Internet Theatre Database

» see theatredb.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The Internet Theatre Database went up in May 1999, built by Keith Scollick and filled in by volunteer theatre people who contributed as time allowed. The model was IMDb, scaled to the stage and then widened out. It carried the West End and the regional touring productions that the Broadway-only databases ignored.

It indexed six different ways, down to the song title and the individual character, which is more axes than most film databases offered at the time. The front page ran a daily feature listing what had opened and closed on that date at notable theatres over the previous several decades, which is the sort of thing a database can do for free once the data is in it and a magazine cannot do at all.

Then it just kept going. Not with updates: by July 2020 it had not been touched in over a decade, and it still served every request exactly as before, because nothing about a finished database costs money to display. Newspapers had reviewed it as a going concern back in 2000, the Rocky Mountain News in August and the Los Angeles Times that September, and twenty-four years later the same pages were still there.

~ the case file ~

~ what a volunteer index looks like after twenty years ~

Theatre is the part of this I have the least claim on. I grew up in Turkey with a modem and a hardware list, and the stage I knew about was the state theatres and whatever the state broadcaster chose to put on. An English-language index of Broadway casting credits was never going to be a reference book I reached for.

What I recognize is the shape. One person starts a database in 1999, strangers fill it in because they care about the subject, and it runs for a quarter of a century on goodwill and a hosting bill. That was a completely normal way to build a reference work for about ten years, and then it stopped being normal, and the ones still standing in the 2020s were running on inertia.

~ the invoice ~

The ending is a billing event. The last archived copy of the working database is dated 13 July 2024 and runs 4,220 bytes of the familiar layout. The next capture, 13 September 2024, is 1,260 bytes of cPanel boilerplate reading "Account has been suspended". Somewhere in those two months a card expired or an invoice went unread.

Wikipedia has this slightly wrong, and the correction is about the only new fact anyone can still add to the subject. The article says the suspension happened "sometime after 23 May 2024 (the last archived date on the Wayback Machine)". There are captures after that date. 13 July 2024 is the real last day the database answered.

~ what a suspended account takes with it ~

Hosting suspension is a quieter ending than a shutdown announcement and it removes more. There was no export and no notice telling contributors to go and save their work. The Internet Broadway Database is still running, and it is still narrower by design. What the ITDb held that nobody else did, the regional and touring credits that only volunteers cared enough to type, is now readable only in whatever the crawler happened to grab on its way past.

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