Mean Girls on Broadway
CLIENT
Situation Interactive
TECHNOLOGIES
WordPress, PHP, JavaScript, Gravity Forms
YEAR
2018
EXTERNAL URL
One of the boldest visual identities on Broadway, translated into responsive web layouts that had to be as irreverent and precise as the brand itself. Custom WordPress theme powering ticketing, a full national tour system, cast and creative profiles, and the kind of CSS challenges that make frontend development genuinely fun.
Owned the build at Situation Interactive — another Casey Nicholaw production alongside The Prom and Some Like It Hot.
Background
The biggest teen comedy of a generation was becoming a Broadway musical — and it arrived with twelve Tony nominations.
Mean Girls broke $1.3 million in its first full week on Broadway and was playing to over 100% capacity within months. Tina Fey adapted her own 2004 film into a rock musical with music by Jeff Richmond, lyrics by Nell Benjamin, and direction and choreography by Casey Nicholaw. It opened at the August Wilson Theatre on April 8, 2018, backed by Lorne Michaels, with a creative team that included Scott Pask (sets), Gregg Barnes (costumes), Kenneth Posner (lighting), Brian Ronan (sound), and Finn Ross and Adam Young (video design). The show earned 12 Tony nominations including Best Musical, with a first national tour already in planning. The challenge was building a digital platform that could sell at Broadway scale, spotlight a large company and creative team, and eventually expand into a multi-city tour system — all wrapped in the show’s unmistakable hot-pink, in-your-face visual language.
This was one of the highest-profile Broadway launches of 2018 — the digital platform had to match the ambition of the production from the first preview forward.
Implementation
A custom WordPress build with a ticketing calendar, a full tour system, and frontend design challenges that made this one of the most enjoyable builds in my career.
I led development on a custom WordPress theme that started as a Broadway launch site and grew into a multi-production ecosystem. The ticketing calendar drove conversions throughout — a date-driven interface with matinee and evening slots, availability states, and deep links into the purchase flow. When the first national tour launched in September 2019, the platform expanded with a city-by-city schedule, venue information, local ticketing endpoints, and tour-specific cast profiles, all managed through structured content that let the production team add new cities without developer support. Cast and creative profiles covered the full depth of the company — biographical profiles for the original Broadway cast including Erika Henningsen, Taylor Louderman, Ashley Park, Kate Rockwell, Barrett Wilbert Weed, Grey Henson, and Kerry Butler, plus the complete creative team. But the frontend was where this build stood apart. Mean Girls has one of the most distinctive visual identities on Broadway — hot pink, bold typography, irreverent graphic energy — and translating that into responsive layouts was a series of CSS challenges that pushed every section into genuinely fun territory. Nothing could feel generic. Every component had to carry the brand’s personality without sacrificing usability or load performance. The site also served as the central hub for media assets, press acclaim, and merchandise promotion.
The frontend work on Mean Girls was some of the most creatively satisfying code I have written — the kind of build where the brand’s visual energy demands precision and playfulness in equal measure.
Results
Twelve Tony nominations, $124 million at the box office, a national tour across 30+ cities, and a platform that carried the franchise to a feature film.
The site launched ahead of Mean Girls’ first Broadway preview on March 12, 2018, and served as the production’s primary digital platform through 833 performances at the August Wilson Theatre — grossing over $124 million at 96% average capacity, with the production recouping its full capitalization by January 2020. The tour system scaled to support 30+ cities starting in September 2019, playing to sold-out audiences from Buffalo to Fort Lauderdale before the pandemic suspended performances in March 2020. The tour resumed and ran through May 2023. The platform ultimately supported the marketing rollout for the 2024 Paramount film adaptation, which grossed $104.8 million worldwide — making Mean Girls a rare case where a single website carried a property from its Broadway premiere through a national tour and into a major feature film release. The site remains live at meangirlsmusical.com.
Mean Girls is the kind of project that defines a career stretch — a platform that started as a Broadway launch site and grew into the digital backbone for a franchise that spanned Broadway, a national tour, and a $100 million feature film.
