Broadway Groups
CLIENT
Situation Interactive
TECHNOLOGIES
WordPress, PHP, JavaScript, Gravity Forms
YEAR
2020
EXTERNAL URL
The B2B side of Broadway ticketing. Where the individual show sites and the Criterion platform handled direct-to-consumer sales, Broadway Groups served a fundamentally different audience: tour operators, school administrators, corporate event planners, and social organizations booking blocks of 50+ seats across 40+ productions. Custom WordPress theme with a multi-step inquiry system, a deep show data model, and a season lifecycle architecture designed for the continuous churn of Broadway’s programming calendar.
Led development at Situation Interactive.
Background
Broadway’s largest group ticketing operation needed a platform rebuilt from the ground up.
Group Sales Box Office — the largest Broadway group ticketing agency in the industry, founded in 1962 and operating under the John Gore Organization’s Broadway.com brand — needed a complete rebuild of its digital platform at groups.broadway.com. The existing site served as the primary sales and inquiry channel for group ticket buyers across social organizations, schools, military groups, tour operators, and corporate clients booking for 40+ Broadway and Off-Broadway shows. The 2018–2019 Broadway season had set records: $1.83 billion in grosses and 14.8 million in attendance, and group sales represented a significant share of that revenue — a share that depended on a platform capable of handling the complexity of multi-show, multi-venue, multi-audience booking at scale. The site needed to do more than list shows — it needed to drive qualified inquiries through a structured intake process, manage show data across an entire season lifecycle, and serve distinct audience segments from educators requesting study guides to tour operators booking blocks of 50+ seats. The rebuild was the opportunity to modernize the platform’s architecture, streamline the inquiry flow, and give the internal team the content management tools to operate independently through seasonal turnover.
This was the digital infrastructure for an operation that had been selling group tickets to Broadway for nearly sixty years — the platform had to match the scale and sophistication of the business it served.
Implementation
A custom WordPress build with a multi-step inquiry system, a deep data model for 40+ shows, and a season lifecycle architecture designed for continuous operation.
I led development on a custom WordPress theme where the data model was the defining architectural challenge. Every show on the platform carried structured data across multiple dimensions — venue, seating capacity, performance schedule, group pricing tiers, minimum group sizes, age appropriateness, genre classification, and availability status — all managed through a dedicated content architecture that the sales team could maintain on their own. The inquiry form was the platform’s primary conversion mechanism and the most complex form system I had built to that point: a multi-step Gravity Forms implementation that collected group type, preferred shows, date flexibility, group size, budget parameters, and contact information, then routed submissions to the appropriate sales representatives based on inquiry characteristics. The form logic handled conditional display rules, validation across steps, and submission routing that mapped to the internal team’s workflow. The season lifecycle architecture addressed the operational reality that Broadway’s programming turns over continuously — shows open, close, extend, and adjust schedules throughout the year. The content layer was designed so the team could onboard new productions, retire closed shows, and update availability states across the entire catalog without structural changes to the site. Show detail pages featured seating charts for Broadway’s 40+ theaters, educator resources including study guides through the Broadway Classroom program, and audience-specific landing pages for social groups, military organizations, schools, corporate clients, and tour operators. The frontend delivered a responsive experience optimized for the platform’s distinct user segments — from a tour operator booking a season’s worth of performances to a teacher researching a single field trip.
The inquiry form and the data model were inseparable challenges — the form had to be smart enough to surface relevant options from a catalog of 40+ shows, and the data model had to be structured enough to power that intelligence without custom code for every new production.
Results
A platform that carried Broadway’s largest group sales operation through the shutdown and into the industry’s record-breaking recovery.
The rebuilt platform launched in 2020 — a year that would test its architecture in ways no one anticipated. When Broadway shut down on March 12, 2020, closing 31 running productions overnight, the site became the primary digital touchpoint for group buyers navigating cancellations, rescheduling, and the eventual return of live theatre. The season lifecycle architecture proved its value immediately: as shows closed, paused, and reopened across an 18-month shutdown, the content team managed the entire catalog through the CMS without structural changes or developer intervention. When Broadway officially reopened at full capacity in September 2021 — with The Lion King, Hamilton, and Wicked leading the return — the platform was ready, onboarding returning and new productions through the same structured workflow. The inquiry system drove qualified group sales leads through the recovery period and into the seasons that followed, supporting the industry’s climb from the pandemic low through the 2024–2025 season that set a new record at nearly $2 billion in grosses. The platform continues to operate at groups.broadway.com, serving as the digital foundation for an organization that brands itself as the #1 source for group tickets to Broadway — a claim backed by six decades of operation and a platform built to sustain it.
The platform I built for Broadway Groups was designed for seasonal turnover — and it ended up proving that resilience through the most disruptive period in Broadway history, carrying the operation from shutdown through a record-setting recovery.
