Tony Awards Site Connects Ticket BuyersTony Awards Site Connects Ticket Buyers

Unlike its movie, television, and music brethren, the theater industry hasn't exactly put the Internet to good use in supporting productions. One exception is how producers of the industry's annual Tony Awards show use the Web. The show's site, tonyawards.com, adds new wrinkles each year, and this year is no exception.

Easily the most significant addition this year is the introduction of ticket sales; every nominee is linked to a site where people can buy tickets for that show.

Show producers had resisted the addition in the past in an effort to keep the site from becoming a sales channel. The potential, however, to beef up ticket sales by simplifying the experience for potential theater-goers finally proved too tempting. "Frankly, that's what the Internet does well," says Ben Pesner, the site's content producer.

Producers also didn't want people to search for tickets and end up dealing with ticket brokers, Pesner says.

Tonyawards.com won't process ticket purchases, but rather will route buyers to popular ticket sites via a pop-up window to prevent fans from leaving the Tony Awards site.

Also new to the site this year are links to the Internet Broadway Database (ibdb.com--no relation to the Internet Movie Database, imdb.com), where abundant information can be found about nominated shows, performers, and technicians.

The new feature augments the site's returning elements--the most popular being a rundown of the craziest examples of Tony parties being hosted by fans, which will go up on the site in the days before the show.

"If past years are a guide, you'll find some pretty funky and eccentric things," Pesner promises. The site again will offer an exclusive Webcast of the first six awards--technical categories that are not part of the TV broadcast, which will be hosted by Marissa Jaret Winokur, last year's winner as best actress in a musical for her performance in Hairspray. Other returning features include Tony memories (video clips of interviews with past and current winners) and fan polls.

Underlying the site is a number of IBM WebSphere middleware products--an application server for overall site support; a portal-content publishing tool for posting real-time results, news, photos, and interviews; and a business-integration-event component that runs the site's daily polls.