Internet Broadway Database (review)

Broadway certainly conjures up a variety of different images in one’s mind with just a brief thought of plays, restaurants, musicals, actors, musicians, etc. Add in the history of Broadway from its beginnings in the late 1800s to the hundreds of plays and musicals that are begun and ended each year and this thought becomes even harder to grasp—especially when trying to capture everything into one entity. There have been many monographs that have dealt with particular facets of Broadway, such as Ethan Mordden’s works on various decades of the American musical, works that look at various playwrights or producers, and even those that look at the gangster element of Broadway. Along the journey there have also been attempts to codify the history into encyclopedias, such as Ken Bloom’s Broadway: Its History, People and Places: An Encyclopedia (2^nd ed. [New York: Routledge, 2004]), which attempts to include as much as it can about aspects of Broadway but is limited in scope due to its paper format and length restrictions even in its second edition.

In 1996 the Broadway League—the national trade association for the Broadway industry, which includes theater owners and operators, producers, presenters, and general managers in New York and 250 other North American cities— requested their research branch to develop what is now known as the Internet Broadway Database (IBDB). This database is meant to serve as a comprehensive history of Broad way for the benefit of league members, press, and theater professionals and enthusiasts.

Content on the Web site is derived primarily from theater programs, and they strive to include all “title page” (their emphasis) information. Other context comes from newspaper and magazine reports, theatrical textbooks, and interviews with theater professionals and league archives. Material found on the Web site is typically from a production’s opening night, and there is generally a two-day lag in current information.

The content contained within the Web site focuses solely on New York theater productions from the beginning of Broadway until today. IBDB does not list Off-Broadway, regional, or touring productions, so one might have to rely on other publications such as The Theatrical Index for this information. However, some information about these types of productions may occur as notes on an individual’s personal page within the database. The disadvantage to this, however, is that one would need to know either the actor involved and/or the production in order to be able to find the information. For instance, if one searched an actor’s page one would find the birth— and perhaps death—dates of the actor, little to no biographical information, and all of the performances in which the actor appeared. Yet it lacks any obvious link to a regional production so one would have to have a good knowledge of these performances. On a side note, although there is a two day delay on any information provided on the site, the developers do encourage both contributions and corrections with appropriate documentation that must be faxed to the League’s offices.

The Web site itself features a tabbed interface with the main headings of Home, Shows, People, Theatres, Characters, Awards, Songs, and Media. Each category has its own tailored set of search boxes and filters as well as a quick search box for the entire site that is omnipresent; this feature makes for easy searching as one browses through the information. The Shows tab contains the headings of show name, show type (which can be narrowed by musical, play, or special and then further narrowed by any of over fifty-two qualifiers such as “Kabuki,” “Ballet,” “Play with music,” etc.) show setting, description, cast size (greater than/equals/less than) number of performances and number of productions (both with the same parameters as cast size), and opening, closing, and playing date ranges. The Shows tab worked rather fluidly and anything that I could think to enter, both new and...