Why we built RepBook

My kids learned things in school theater that I’m not sure they could have picked up anywhere else. Valuable life lessons that really supercharged their self-esteem and determination. Not to mention a healthy dose of distress tolerance skills. How to work with a group of people who are all counting on each other. How to put in weeks of unglamorous effort toward a single night. The stress of missing a line, or acting on a set that feels like it might collapse (if you have seen a student production of Noises Off, you know what I mean). And the particular joy of a performance that lands — the kind you can’t fake and don’t forget.

One of them kept going. Beyond high school, into college productions, and onto the stage at our local Shakespeare festival. And that raised a surprisingly hard question.

How do you even find out?

How does anyone find out about auditions? More specifically: how does a working adult — with a day job, a full calendar, and no time to check a dozen websites on a Tuesday night — keep track of when and where the next audition is?

I started paying attention to how the information actually travels. It comes down to three channels, and each one leaks.

Where the information lives

Social media. Follow enough theaters and the notices do come through — until one posts late, or “check the link in our bio” goes nowhere, or the feed’s algorithm decides you’d rather see something else and the auditions quietly stop appearing at all.

Theater websites. Every one is built differently. Auditions might live under “Get Involved,” or “About,” or nowhere obvious at all. There’s no canonical place to look, so monitoring a dozen theaters means a dozen sites and a lot of clicks — with no way to be sure you didn’t miss one.

Association websites. State and regional community-theater associations do real, well-meaning work, but a listing is only as fresh as the last volunteer who had time to update it. Pages lag a season behind; links point to shows that already closed.

None of this is anyone’s fault. The information exists — it’s just fragmented, and it goes stale. And it’s not a small niche: there are well over 6,000 community theaters in the United States, each producing several shows a year — an enormous amount of activity, with no common channel to announce itself.

So I tried building one

I come from a tech background, and if you were to spend time with me, you would know that I am fascinated with how the web works, and I am lazy. I don't want to click through dozens of websites, and I get really distracted by social media. I want an app that just does what it's supposed to do. I want one place that pulls together theaters, auditions, jobs, and volunteer opportunities, and keeps them current. I want to be notified about things I care about.

That’s my idea. That’s RepBook. It started as a way to answer my own family’s question — when’s the next audition? — and became something I hope answers yours.

If you run a theater that should be in the directory but isn’t, or you wish RepBook did something it doesn’t yet — write us. We read every email.

— Jason

Sources

1. American Association of Community Theatre, Community Theatre Impact. https://aact.org/community-theatres-impact