Oklahoma
CLIENT
Situation Interactive
TECHNOLOGIES
WordPress, PHP, JavaScript, jQuery
YEAR
2021
EXTERNAL URL
N/A
Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma! stripped away everything audiences expected from the most canonical musical in American theater — and the website had to match that energy. A tour-first WordPress build for a production that played Circle in the Square in the round, won the Tony for Best Revival, and made history with Ali Stroker’s groundbreaking win.
I led the build at Situation Interactive. Circle in the Square was also the venue for American Buffalo — two unconventional productions in the same intimate space.
Background
Chili at intermission, fluorescent lighting, and a Rodgers & Hammerstein classic reimagined as something genuinely unsettling.
Daniel Fish’s Oklahoma! defied every expectation of what a Broadway revival should look like. Staged in the round at Circle in the Square Theatre — the same intimate thrust space where I later built the site for American Buffalo — the production featured a stripped-down, seven-piece country-western band performing Daniel Kluger’s new orchestrations. The audience sat at tables. There was chili and cornbread at intermission. Fluorescent lights stayed on. The show reframed one of the most-produced musicals in history as something dark, contemporary, and deliberately uncomfortable. After premiering at Bard College’s Fisher Center and playing a sold-out run at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, it transferred to Broadway on April 7, 2019, winning the Tony for Best Revival. Ali Stroker became the first performer who uses a wheelchair to win a Tony Award, taking Best Featured Actress for her Ado Annie — a moment that resonated far beyond the theater world. The original cast — Damon Daunno, Rebecca Naomi Jones, Patrick Vaill, Mary Testa, James Davis — delivered 328 performances grossing over $22.8 million before closing on January 19, 2020.
The national tour was originally slated for fall 2020 but was delayed by the pandemic. When it finally launched in November 2021 at the Orpheum Theatre in Minneapolis, I led development on the refreshed platform at Situation Interactive.
Implementation
A tour-first platform built to sell tickets across 25+ cities while honoring one of Broadway’s most distinctive visual identities.
The WordPress build was tour-first from the ground up. The ticketing calendar rendered performance schedules across 25+ cities with date browsing, availability states, and deep links into regional ticketing providers. The tour system managed city-by-city scheduling, venue details, on-sale dates, and local ticket links for stops spanning Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Washington D.C., Nashville, Oklahoma City, and beyond — all maintainable through the CMS by the marketing team. Cast profiles supported the touring company led by Sasha Hutchings as Laurey and Sean Grandillo as Curly, with field groups designed for cast rotations as performers cycled through the run.
The frontend demanded a different approach than the polished Broadway brands I was used to building. Oklahoma!’s visual identity was raw and deconstructed — the design language pulled from the production’s stripped-down aesthetic, with typography and layout choices that felt deliberately unfinished. Unconventional staging called for unconventional design. Media galleries, press aggregation, and newsletter integration rounded out a content layer built to scale as the tour expanded into new markets.
The ticketing and tour infrastructure drew on patterns I had refined across builds like TINA and Mean Girls, but the visual execution was entirely its own — nothing from those polished brands applied here.
Results
A Tony-winning production, a historic first, and a platform that carried the tour from Minneapolis to Los Angeles.
The platform served as the production’s digital hub throughout a national tour that opened at the Orpheum Theatre in Minneapolis in November 2021 and played over 25 cities — the Ahmanson in Los Angeles, the Golden Gate in San Francisco, the Kennedy Center in D.C., the Cadillac Palace in Chicago, and the Civic Center Music Hall in Oklahoma City among them. The ticketing calendar drove conversions across every market, routing audiences into the purchase flow for each city’s presenter.
The production carried real cultural weight beyond the box office. A Tony-winning revival, a historic first with Ali Stroker’s win, $22.8 million across 328 Broadway performances, and a national tour that brought Daniel Fish’s provocative reinterpretation to audiences who had never questioned what Oklahoma! was actually about. The platform supported all of it — from the pandemic-delayed launch through the final tour stop.
Oklahoma! reinforced something I had been learning across every Broadway build: the tour infrastructure was becoming the most reusable part of the stack. The visual design was always bespoke, but the content architecture underneath kept proving itself.
