Community theater in the United States is enormous and almost invisible. There are well over 6,000 community theaters in the United States, each producing four to six shows a year — and almost none of them share a common channel for casting. Listings live on Facebook groups, Google Forms, theater websites, scattered email blasts, and local arts council pages. Actors miss calls. Theaters under-cast. Every season, shows go up with empty seats in the ensemble.
We started RepBook because we lived the problem. To find auditions, we tried researching on the web, tracking social media accounts, and asking around. Social media seemed to be the best source. If we spent an hour or two looking through the feeds of our local theaters we could see when they had cast productions in previous seasons. It worked well, and the social media algorithms would show us when they posted new auditions. But we kept missing them. We would see a post about an audition, but by the time we got to it, the audition was already closed. The algorithms would eventually drift and we would see less auditions. We realized that we needed a better way to find auditions, and that is how RepBook was born.
What we believe
Community theater is one of the few remaining places where non-professionals practice a live art form, in person, with strangers who become a company. We believe the technology around it should be simple, trustworthy, and warm.
We are not building a marketplace. We are building a directory and a community.
What we’re building now
- A free, searchable directory of every community theater in the United States, with a profile for each theater that lists their upcoming shows and auditions.
- An iOS app that lists every audition we can find, near you, sorted by relevance.
- A free theater profile so managers can claim their listing, correct details, and get more applicants.
- A genuine effort to pull the entire space into one place — respectfully, with credit.
What’s next
Android. A web companion. Email digests. Filling in the smaller theaters our scrapers don’t reach yet. We’re a small team and we’re moving deliberately. If you’d like to talk — about a theater you run, a feature you wish existed, or just to say hi — please write us.