Why we built RepBook

The first version of RepBook was a Google Sheet. It still exists, somewhere in a drive folder, with thirty-eight rows of audition listings from a Sunday afternoon in March when three of us got tired of missing calls.

We were standing in a parking lot in Albuquerque after rehearsal, listing the shows we'd missed auditions for that month. Midsummer at Civic Light. Two staged readings at the university. A Christmas show that had cast back in August. The pattern was always the same: the listings existed somewhere — a Facebook group, a theater website, an arts council newsletter — but you had to know to look in that specific somewhere on that specific day.

The case for a directory

Community theater in the United States is gigantic. There are an estimated seven thousand active community theaters producing several full seasons each year. That is more annual productions than the entire Broadway and regional theater systems combined.

Community theater isn’t niche. It’s the largest live performance ecosystem in the country. It just doesn’t advertise itself that way.

The reason it feels invisible is that there's no canonical channel. Every theater has its own website. Every region has its own arts council. Every state has its own community-theater association, with varying degrees of maintenance. There's no central directory.

We thought: that's the problem. Build the directory.

What we tried first

Spreadsheet. Worked for a month, broke when we got busy.

Then a scraper that pulled audition notices from the websites we trusted. Worked, but the data was ugly — HTML tables full of italicized titles and three different ways of writing “Tuesday at 7pm.”

Then an LLM-assisted scraper that turned the ugly data into structured records: theater, show, type, dates, city, contact. Worked well. We had several thousand listings within a few weeks.

Then an iOS app, because everyone we knew checked their phones first.

What we’re working on now

The honest answer is: not enough, but more than yesterday. Specifically:

• Better scrapers for the long tail of small theaters
• Theater profiles so producers can claim and correct their listing
• An Android version because we get asked at least once a week
• A web companion so you can plan a season at your laptop

If you’re a theater that wants to be in our directory but isn’t, or an actor who wishes a feature existed: write us. We read every email.

— Jason