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Show HN: Dress Circle – IMDB for UK Theatre

by thehodge on 5/25/22, 8:36 AM with 36 comments

  • by thehodge on 5/25/22, 8:36 AM

    Hey HN!,

    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)

  • by youngNed on 5/25/22, 11:07 AM

    hey thehodge, good to see you and a great looking site.

    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

  • by Closi on 5/25/22, 11:55 AM

    I live in the UK and absolutely adore theatre - this is amazing!

    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!)

  • by vr46 on 5/25/22, 12:14 PM

    This is very good, although it’s not quite the same use case as IMDB given that once a show has finished its run, it’s gone. I’m not talking about overpriced long-running musicals - which deserve entries for cast changes anyway - but most other productions around the UK. The NT digital/live/at home projects helps preserve a few really big shows, but most productions don’t film well and will only exist in our memories years later.

    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.

  • by adrianl on 5/25/22, 8:50 AM

    Great site for finding the shows outside the norm (haven't we all seen Les Miserables at least twice by now?) Also the best way to find show dates and times without going through 16 pages of adverts offering me seat upgrades before they even tell me the time.

  • by Dennip on 5/25/22, 11:16 AM

    A group of my friends and I maintain a (private) google doc of shows/games/books/movies/etc we have watched/read/etc with ratings and shorts reviews for the others.

    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.

  • by ZeroGravitas on 5/25/22, 10:39 AM

    Do you have unique IDs internally that can be linked to wikidata? Helps when you hit those inevitable duplicates:

    https://m.wikidata.org/wiki/Q16956203

    https://m.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2567859

    https://www.americantheatre.org/2015/07/16/the-wild-coincide...

  • by xenophonf on 5/25/22, 11:18 AM

    Under what license is the contributed data? I got burned twice by CDDB and then IMDB stealing their community's hard work only to monetize it, and I'll only ever participate in these sorts of things if (1) content is put under CC-BY-SA/GFDL and (2) there's a database export option, like Wikipedia:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download

  • by davea37 on 5/25/22, 1:30 PM

    Reminds me of https://theatricalia.com - have you come across that site before?

  • by amelius on 5/25/22, 11:13 AM

    What makes IMDB great, imho, are the user comments.