Drama Nerd Database
Broadway and West End: an exhaustive theatrical database of plays and musicals
This is a database of Broadway and West End theatre: plays and musicals from 1866 to now, along with the people and venues behind them. I built it because I love this stuff, and because no single source online gets the whole picture right.
It started small. I just wanted a clean list of cast recordings. It grew from there into a record of who wrote each show, who performed in it, where it played, how long it ran, who directed it, and how it connects to everything around it.
Most of the work happened on the site itself. You can search by show, by person, by era, or by venue. You can follow a director's career across four decades, or see every show one writer touched. Every record links out to the records around it, so one click from a show takes you to its cast, its venue, and its era, and back again.
If you're building your own project, the same data ships as a TypeScript package. And if you'd rather just ask a question in plain language, Broadway Oracle is an AI agent that answers directly from the dataset.
On the site
The site rewards wandering.
dramanerds.com is built for browsing. You can start at a show and end up three clicks deep in a director's whole career, or land on a venue and watch fifty years of its history unfold. That kind of wandering only works because the data underneath is connected. Every show, person, and venue links to the records around it, so the site can follow your curiosity instead of boxing you into a search bar.
For people building their own tools, the data also ships as a TypeScript package, typed and documented. And for anyone who'd rather just ask a question, Broadway Oracle is an AI agent that reads straight from the dataset and answers in plain language.
Building it
The dataset is the real project.
The website is the part people see, but most of my time went into the data itself. Sources disagree with each other constantly. One site lists an opening date, another lists the preview date, and a third credits a director for a revival they never actually worked on. I had to decide, fact by fact, what was actually true, and then write down where that answer came from.
Every fact in the database carries a source and a verification date. A validator runs on every commit and checks for fourteen kinds of problems a person would miss by hand, like dates out of order or a performer credited after they died. When IBDB or Playbill change their own records, an automated workflow notices and opens a pull request so I can review the update.
That care is what makes the rest possible. The website can let you wander freely, and Broadway Oracle can answer a question in plain language, because the data underneath actually holds up.