Tina on Broadway
CLIENT
Situation Interactive
TECHNOLOGIES
WordPress, PHP, JavaScript
YEAR
2019
EXTERNAL URL
The project where I built the media carousel that became a standard component across Situation’s entire Broadway portfolio. A content-dense WordPress platform for the Tina Turner biographical musical — ticketing, production photography, press infrastructure, and a component library designed to outlast the run at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre.
Led development at Situation Interactive — one of several biographical and jukebox musical builds alongside Jagged Little Pill and MJ the Musical.
Background
A West End sensation crossing the Atlantic with a built-in global audience and a living legend’s blessing.
After a sold-out premiere at London’s Aldwych Theatre in 2018, TINA — The Tina Turner Musical was one of the most anticipated Broadway openings of the 2019-20 season. Written by Katori Hall with Frank Ketelaar and Kees Prins, directed by Phyllida Lloyd, the biographical musical traced Tina Turner’s journey from Nutbush, Tennessee to global icon. Adrienne Warren starred in the title role. Previews were set for October 12, 2019 at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, with an official opening on November 7. Unlike a typical biographical show, this one had the subject’s direct involvement — Tina Turner herself was a producer — which raised the stakes on everything from visual tone to how the story was framed. The digital platform needed to honor that legacy while converting an enormous built-in audience into ticket buyers across a marketing cycle that would stretch from first preview through awards season and beyond.
The content demands were heavy from day one — cast bios, production photography, video, press quotes, and media assets all competing for space in a layout that had to feel worthy of the story it was telling.
Implementation
A ticket calendar and media carousel that became the template for every Broadway build that followed.
The WordPress build prioritized content density — every section had to earn its screen space in a mobile-first layout that packed cast bios, production photography galleries, video embeds, press quotes, and ticketing into a cohesive experience. The ticket calendar served as the conversion centerpiece: a performance grid with date browsing, ticket type filtering, and direct links into the purchase flow. But the component that defined this project was the media carousel. I designed and engineered it from scratch to handle the volume and variety of TINA’s media assets — high-resolution production stills, embedded video players, and captioned press imagery all in a single responsive, swipeable interface. It needed to perform consistently across devices while handling assets of wildly different aspect ratios and media types. The carousel shipped on TINA and proved durable enough that it became a standard component at Situation, reused on MJ the Musical, Jagged Little Pill, and nearly every major Broadway build that followed.
Building a reusable component wasn’t the original goal — the goal was solving TINA’s specific content problem. That the solution generalized so cleanly was a byproduct of getting the abstraction right.
Results
Twelve Tony nominations, a box office record, and a component library that outlived the run.
The site launched ahead of the October 2019 preview period and carried TINA through a three-year Broadway run at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. Within weeks of opening, the production broke the venue’s all-time box office record with a single-week gross of $1,834,339 — surpassing the previous record held by Motown since 2013. The show earned 12 Tony nominations including Best Musical, with Adrienne Warren winning Best Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical. The platform sustained demand across 482 regular performances — through opening, the pandemic shutdown, reopening, and the show’s final performance on August 14, 2022. When the national tour launched in September 2022 at the Providence Performing Arts Center, the site expanded to carry tour content alongside the Broadway archive.
TINA was a turning point in how I approached Broadway builds — the media carousel and ticketing patterns born here became the foundation for projects like MJ the Musical and Jagged Little Pill.
