Jagged Little Pill
CLIENT
Situation Interactive
TECHNOLOGIES
WordPress, PHP, JavaScript
YEAR
2018
EXTERNAL URL
Full-stack development for the official website of Jagged Little Pill — the Grammy-winning, Tony-nominated Broadway musical based on Alanis Morissette’s landmark album. Custom WordPress theme with a ticketing calendar, complex frontend layout work, and a content architecture built to carry a production from world premiere through Broadway and a national tour.
Development lead on this project at Situation Interactive.
Background
One of the most anticipated new musicals of the decade needed a digital platform before the first note played.
Jagged Little Pill — a new musical with music by Alanis Morissette and Glen Ballard, lyrics by Morissette, book by Oscar winner Diablo Cody, and direction by Tony winner Diane Paulus — was preparing for its world premiere at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in May 2018. The show is not a bio-musical about Morissette — it tells an original story about the Healy family, weaving songs from the 33-million-copy-selling 1995 album into a narrative about pain, healing, and the systems that fail us. The production featured choreography by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (Beyoncé’s Formation world tour), orchestrations by Pulitzer and Tony winner Tom Kitt, and a cast led by Elizabeth Stanley, Celia Rose Gooding, Derek Klena, Sean Allan Krill, Lauren Patten, and Kathryn Gallagher. A show with that creative pedigree — built on one of the best-selling albums of all time — needed a digital platform that could match the anticipation and convert it into ticket sales from the moment the premiere was announced.
The site needed to launch ahead of the A.R.T. world premiere and be architecturally ready to scale through what everyone involved expected would be a Broadway transfer.
Implementation
A custom WordPress build with a ticketing calendar and frontend layouts that matched the show’s visual ambition.
I led development on a custom WordPress theme where the frontend demanded as much attention as the backend architecture. The design pushed well beyond standard Broadway production site conventions — layered compositions, unconventional grid structures, and bold typographic treatments that required precise CSS positioning to hold together across breakpoints without losing the visual energy that made the desktop layouts compelling. The ticketing calendar was the primary conversion component — an interactive, date-driven interface displaying performance availability at the A.R.T. (and later the Broadhurst Theatre on Broadway), with matinee and evening slots, sold-out states, and direct links routing users into the purchase flow with the correct show and date pre-selected. The site carried the full scope of a major Broadway production platform: cast and creative team profiles with structured bios, a press acclaim section aggregating reviews from major outlets, video content integration, a Grammy-winning cast album streaming section, newsletter signup for community engagement, and an official merchandise shop. The content architecture was built with the show’s lifecycle in mind — structured content objects for cast members, tour dates, and venue information that could be updated independently as the production moved from its A.R.T. premiere to Broadway previews and beyond.
The frontend layout work on this build was some of the most interesting I have done — designs that looked effortless on screen but required careful CSS architecture to execute responsively without compromise.
Results
A record-breaking premiere, 15 Tony nominations, and a platform that carried the show for six years.
The site launched ahead of Jagged Little Pill’s world premiere at the American Repertory Theater in May 2018, where the production sold out all 79 performances and became the highest-grossing and longest-running musical in A.R.T. history, with more than 45,000 audience members across the 10-week run. The platform then supported the show’s transfer to Broadway at the Broadhurst Theatre — 36 previews beginning November 3, 2019, an official opening on December 5, and a run that ultimately spanned 171 performances and grossed over $24.3 million at an average capacity of 93%. The show received 15 Tony Award nominations — the most of any production that season — and won two, including Best Book of a Musical for Diablo Cody and Best Featured Actress for Lauren Patten. The original cast recording won the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album. The ticketing calendar evolved to support the North American national tour, which launched in September 2022 and ran through April 2024 across 474 performances in cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia.
The platform I built for Jagged Little Pill served the production across every phase of its life — from a sold-out world premiere in Cambridge to a Tony-nominated Broadway run to a two-year national tour, all on the same architecture.
