Life of Pi
CLIENT
Situation Interactive
TECHNOLOGIES
WordPress, PHP, JavaScript
YEAR
2023
EXTERNAL URL
Full-stack development for the official website of Life of Pi — the five-time Olivier Award-winning stage adaptation that transferred from the West End to Broadway at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre. Custom WordPress theme with a ticketing calendar, production content architecture, and a platform built to carry the show from its American premiere through a national tour.
Development lead on this project at Situation Interactive.
Background
A West End phenomenon was crossing the Atlantic — and needed a digital platform ready for Broadway.
Life of Pi — Lolita Chakrabarti’s stage adaptation of Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning novel, directed by Max Webster — had already become one of the most celebrated productions in recent London theatre history. The play premiered at the Sheffield Crucible in 2019, transferred to the West End at Wyndham’s Theatre in 2021, and swept the Olivier Awards with five wins including Best New Play. The production was preparing its American premiere at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in December 2022, ahead of a Broadway transfer to the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre in spring 2023. The show’s signature — a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker brought to life on stage by seven puppeteers through groundbreaking puppetry by Finn Caldwell and Nick Barnes — had already captivated London audiences and generated intense anticipation for the Broadway run. A production arriving with that momentum, led by Hiran Abeysekera reprising his Olivier Award-nominated performance as Pi, needed a digital platform that could convert transatlantic press coverage and audience anticipation into ticket sales from the first American performance forward.
The site needed to launch ahead of the A.R.T. premiere and be architecturally ready to scale through the Broadway transfer and beyond.
Implementation
A custom WordPress build with a ticketing calendar and content architecture spanning two venues and a national tour.
I led development on a custom WordPress theme where the ticketing calendar was the primary conversion component. The calendar rendered the full performance schedule — first at the A.R.T. for the American premiere engagement, then at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre for the Broadway run — with matinee and evening performance slots, availability states, and direct purchase links routing users into the ticketing provider’s checkout flow with the correct show and date pre-selected. The site carried the full scope of a Broadway production platform: cast and creative team profiles with structured bios, a press section aggregating critical acclaim from the New York Times, the Guardian, and London theatre press, video content showcasing the production’s revolutionary puppetry, and a gallery system designed to highlight the visual spectacle that defined the show’s identity. The content architecture was built with the production’s lifecycle in mind — structured content objects for cast members, venue information, and performance schedules that could be updated independently as the show moved from its A.R.T. premiere through Broadway previews and into its open-ended run. The design system reflected the production’s visual language — oceanic imagery, warm lighting tones, and typographic treatments that echoed the dreamlike quality of Pi’s journey without overwhelming the conversion-focused layout.
The ticketing calendar architecture was built to transition seamlessly between venues — the same system that powered A.R.T. sales carried straight through to Broadway without a rebuild.
Results
Three Tony Awards, $10 million at the box office, and a platform that carried the production into a national tour.
The site launched ahead of Life of Pi’s American premiere at the A.R.T. in December 2022 and served as the production’s primary digital platform through its entire Broadway lifecycle. The show opened at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre on March 30, 2023, after 22 previews, and ran through July 23, 2023 — 133 performances grossing over $10 million at an average capacity of 84.34%. The production won three Tony Awards — Best Sound Design (Tim Lutkin and Hugh Sherwood), Best Lighting Design (Tim Lutkin), and Best Scenic Design (Tim Hatley and Andrzej Goulding) — along with four Drama Desk Awards and multiple Outer Critics Circle Awards. The ticketing calendar drove conversions throughout the run and then evolved to support the North American national tour, which launched in December 2024 and continues through October 2025 across cities including Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Denver, and Washington D.C.
The platform I built for Life of Pi served the production across every phase — from a sold-out A.R.T. premiere to a Tony-winning Broadway run to a national tour, all on the same architecture.
Related Projects
No projects match your current filters.