What is this?

AboutTheArtists.com is a database of theatre credits, updated by both the public and our staff. Our goal: to catalog each and every production in the history of theatre. Scratch that. Our goal: to help you catalog each and every production in the history of theatre.

We think theatre artists deserve as much recognition as film stars, musicians, or authors. Before AboutTheArtists.com launched there was no central source for information about actors, directors, and other theatre artists that ranged beyond New York. We hope that you, as artists and fans of live theatre, find the site useful, informative, and fun.

Who are we?

AboutTheArtists.com was started by theater folk in Nashville, TN. Most of the programming and initial data entry was done by John Devine. Since we've started, more and more of our data has been entered by users like you. You can friend us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter: @abouttheartists or just email us at support@abouttheartists.com with comments, complements or concerns.

How can I get my show listed?

Log in and enter it!

If you have a production coming up, be sure to enter the cast and crew credits as soon as possible. AboutTheArtists.com is a great, free way to get your show noticed. Our users are sent free email alerts not only of shows playing near them, but also of all upcoming shows featuring any of their favorite artists.

If a user is browsing through our listings and comes across a cast or crew list featuring any artist involved in your currently running show, a "Now Appearing In" pop-up box appears next to her name with a link to your show's page. The more credits listed for the artists in your show, the more ways there are for people to discover your show's page.

So make sure all your artists are listed.

Too busy to enter the lists yourself? Send your press releases, publicity photos, actor headshots, and contact information to data@abouttheartists.com and we'll try to enter it for you. But we can't promise we'll get to it in time.

Where'd you get that info?

From theatre company websites, reviews, programs, press releases, users with personal knowledge, you name it. We hope you'll help us keep our information as complete and accurate as possible. If you see something wrong, log in and change it. If you know about a play performed, coming up or 200 years in the past, we want your help cataloging it.

As we are not the only website out there with lists of theatre credits, please avoid copying information from other similar sites. If you find that your copyrights have been infringed, please contact us right away.

How to Enter Data:

Here's a detailed step-by-step video tutorial showing how to add a production to our database. There are three parts to the video, so view them in order. Once we get the swing of this screencasting thing all the kids are talking about, we'll add some higher-resolution videos which focus on more specific questions.

Part I

Part II

Part III

Enter all the credits (not just your own)

Remember, the more credits there are on a production's page, the more possible ways there are for people to discover your credits!

We understand that many people will primarily be interested in entering information about their own performances, and we appreciate that. We want your accomplishments to be known. But please understand that this is not a resume service. Those are easy to find elsewhere. (And we do let you add a link from your artist page to your own homepage.)

This site is for everyone. Anyone can enter information about anyone else. Other people can come along and tell us about plays you've been in, and we hope that you will do the same for others.

Adding data to the site is simple (kind of) and if you're not the type to RTFM, start by clicking the "productions" button on the left, and searching for a production. If you find it and want to add a credit, go to that production's page, click the pencil icon on the bottom of the page, and have a ball. If you don't find it, click the "add production" button on the bottom of the page and go through the step. There are instructions if you need them.

The Instructions

If you haven't already, scroll up and take a look at the videos.

The starting point for entering data should be the production. You can add an artist record, or a production company record, but they're not much fun to look at if there's no production credits associated with them. So start by adding a production, and as you fill in details, you'll have a chance to add the artists, venues, plays, characters, adaptations, reviews, photos, engagements, etc. Once the production is filled in, you can go back to any associated element and add or edit its details.

Everything is connected. If you enter a production for a play, your production will automatically be added to that play's production history page. If you add an acting credit to a production, that production will be listed on that artist's page. You get the picture.

As much as possible we want to present complete cast and crew lists. If you only know or remember bits and pieces of a production, that's okay. Fill in what you know, and leave it to someone else to fill in the rest.

So let's go through a typical user experience:

Say you're googling for someone you know, and stumble upon this site. You think, hey, I'm an up-and-coming actor, I wonder if I'm listed. You search in the upper right-hand corner for your name, and, woe is you, you discover you're one of the unlucky 99.99999% of the theater world not yet listed. But don't despair. We haven't convened the council and deemed you not worthy, we just haven't gotten to you yet. So you should take matters into your own hands. Here's what you do:

Start with a production.

You're an artist. You have credits. So let's start with one of your most recent credits. Say you're an actor (use your inside voice) and you've just finished a run of Rainbows and Despair in Juniper Valley by Geörg Beretwearer put on by the Worchestershire Ensemble Players at the Riverkill Playhouse in Peoria.

So first, let's see if someone's entered that production. Since the site is fairly new, and we've been focusing on just a few regions, odds are it isn't. So you click the "productions" button on the left of the screen, type in the name of your production, and search. Nothing shows up? Great, let's add it.

Click the "new production" button at the bottom of the production search page and the production form will show up. Lots of instructions there, so before I go through all the options, in a nutshell you'll be asked what play was being performed, where and when it took place, what production company produced it and a few other details, then click submit and the production is created. You'll then be taken to the "edit" page for that production, which is where you'll add cast, crew, photos, and lots of other info.

The play(s)

The first thing we'll want to know is what play was performed. Since not all productions are productions of an actual play, we'll call it the "artistic work". At this point there are only two options, "play", and "book". Later, when we discover a new energy drink that makes us better citizens, we'll add opera, dance, recitals and everything else artists do, but for now, work with what we've got. Usually you'll leave it set at "play". "Book" is for plays that are adaptations of books. Since we list the name of the contributors (authors, composers, etc.) of the artistic work on the production page we want the names of the author of the original work to show up as well as the names of the person that wrote the adaptation.

If you're doing "Pride and Prejudice" but using Wally Dwaye Cheezum's script, it's not fair to imply that Wally wrote "Pride and Prejudice". Jane Austin deserves the credit. So in that case you'll choose "book", look for "Pride and Prejudice" in the text field (once you start typing it'll go search our database to see if we have a record that matches), and select it, or create a new record for it. (Details on how to use the text field are on that page.) Once the book is selected, you can create a new record for Rev. Cheezum's adaptation in the "translations/adaptations" select field that magically appears.

But "P&P" is so last year. We're interested in our production of Rainbows & Despair. So we leave the "artistic work" selector at "play" and type in the name of the play. No search results found?!?! Seriously? All right. There's an option there to "create a new one". So click it.

Adding a Play

Whoosh! The form we were working on disappears and a new one comes up for us to create the record for the play. Fill this out with as much info as you know: the title, the date it was written (in the format: MM/DD/YYYY or MM/YYYY or just YYYY. So 2001 is fine, 12/31/1999 works, 10/1984 works, 36 BC works...), and the "contributions".

Contributions

Contributions are the building block of the whole site. Each contribution has an artist, and a job. To add a contribution to our play, we'll first type "Geörg Beretwearer" in the artist field. Again, we'll search the database and see if we have a record that matches that name. And again, none found. But before you go and add a new record for Mr. Beretwearer, remember that not everyone knows how to type umlauts with a computer, so let's try "Georg Beretwearer"... Success!

But now we see three different records of people with that same name. Which one to select? If you hover your mouse over one of the lines in the search results list that came up, a little info box will appear and show you a brief summary about that artist. So we see the first result: "George Beretwearer" has three credits as a set decorator in Texas. Probably not the one we want. Hover the mouse over the second result, "Georg Beretwearer, IV" and we see he's a playwright, with several plays listed. Yeah that's him. So click on that line to select it. Once you select his record, the "artist" text field will turn green indicating that we've selected a valid record.

After you select a valid record, a new select box will show up below the artist field called "credited as". Really his name should be spelled with an umlaut, so we could type in the proper spelling here. But that would mean his credit would be listed as: "George Beretwearer, IV credited as Geörg Beretwearer". That's not what we want. "Credited as" is useful for pennames, stage names, aliases, and people whose names actually change because of marriage, conversion to Islam, and the like. We want to correct the actual spelling of his name, so we'll leave the "credited as" field blank and make a note to update his record later.

There's also a field for "description", which we'll leave blank, but if there's some short piece of information you want included in the contribution, such as "understudy", specific dates, "select performances", etc, that's the place to put it.

The next step for this contribution form is the "job" field. We'll type in "author". Not "playwright". Not "book". If you try those, it'll just force "author" on you anyway. You can also add other contributions to the play. If it's a musical you can add a "composer" contribution and a "lyrics" contribution. If the same person did all three jobs, add three different contributions, each with the same artist. No multiple jobs per contribution, capice? This makes it easier when we want to single out all the text consultants of the world and call them to account.

Characters

Once you've added all the contributions for the play, you have the option to fill in information about the characters in the play. There are forms for two characters, and to add more, just click "add another character". Try to fill in as full a name as possible for the character, but leave the description in the description field, not the name field. So put "Hamlet" in the name field and "prince of Denmark" in the description field instead of "Hamlet, prince of Denmark" in the name field.

You can leave characters out, but each character in a play gets its own page on the site, with a list of everyone we know of who's performed that role. You'll have a chance to add characters later when filling in the cast list, so if you get impatient, you can leave them out. And, please, only add characters who have actual roles in the play, even non-speaking roles, but not characters that are unique to your production.

Now that you've filled in everything about the play, scroll to the bottom of the form and click "submit". This will save the play and all it's related info to the database and return you to the original "production" form with Rainbows & Despair filled in in the "artistic work name" field. If this production featured more than one play, you can click "add another work" and new form will appear for you to fill in another play.

Once you've created or selected a record for the play, a select box marked "translations/adaptations" appears, allowing you to specify which translation or adaptation of the play was used. If you didn't use a particular translation or adaptation, click "next step".

Engagements

The next part of the form is called "engagements". Each production needs at least one engagement, which consists of a venue, a start date and an end date. Some productions play multiple venues, and would have multiple engagements. Type the name of the venue into the "venue" field, and see if it's in our database. If so select it, if not, click create a new one for the venue form.

Creating a venue

The venue form is fairly straightforward. Try to use the official name of the venue. If there's a shorter version that everyone uses, we can add an "aka" record to that venue later by going to the venue's page, clicking the edit pencil and clicking "add aka". That way the official name will show up when people search for the short name. But remember that this site is for the whole world, and there are a lot Rep Theater's or Orpheum's in the world.

The address should be the official street address of the theater so that when we try to display a map of the theater Google knows how to find it. Otherwise it ends up being mapped to the middle of the Pacific Ocean near Easter Island.

Country is before state so that we can refresh the states list for you to reflect which country the theater's in.

The brilliantly named "venue_metro" field is very important — especially if you want your productions included on the home page and in our FollowSpot emails (you have signed up for yours, haven't you?). Click "add venue_metro" and scroll down the list and select the most specific area that describes the location of the theater. Most states don't have many specific neighborhoods listed yet, but we'll be adding more soon as we expand our coverage. If there are neighborhoods listed for your state but your theater is not in those neighborhoods, select the next highest level.

When you're finished entering the information about the venue, click save and return to the "engagements" form.

Be sure to include a start date and end date. Even if you're not sure of the exact dates you can estimate (the field accepts specific dates, or just the month and year, or even just a year). If there is no end date listed the production will be listed as currently playing which could confuse people if it closed years ago.

Stay tuned for more instructions, and if you have any questions, ask away with our live help feature or send them to "support@abouttheartists.com"