Anastasia The Musical
CLIENT
Situation Interactive
TECHNOLOGIES
WordPress, PHP, JavaScript, Gravity Forms
YEAR
2018
EXTERNAL URL
Inherited and maintained the official website of Anastasia — the Broadway musical based on the 1997 animated film, with music by Stephen Flaherty, lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, and book by Terrence McNally. Custom WordPress theme with a ticketing calendar, cast and creative profiles, and a content architecture that supported the production through its final Broadway season, closing, and transition to a national tour.
Development lead on this project at Situation Interactive.
Background
A hit Broadway musical needed ongoing platform development — and the codebase needed a new set of hands.
Anastasia — the musical inspired by the 1997 animated film, with music by Stephen Flaherty, lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, and a new book by four-time Tony Award winner Terrence McNally — had been running at the Broadhurst Theatre since April 2017. Directed by Darko Tresnjak with choreography by Peggy Hickey, the production starred Christy Altomare as Anya, Derek Klena as Dmitry, Ramin Karimloo as Gleb, John Bolton as Vlad, Mary Beth Peil as the Dowager Empress, and Caroline O’Connor as Countess Lily. The show had arrived on Broadway after a world premiere at Hartford Stage in 2016, earned two Tony nominations — Best Featured Actress for Mary Beth Peil and Best Costume Design for Linda Cho — and was averaging over 91% capacity at the 1,143-seat Broadhurst. By 2018, the production’s digital platform was well-established but needed continued development as the show moved through its second year on Broadway, approached its eventual closing, and prepared to launch a 30-city national tour.
I inherited the existing WordPress codebase and took over as development lead — maintaining the platform through the show’s final Broadway season and its transition to a touring production.
Implementation
An inherited codebase, a ticketing calendar to maintain, and a platform that needed to evolve with the production.
I took over an existing custom WordPress theme and made it my own. The codebase had been built by another developer, so the first priority was understanding the architecture — the custom post types, template hierarchy, and the way the ticketing calendar had been wired together — before making any changes. The ticketing calendar was the primary conversion component, rendering the full performance schedule at the Broadhurst Theatre with matinee and evening slots, availability states, and direct purchase links routing audiences into the checkout flow with the correct date and time pre-selected. Beyond the calendar, the site carried the full scope of a Broadway production platform: cast and creative team profiles with structured bios, a media section with video content and the cast album, a digital lottery integration for $42 tickets, press and reviews aggregation, merchandise through multiple retail partners, and Gravity Forms powering newsletter signup and audience engagement. As the production moved toward its closing and a national tour launch, I updated the platform to support tour-specific content — new venue information, city-by-city scheduling, and a restructured navigation that gave the tour its own section while preserving the Broadway production’s legacy content.
Inheriting someone else’s codebase is a different kind of challenge than building from scratch — the discipline is in understanding what’s there, respecting the decisions that work, and improving what doesn’t without breaking what the production team depends on.
Results
$93 million at the box office, 808 performances, and a platform that carried the production into a national tour.
The platform supported Anastasia through the final stretch of its Broadway run at the Broadhurst Theatre — 808 performances and 34 previews that grossed over $93.4 million at an average capacity of 91.67% and an average ticket price of $105.25. The show played its final Broadway performance on March 31, 2019. The ticketing calendar and tour infrastructure I built then carried the production into its first national tour, which launched in October 2018 at Proctors Theatre in Schenectady and played 30 cities across the United States and Canada — including Dallas, Houston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and Atlanta — before performances were suspended in March 2020 due to the pandemic. The site at anastasiathemusical.com continues to serve the production, though it has not been actively maintained since the Broadway closing and tour suspension.
The platform I maintained and extended for Anastasia served the production through its highest-grossing Broadway stretch, a seamless transition to a national tour, and continues to stand — years later — as the show’s digital presence.
