The Band’s Visit
CLIENT
Situation Interactive
TECHNOLOGIES
WordPress, PHP, JavaScript, Gravity Forms
YEAR
2018
EXTERNAL URL
N/A
Ten Tony Awards and a show that redefined what a Broadway musical could be — The Band’s Visit needed a platform as understated and precise as the production itself. Custom WordPress theme with ticketing, tour support, and structured cast profiles, built during the show’s historic first Broadway season at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.
I built this from scratch at Situation Interactive.
Background
The show everyone was talking about had almost no spectacle — the website had to channel that same restraint.
The Band’s Visit — adapted from Eran Kolirin’s 2007 Israeli film about an Egyptian police orchestra stranded in a remote desert town — arrived on Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on November 9, 2017, after a sold-out world premiere at the Atlantic Theater Company Off-Broadway. Directed by David Cromer with music and lyrics by David Yazbek and a book by Itamar Moses, the production starred Tony Shalhoub as Tewfiq, Katrina Lenk as Dina, and Ari’el Stachel as Haled. By the time I started building the site, critical momentum was already extraordinary heading into the 2018 Tony season. Unlike most Broadway marketing sites that lean into spectacle, this one had to convert attention into ticket sales while reflecting a production whose entire identity was built on understatement.
I built this platform at Situation Interactive during the show’s first Broadway year, watching it go from critical darling to historic Tony sweep in real time.
Implementation
Drawing on the ticketing infrastructure I had built for Dear Evan Hansen, I shaped a platform around a very different kind of production.
The custom WordPress theme drew on the ticketing infrastructure I had built for Dear Evan Hansen earlier that year, but the design and content strategy were entirely different. Where Dear Evan Hansen demanded bold color and high energy, The Band’s Visit called for warmth and simplicity — earth tones, generous whitespace, and a layout that let the production’s photography and storytelling do the work. The ticketing calendar anchored the site as the primary conversion tool, presenting the weekly schedule at the Ethel Barrymore with availability states and direct purchase routing. Cast and creative sections carried structured profiles for Shalhoub, Lenk, Stachel, John Cariani, and the full ensemble, alongside the creative team led by Cromer, choreographer Patrick McCollum, and orchestrator Jamshied Sharifi. When the national tour was announced, I extended the platform with city-by-city scheduling, venue details, and a navigation layer that gave the tour its own section without disrupting the Broadway content. The site also handled media galleries, press aggregation, a digital lottery integration, and merchandise through the show’s retail partners.
Reusing proven architecture from Dear Evan Hansen meant I could focus development time on what made this production unique rather than rebuilding ticketing infrastructure from scratch.
Results
10 Tony Awards, 589 performances, and a platform that carried the production from Broadway to a national tour.
The Band’s Visit won 10 Tony Awards at the 72nd ceremony in June 2018 — including Best Musical, Best Original Score, Best Book, Best Direction, and both leading actor awards — making it one of only four musicals in Broadway history to win the “Big Six.” The platform supported the production through 589 performances and 36 previews at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, breaking the venue’s all-time box office record twice before the Broadway run closed on April 7, 2019. The tour infrastructure carried the show into its first national tour, launching at the Providence Performing Arts Center in June 2019 and playing over 25 cities — including the Kennedy Center, Cadillac Palace in Chicago, and the Golden Gate in San Francisco — before the touring industry suspended in March 2020. The tour resumed in October 2021 and continued through 2022.
Building for a production this critically dominant sharpened the patterns I was developing across simultaneous Broadway projects like Pretty Woman and The Prom — each one refining the approach for the next.
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