Show HN: Dress Circle – IMDB for UK Theatre | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Dress Circle – IMDB for UK Theatre

dresscircle.co.uk

77 pointsthehodge36 comments

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)

Looks really neat. I use to work in this space, and it's just a dreadful collection of slow outdated systems cobbled together, so your site is a breath of fresh air.

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

Less than 5% of the links we have are affiliate links, a few sites in the industry we noticed will only list venues that give a kickback, but we want to list everything and we've got a few other ideas of monetisation later down the link (the small number of affiliate links we have at the moment are working pretty well).

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!)

It's such a gross industry, heavily dependant on who you know.

Best of luck out there.

I also work in this space, mostly on websites for theatres, including lots on OP's list. Very cool to see this project

Such a backwards industry sometimes, although change is slowly coming at least in Box Office/CRM APIs for individual theatres.

Thanks that's appreciated, please feel free to email dom@dresscircle.co.uk if you think of anything we can improve :)

Design looks really good and is very performant (peak hacker news comment?).

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.

Haha I can't lie, she is a MUCH better developer than me and typically I build a proof of concept and she gets annoyed with my code and takes over.

Nice - although the coverage locally is a bit spotty (I'm not talking missing shows, I'm talking missing theatres!).

Thanks, let me know what we are missing and I’ll try and get them added (as a two person team we know we have a challenge to try and get everything!)

Hi Dom,

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 ...)

There is no scraping (at the moment) it's all manually input to avoid issues, every theatre website is different (and a lot of them are terrible) but we are getting on a lot of press distribution lists so the next stage it to see if we can automate the parsing of those emails.

Thanks for the comments re: pitch, it was a fun day and looking forward to next year

As some one not familiar with theatrical terms, what does the term "Dress Circle" mean? Is it a class of seating?

Yes, in a sense. The Dress Circle is the first balcony (closest to the ground) in a traditional theatre.

Thanks for answering that! I went for some lunch :)

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

That's a good point we should think about the naming of that page.. as we also have Online only theatres - https://www.dresscircle.co.uk/theatres/online and ones in the sea https://www.dresscircle.co.uk/theatres/sea ;)

There appears to be a slightly amusing typo in the slug for the Cork Opera House too.

/me very quickly updates SQL ...I have NO IDEA what you are talking about ;)

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!)

Hey, I’m on my mobile at the moment but I think we can do that, can you send a message to dom@dresscircle.co.Uk and I’ll see if what we can do will work!

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.

Thanks for the feedback! You are right that it’s not “exactly” the same use case but it’s certainly an easy way to pitch it!

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!

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.

Thanks, that's exactly what we were going for!

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.

Why don't you use IMDb?

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...

We do have unique ID's for each production (and have already had to deal with avoiding duplication of shows with the same name) but linking to Wikidata is a good shout!

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.

mix n match is a tool for reconciling such lists:

https://mix-n-match.toolforge.org/

Looks like they already have a few databases with opera singer and writers as well as actors etc.

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

That's a very fair point, honestly not the first thing we thought of when building the website (as the initial intention was only for my wife and I to have lists but certainly something I'm going to look into and work on.

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

Oh yes, it's a beautiful website.

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

I agree, and thats one the reasons that each show page has reviews based on the ratings of each show i.e. https://www.dresscircle.co.uk/shows/disney-s-the-lion-king and each how has a discussion board. obviously there is still a fair bit to do but we thought about that from the beginning.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com