Roundabout Theatre
CLIENT
Situation Interactive
TECHNOLOGIES
WordPress, Gutenberg, Twig, PHP, theme.json
YEAR
2026
EXTERNAL URL
The second time I built for Roundabout — and the engagement that changed my practice. I had first worked with Roundabout in 2022, building the Better Roundabout microsite for their EDI initiative. This was the full platform rebuild: a hybrid Full Site Editing architecture on WordPress and Twig, powered by theme.json and Gutenberg, for New York’s largest nonprofit theatre company. The architectural decisions made here became the foundation of my independent practice.
Led the frontend build at Situation Interactive, Roundabout’s digital agency of record.
Background
A nearly 60-year-old institution needed a digital platform built for the next decade.
Roundabout Theatre Company — founded in 1965, operating five New York City venues including the Todd Haimes Theatre, Studio 54, and the Stephen Sondheim Theatre — had outgrown its existing website. The organization produces a full season of Broadway and Off-Broadway plays and musicals, runs education programs reaching thousands of students, manages complex ticketing across multiple venues, and maintains donor and subscription relationships at institutional scale. The existing site couldn’t keep up with the content demands of a modern season cycle: show pages, event campaigns, education programming, donor communications, and accessibility information all competing for attention on aging infrastructure. Situation Interactive, Roundabout’s digital agency of record, brought me on to lead the frontend build of a ground-up platform replacement.
This wasn’t a redesign — it was a complete re-architecture, replacing legacy systems with a modern WordPress platform built to handle the operational complexity of one of Broadway’s most active producers.
Implementation
Hybrid Full Site Editing — Gutenberg and Twig working together through theme.json.
The platform was built on WordPress using a hybrid FSE approach — leveraging theme.json as the single source of truth for design tokens (typography scales, color palettes, spacing presets, layout constraints) while rendering frontend templates through Twig rather than PHP block templates. This gave the editorial team the full power of the Gutenberg block editor for content assembly while keeping the frontend rendering layer clean, composable, and testable. The parent-child theme architecture used a provider pattern to organize features into self-contained domains — each owning its own blocks, assets, and configuration. Show pages, venue pages, education content, and donation flows each operated as independent content models with structured field groups, connected through relational queries that surfaced contextual cross-links automatically. The block editor configuration was tuned for Roundabout’s specific editorial needs: curated block palettes, locked layout patterns for show pages, and reusable template parts that enforced brand consistency without restricting the content team’s ability to compose pages for each new season.
The architectural decisions made on this project — the hybrid FSE model, the provider pattern, the theme.json-driven design system — became the foundation for the platform I now use across every client engagement in my independent practice.
Results
A production-ready platform — and the blueprint for everything I’ve built since.
The new platform launched ahead of Roundabout’s 2025-26 season — a year featuring the first Broadway revival of The Rocky Horror Show in 24 years at Studio 54, the premiere of Chinese Republicans Off-Broadway, and the reopening of the newly renovated Todd Haimes Theatre with Fallen Angels starring Kelli O’Hara and Rose Byrne. The content team managed the full season rollout — show pages, subscription campaigns, venue updates reflecting the renovation — independently through the block editor, with zero developer support required for editorial operations. The structured content architecture handled the complexity of multi-venue scheduling, cross-linked education programming, and donor communications without the bottlenecks that had plagued the previous platform.
This project was the proving ground. The hybrid FSE architecture, the provider pattern, the theme.json-driven design system — every pattern I refined on Roundabout’s platform became the foundation of my independent practice and the custom framework I now deploy across every client engagement.
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