Wicked The Musical
CLIENT
Situation Interactive
TECHNOLOGIES
WordPress, PHP, JavaScript, TranslatePress
YEAR
2018 & 2025
EXTERNAL URL
The biggest show in my portfolio, and the only one I have built twice. First in 2018 for Wicked’s 15th anniversary, then a complete redesign in 2025 to unify the stage brand with a $700M+ film franchise. Custom ticket calendar spanning Broadway, touring, and international productions in six languages.
Drove the full development effort at Situation Interactive.
Background
Broadway’s biggest franchise needed a digital platform that could evolve across eras.
Every other project in my portfolio operates at a fraction of Wicked’s scale. Seen by nearly 65 million people worldwide, grossing over $5 billion across Broadway, touring, and international productions in 16 countries and six languages, Wicked is not just a show — it is a global entertainment franchise. By 2018, the show was approaching its 15th anniversary — marked by an NBC primetime special featuring Idina Menzel, Kristin Chenoweth, and Ariana Grande — and the existing website no longer reflected the scale of the brand. Situation Interactive brought me on to rebuild the site from the ground up. Seven years later, Universal’s two-part film adaptation grossed over $700 million at the global box office, creating a cultural moment that sent Broadway ticket demand to record-shattering levels. The site needed a second complete overhaul to unify the stage and screen brands under one digital roof.
Two builds, two different eras of the same franchise — each requiring a platform that could serve a global audience buying tickets across Broadway, national tours, and international productions simultaneously.
Implementation
A custom ticket calendar, multilingual architecture, and interactive backgrounds built for a global theatrical brand.
The ticket calendar here is the most complex version of a component I have built many times across this portfolio. Where a show like The Outsiders or Maybe Happy Ending needs a calendar for a single venue with one or two ticket tiers, Wicked’s calendar aggregates performance schedules, pricing tiers, and purchase links across Broadway, multiple national touring companies, and international productions into a single unified interface — with timezone-aware date rendering, dynamic availability states, and deep links to different third-party ticketing providers per market. TranslatePress powered the multilingual layer, enabling front-end translation management for international audiences without requiring separate site instances or duplicated content structures. The 2025 redesign introduced interactive animated backgrounds — canvas-driven visual elements that respond to scroll position and viewport size — bringing the immersive visual language of the film franchise into the browsing experience. The film’s release created the most intense traffic surge any of my platforms has handled: Wicked posted the first-ever $5 million single-week gross in Broadway history.
Both builds ran on WordPress with custom theme architecture — structured content managed through dedicated field groups so the marketing team could update show schedules, cast announcements, and promotional campaigns without developer involvement.
Results
Seven years of continuous operation, two successful launches, zero platform migrations.
The 2018 build ran continuously for seven years without structural changes — supporting cast rotations, touring company updates, and marketing campaigns entirely through the CMS. When the film drove a surge in ticket demand in late 2024, the site handled the traffic without incident. The 2025 redesign shipped in coordination with the film franchise’s visual rebrand, unifying stage and screen identities while preserving the operational workflows the marketing team had relied on for nearly a decade. Wicked is the anchor of my portfolio in a way no other project is — not just the biggest brand, but the longest client relationship and the clearest proof that the platforms I build are designed to last.
Two builds, seven years of continuous operation, a $700M film launch absorbed without incident. The ticket calendar alone serves more markets and languages than most developers’ entire portfolio.
