Drama Nerd Database
Broadway and West End: an exhaustive theatrical database of plays and musicals
A database of Broadway and West End theatre. Plays and musicals. 1866 to now. 836 shows. 3,480 people. 107 venues. Tony Awards for sixty years. Historical eras.
Started as something smaller—just cast recordings. Then expanded to hold everything: who wrote what, who performed where, what played when, how long it ran, who directed it, where it opened, what came before and after.
Every record is typed. Every link is checked. Shows point to people, people point to shows, venues hold their history. The validator runs on every commit. It catches things that don't make sense—dates out of order, people older than their lifespan, references that go nowhere. Every fact has a source and a verification date.
The data lives in TypeScript as an npm package. The website is at dramanerds.com, where you search and browse. An AI agent that answers Broadway questions (Broadway Oracle) uses this data. It's infrastructure—clean, maintained, trusted.
How it works
Data you can trust.
The data lives in TypeScript. It's published as an npm package. Every record is typed. Every link is checked. The validator runs on every commit—fourteen different checks for things that don't make sense. If something fails, the deploy stops.
Every fact has a source. Every record has a verification date. When IBDB or Playbill change, automated workflows catch it and open pull requests with the changes.
The website is at dramanerds.com. You can search by show, by person, by era, by venue. Browse. Follow a director's career. See who wrote what. It all draws from the same dataset—one source of truth, not a fork.
What's in it
836 shows. 3,480 people. One trustworthy record.
Shows from 1866 to 2025. Opening and closing dates. Venues. Cast type (original, revival, concert). Creators linked by ID so one update cascades everywhere they appear.
People: playwrights, composers, choreographers, directors, performers. Birth year, death year, Wikipedia link. Linked to every show they worked on.
Sixty years of Tony Awards. Best Musical and Best Revival nominees and winners. Historical eras that mark Broadway's shifts. 107 venues.