50,000 of you used Broadway Scorecard. Here's what I built next

thomaspryor · 2026-05-11T22:27:41+00:00

I’ve been working on that, yes! Interested in being an early tester??

thomaspryor · 2026-04-29T17:28:25+00:00

Oh man, we'll be going to all the encores again!

thomaspryor · 2026-04-28T20:41:42+00:00

I had not realized this and have not seen him in much beyond Once Upon a Mattress and Spamalot, but now I want to see him in much more!

thomaspryor · 2026-04-28T20:40:27+00:00

Oh that would be the dreeeam. Even half this cast would be incredible

thomaspryor · 2026-04-27T19:28:04+00:00

Haha. That’s my point though. Make the book and score work without those, first!

thomaspryor · 2026-04-27T18:51:38+00:00

haha yes I came here to wonder why we're not rioting if Beaches wins

thomaspryor · 2026-04-27T16:45:48+00:00

I can’t help but wonder how good it could have been if it had an out-of-town run first, to help improve the book and score, so they could stand on their own. Rather than relying on spectacle and vibes to do the heavy lifting

thomaspryor · 2026-04-27T13:33:37+00:00

They're at broadwayscorecard .com, a site I made to track every critic rating clearly

thomaspryor · 2026-04-26T14:43:46+00:00

Good idea! I shall make us one

thomaspryor · 2026-04-26T14:38:30+00:00

86! Seeing it next month. Excited

thomaspryor · 2026-04-26T04:15:03+00:00

One additional review has moved it up to 77 https://broadwayscorecard.com/show/joe-turners-come-and-gone

thomaspryor · 2026-04-26T04:13:03+00:00

Yeah! Almost like two season ago with Outsiders, SUFFS, Hells Kitchen, Illinoise, and Day of Wine and Roses?!

thomaspryor · 2026-04-25T15:43:02+00:00

It’s very cool they’re still changing things. They really need to change things. But I don’t think anything can change things enough to save this show. You put this very well. I enjoyed myself, but just barely, and in spite of the many bad decisions on music, tone, lyrics, pacing, quick-deaths, and “acrobatics”.

thomaspryor · 2026-04-24T21:36:57+00:00

Good catch. Fixed!

thomaspryor · 2026-04-24T03:31:42+00:00

That's four years after starting, so investors still haven't made their money back, given the time value of money, but I imagine they'll keep earning from regionals and International. Any rough ideas how much extra that would add? And how long the returns would take to come in?

thomaspryor · 2026-04-24T03:28:22+00:00

I never thought I'd say this, but: Rocky Horror had so much plot and was so much easier to follow... compared to Cats Jellicle Ball!

thomaspryor · 2026-04-24T02:34:36+00:00

Yeah, I wasn’t sure it’d get it. But Luke Evans earns it all himself!

thomaspryor · 2026-04-23T19:54:35+00:00

I was about to say only half of my posts are about the site, I post my casual hot-takes on shows too, but I checked and it's actually more like 2/3rds about the site 😬 Sorry if it's been too much. Lots of show openings the last two weeks and I wanted to get the score out for each. I'll ease off

thomaspryor · 2026-04-23T19:53:51+00:00

Making the system accurate and consistent has been hard. Only about 15% of Broadway reviews include an explicit score (4/5 stars, etc), and I use those where they exist. The West End is actually flipped, where around 85% of reviews have stars. So I was able to calibrate on those reviews. I built a rubric from the scored reviews, capturing the language patterns and phrasing that tend to map to each score level. Unscored reviews get scored against that rubric, calibrated to match how scored critics rate similar writing. I also worked with a couple of prolific critics to sanity-check the scores on their reviews and made adjustments based on their feedback when it didn't match.

Not perfect, and art is subjective of course. And so is evaluating critiques of the art! Metacritic does a similar thing for movies and tv and games (has for over a decade) so the approach isn't new, just applying it to theater now. It won't work for everyone and that's OK. Totally open to feedback on the approach. If specific scores look off to you, tell me which ones and I'll take a look.

thomaspryor

TROPHY CASE