Anastasia The Musical
CLIENT
Situation Interactive
TECHNOLOGIES
WordPress, PHP, JavaScript, Gravity Forms
YEAR
2018
EXTERNAL URL
An inherited codebase rather than a ground-up build — I took over the Anastasia platform from another developer and steered it through the show’s final Broadway season, closing at the Broadhurst Theatre, and transition to a 30-city national tour. The site at anastasiathemusical.com still stands years later.
Maintained and extended at Situation Interactive.
Background
Not every project starts with a blank editor — sometimes the harder job is understanding what someone else built.
Anastasia — the musical inspired by the 1997 animated film, with music by Stephen Flaherty, lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, and a new book by 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 earned two Tony nominations and was averaging over 91% capacity at the 1,143-seat Broadhurst. By 2018 the original developer had moved on, and the production needed someone to take ownership of a codebase they had never seen — maintaining it through the show’s final Broadway stretch while simultaneously preparing it for a 30-city national tour.
I picked up the existing WordPress codebase and made it mine — learning its architecture, fixing what needed fixing, and extending it for a production entering its next phase.
Implementation
Understanding someone else’s decisions before changing anything — then extending the platform for a national tour.
The first priority was reading the codebase: mapping out the custom post types, template hierarchy, and how the ticketing calendar had been assembled. The calendar was the core conversion tool, displaying the Broadhurst schedule with availability states and direct purchase routing. Once I understood the existing architecture, I could extend it without disrupting what the production team already relied on. The site carried the full scope of a Broadway platform — cast and creative profiles with structured bios, a media section with video content and the cast album, a $42 digital lottery integration, press aggregation, and merchandise links. As the show approached its closing, I built out tour-specific infrastructure: city-by-city scheduling, venue information, and a restructured navigation that gave the tour its own section while preserving the Broadway production’s legacy pages. This was a different discipline than the ground-up builds I was doing simultaneously on Dear Evan Hansen and Pretty Woman — the constraint was working within someone else’s decisions and improving the platform incrementally.
The real skill in an inherited codebase is knowing what to leave alone. The original architecture was sound — my job was to respect it, fill the gaps, and prepare it for the tour.
Results
$93 million at the box office, 808 performances, and a platform that carried the production into a national tour.
Anastasia closed on Broadway on March 31, 2019, after 808 performances and 34 previews that grossed over $93.4 million at 91.67% average capacity. The tour infrastructure I added carried the production into its first national tour, launching in October 2018 at Proctors Theatre in Schenectady and playing 30 cities — Dallas, Houston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Atlanta, and more — before the pandemic suspended performances in March 2020. The site at anastasiathemusical.com still stands as the production’s digital presence, years after the Broadway closing and tour suspension.
Anastasia proved that inheriting a codebase can be just as valuable as building one — the platform I extended served through $93 million in box office revenue and a coast-to-coast tour, and it is still online today.
