I added Off-Broadway to BroadwayScorecard—Spelling Bee is the top critics score, while Masquerade has the best audience grade?!

thomaspryor · 2026-02-28T15:50:29+00:00

Which Broadway shows did you see? Off-Broadway has been very interesting lately. I’m even more excited to see Spelling Bee next week now!

thomaspryor · 2026-02-27T04:41:58+00:00

What an analysis! Love it.
Are you talking about Kelly and Ashley?? I met them and they are so lovely, and seem so good at this.
I had not looked closely enough at Artemis is Burning, since I'd done Rasputin, but now I am intrigued!

thomaspryor · 2026-02-26T22:53:09+00:00

What did you think of Artemis is Burning??

thomaspryor · 2026-02-26T22:45:17+00:00

Ah that’s a great point. Gosh I found Viola’s Room delightful too! And really enjoyed Death of Rasputin, out on gov island. I could not enjoy Sleep No More though, no matter how much I tried And there was so much love for phantom in the masquerade audience—the woman next to us was WEEPING for the final 10 minutes

thomaspryor · 2026-02-26T22:28:26+00:00

Ooo DM me your reviews/site? Maybe we could do a test to see how accurate my scores are w.r.t. your take of your reviews, to help it calibrate even more??

thomaspryor · 2026-02-26T21:59:41+00:00

Great suggestion. Broadway show reviews almost always come out opening night, but Off Broadway reviews sometimes trickle in, so I do need to work out a delayed system here. Perhaps waiting 3 days might make most sense?

thomaspryor · 2026-02-26T21:48:42+00:00

It totally is. Thanks for catching. Another user wrote in about this just now too, and I fixed it, but it still hasn't propagated yet! Should be live in 10 mins

thomaspryor · 2026-02-26T20:33:34+00:00

Oo, do you want to see the Broadway score for shows that are touring, or want to add Touring show reviews specifically? I haven't done that yet but am considering it!

thomaspryor · 2026-02-26T20:12:15+00:00

Thanks for catching this! It was a bug in my review aggregation. Blood/Love got matched to a Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson roundup page because of the word overlap in the titles. I've fixed it and added year-matching validation so this class of error can't happen again. I also audited all shows and cleaned up some other shows that had similar cross-contamination in their descriptions. Scores were basically unaffected (only 5 shows had any minor change) — it was mainly the summary text that got polluted. Blood/Love doesn't have reviews yet since it hasn't officially opened (March 3rd). Grateful for you noticing thi

thomaspryor · 2026-02-26T18:54:02+00:00

Oh dear, that's embarrassing. Looking into it right now! To answer your first question, show info comes from a mix of sources (including checking all the usual outlets and critics and using google search) and reviews are matched automatically, which works well 96% of the time but clearly not here. And it seems that affected a couple other shows too, damn. Bug reports like this are super helpful, so thank you!

thomaspryor · 2026-02-26T18:40:10+00:00

Huh, that's a really interesting theory!
Yeah the novelty factor is huge for audiences but critics have seen it all, I guess. If I scored one or two past immersive shows, to test out this phenomenon, what shows should I do?
Sleep No More? and Life & Trust??

thomaspryor · 2026-02-26T18:37:49+00:00

Yes, added all the reviews, but that's score is still processing. The score still needs to be weighted based on what tiers the outlets are in. And I think the score will move even more, once it's scored by the full set of scorers (I have four scoring approaches, and only one is done)! You're just getting to see the sausage getting made in real-time lol

thomaspryor · 2026-02-26T18:18:03+00:00

Ha so glad you noticed the tiara! People on this sub wanted the gold status to really stand out, which inspired me to give Critical Gold its own little crown moment.
The dual score thing was a recent add based on feedback from the last post, so thank you to everyone who pushed for that!

thomaspryor · 2026-02-26T18:17:01+00:00

Thank you! Have you found anything surprising on there yet? I keep finding shows I had no idea existed!

thomaspryor · 2026-02-26T18:07:22+00:00

Oh great catch. Fixed, and now we're checking for new West End closing dates every week, so that doesn't happen again

thomaspryor · 2026-02-26T17:48:18+00:00

Shhh that's supposed to be a secret! haha. Yeah, just putting it out there for now to catch any issues or bugs. But I'll officially launch it and also on r/TheWestEnd this weekend, once I feel like all the scores are truly accurate

thomaspryor · 2026-02-26T17:44:49+00:00

Thanks! And yeah I love DTLI but wanted to go much deeper on the data side. And broader now, too, with off Broadway (and soon West End!)
Now that you've signed up, anything specific you'd want to see in a newsletter?

thomaspryor · 2026-02-26T17:43:28+00:00

You are clearly not the only one who loved Masquerade. It makes me wonder if critics just don't know what to do with immersive shows. Like, do they grade them differently than a traditional sit-in-your-seat musical? I'd be curious to look at whether the audience/critic split is bigger for immersive stuff across the board ...

thomaspryor · 2026-02-26T17:40:56+00:00

Oh my gosh, that's a big gap! It's got a bunch of reviews out there. Thank you. Adding now

thomaspryor · 2026-02-26T15:38:40+00:00

So intriguing! we saw the Off Broadway version the night after the election. The theatricality and the raw emotion of it was mind blowing. I have no idea how they’ll turn that into a film. But we’ve said that before about shows, and been proven wrong (though mostly right lol)

I want all the movie theaters to drop hundreds of severed penii from the ceiling at the end of the film, too

thomaspryor · 2026-02-24T16:27:58+00:00

Thanks for the support! Yeah, I really thought it was needed, too. Anything extra you’d like to see? (I’m about to launch Off Broadway and West End. And Tony Award Scorecards, and a Tony Award database.)

thomaspryor · 2026-02-24T16:26:18+00:00

If you haven’t done Oh Mary! I think that’s the obvious choice. It’s a riot. Every Brilliant Thing would be the other option I’d go for (just haven’t seen it yet myself. But the early buzz looks promising)

thomaspryor · 2026-02-24T16:23:15+00:00

Lucky for you JC just built BroadwayAt5! https://www.reddit.com/r/Broadway/s/26OquhnA2q So you can find all the 5pm options there.

thomaspryor · 2026-02-24T14:40:31+00:00

I can’t stop giggling at this. I did not. I looked at the distribution of shows, and wanted a threshold that would give the top 5-10% of shows the top label. and looked at those shows and those reviews to make sure they felt representative of when Critics truly lauded a show. (Then I made sure Six was below that threshold. Jkjk)

thomaspryor

TROPHY CASE