Some Like It Hot
CLIENT
Situation Interactive
TECHNOLOGIES
WordPress, PHP, JavaScript, Gravity Forms, Google Tag Manager
YEAR
2022
EXTERNAL URL
The third Casey Nicholaw production I built at Situation Interactive, following Mean Girls on Broadway and The Prom. WordPress platform with a design-intensive frontend, ticketing calendar, tour management across 30+ cities, and a content layer that carried the show from first preview through four Tony wins, a Grammy, and a national tour.
My build at Situation Interactive.
Background
A beloved film IP, a Tony-winning creative team, and no out-of-town tryout — straight to the Shubert.
Some Like It Hot brought together a book by Matthew Lopez and Amber Ruffin, a Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman score, and direction and choreography by Casey Nicholaw — whose earlier productions Mean Girls on Broadway and The Prom I had also built at Situation Interactive. That familiarity with Nicholaw’s visual language and the scale of his productions gave me a head start on the creative direction. The cast was led by Christian Borle and J. Harrison Ghee, and the show carried commercial expectations to match: a beloved 1959 Billy Wilder film as source material, a pre-Broadway tryout in Chicago cancelled by COVID, and a decision to go straight to Broadway at the Shubert Theatre in fall 2022 with no warmup run.
Skipping the out-of-town tryout meant the site had to be fully operational for first preview — there was no phased rollout window.
Implementation
A complex design system and ticketing infrastructure built to carry a show from opening night to national tour.
The design system was one of the most exacting I had built. Deep royal blue with gold accents evoked jazz-age glamour, bold uppercase typography carried across every content type, and the layout language had to hold together as the site grew — awards content, media galleries, and eventually a full tour section would all layer in over a 13-month Broadway run. The creative direction left little room for approximation; color values, spacing, and typographic hierarchy all had to be precise.
The ticketing calendar followed the infrastructure I had evolved through Dear Evan Hansen and the spring 2022 plays, but the tour management system represented a step forward. Structured content for 30+ cities — venues, dates, regional ticket links — gave the marketing team a self-service interface for the entire national run. Cast and creative profiles supported both Broadway and touring companies through structured field groups. Google Tag Manager instrumented the full purchase funnel from calendar browse through checkout completion.
One of my personal favorite scores — the kind of project where the creative quality of the show raised the bar for the digital work surrounding it.
Results
Four Tonys, a Grammy, $52 million at the box office, and a tour that recouped in its first year.
The site launched ahead of first preview on November 1, 2022 and supported 441 performances across a 13-month Broadway run at the Shubert. Thirteen Tony nominations, four wins — including J. Harrison Ghee’s historic Best Leading Actor win as the first openly nonbinary performer in a leading acting category — and a Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album. The content architecture absorbed every phase of the awards cycle without structural changes: Tony badges, Grammy callouts, Critics’ Pick designations, and review carousels all layered in through the existing CMS framework.
The national tour launched at Proctors Theatre in Schenectady in September 2024, and the tour management system scaled directly — 30+ cities with venue-specific ticket links, all managed through the CMS by the marketing team. The tour recouped within its first year. The platform continues to serve as the show’s official digital presence. From Mean Girls through The Prom and now Some Like It Hot, the Nicholaw builds kept getting bigger, and each one informed the next.
Infrastructure built for a November 2022 Broadway opening has carried the production through a Tony sweep, a Grammy, and a national tour — without a rebuild.
