season, with previews set to begin October 12, 2019 at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre and an official opening on November 7. The production needed a digital platform that could carry the full weight of a major Broadway launch: ticketing, cast and creative bios, production photography, video content, press quotes, and the media assets that would drive the show’s marketing cycle from first preview through awards season.
Tina Turner herself was involved in the production — the site needed to honor the legacy while converting the enormous built-in audience into ticket buyers.
Implementation
A ticket calendar and media carousel that became the template for every Broadway build that followed.
The site was built on WordPress with the content density a Broadway marketing cycle demands — cast and creative bios, production photography galleries, video embeds, press quotes, and ticketing all competing for attention in a compact, mobile-optimized layout. The ticket calendar was the conversion centerpiece: a dynamic performance grid surfacing available dates and ticket types that guided visitors from browsing to purchase with minimal friction. The media carousel — built to showcase production photography, video content, and press imagery in a responsive, swipeable format — was designed and engineered on this project as an original component. It handled high-resolution production stills, embedded video players, and captioned press assets in a single unified interface that performed consistently across devices. The carousel pattern proved durable enough that it became a standard component across subsequent Broadway show sites at Situation, reused and refined on builds that followed.
The media carousel was born on this project — what started as a solution for one show’s content density became a reusable pattern across the agency’s entire Broadway portfolio.
Results
Twelve Tony nominations, a box office record, and a component library that outlived the run.
The site launched ahead of the October 2019 preview period and carried TINA through a three-year Broadway run at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre — from opening night through the 2020 Tony Awards (12 nominations, including Best Musical, with Adrienne Warren winning Best Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical), through the pandemic shutdown and reopening, and through the show’s final performance on August 14, 2022. Within weeks of opening, the production broke the Lunt-Fontanne’s all-time box office record with a single-week gross of $1,834,339 — surpassing the previous record held by Motown since 2013. The platform handled sustained demand across 482 regular performances, with the marketing team managing all content updates — new press quotes, cast changes, award badges, and promotional campaigns — independently through the CMS. When the national tour launched in September 2022 at the Providence Performing Arts Center, the site expanded to support tour content alongside the Broadway archive.
The ticket calendar and media carousel built for TINA became foundational components at Situation — patterns that shipped on this project and were reused across every major Broadway build that followed.
