My wife and I have created Dress Circle.
The idea behind Dress Circle came from a Google Doc I've had for years with every show (Play, Musical, Opera) I've seen in ranked order, eventually we translated it into a webpage (https://www.dresscircle.co.uk/+thehodge) so others could view it and then friends wanted their own list.
To enable features such as alerts and showcases, we started to build a database Theatres in the UK then we added the shows that were in them and THEN we added the actors (and creative teams).
Then we started to add historical productions and.. well here we are, we've accidentally built IMDB for UK Theatre
(I thought with the timezone this might be a good time to post)
I notice that you are redirecting to 3rd parties when people "book now", do you have affiliate/kickback agreements with these places, or are you just doing it out of the goodness of your heart?
The company I use to work for maintains an API for integrating with all these systems for booking tickets etc. It is... interesting...in terms of reliability, but it might help you integrate an "on platform" solution. Given that your website is slick, and that the industry is horrendously technologically backwards, you could probably turn this into a decent biz.
API: https://docs.ingresso.co.uk/
Python Wrapper: https://github.com/ingresso-group/pyticketswitch
Disclaimer: No current affiliation, use to work there, helped build the current JSON API, learned the hard way about how backwards these systems are.
Feel free to reach out if you want a point of contact or something
A ticketing solution is certainly one of the options we have, especially for the smaller productions which are in makeshift theatres (a fair few in working mens clubs!)
Such a backwards industry sometimes, although change is slowly coming at least in Box Office/CRM APIs for individual theatres.
I also enjoyed this snippet from the 'About':
>After starting the first version and getting a proof of concept working, this soon caught the attention of his wife who was a much better developer and she rewrote elements of the source to make them... well work.
Enjoyed your pitch at Thinking Digital last week, good to see it popping up on HN too! How do you get all the show data backing this - is it scraped from the individual theatres? (since I'm guessing there's no nice API ...)
Thanks for the comments re: pitch, it was a fun day and looking forward to next year
I hate to be that guy, but you might want to rethink putting irish theatres on the UK page: https://www.dresscircle.co.uk/theatres/cock-opera-house-cork
https://m.wikidata.org/wiki/Q16956203
https://m.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2567859
https://www.americantheatre.org/2015/07/16/the-wild-coincide...
I've not looked into it fully but since we cover a lot of Fringe and Amateur productions they might not be in Wikidata and those will tend to have a higher duplication factor.
https://mix-n-match.toolforge.org/
Looks like they already have a few databases with opera singer and writers as well as actors etc.
Can I have a sneaky feature request? I live in the Midlands and it's a real chore to check the major productions that come nearby (I'm willing to travel, but there are like 10 different theatres near me!)
It would be great if you could search by productions within 1 hour of an address or something similar, and get a list of all touring productions travelling through.
(At the moment I have to click through each nearby town / city on MusicalsOnTour.co.uk, but a combined view by month would be awesome!)
Archiving shows in this way is really important, however, but I doubt discussions would continue once shows are gone. It might be worth comparing and rating different casts and leads - “Was Layton Williams the best Jamie? This revival sucks!” - and perhaps coming up with a UK-wide awards system, as the Oliviers are by their nature, London-only, even if the show originated in Edinburgh or Colchester (disclosure: I was once an Olivier panellist) and the rest of the country could get some publicity.
I really want to highlight smaller and regional productions as well as larger west end ones (that’s why our recommendations system is designed not to focus on budget ;) )
Awards are on the development list but I want to really think about ones which could have an impact to the production rather than quickly throwing some up!
Even without the review element its nice to keep track of what you have watched.
I spent a good while looking to see if there is/was any kind of open source self-hosted IMDB style thing I could throw on AWS we could use instead of a goole doc but doesn't seem like there is anything. Anyone come across anything similar? My next step is to roll my own and maybe hook into a few APIs so we can get thumbs etc.
