The Launch of the Australian Music Theatre Database (AMTDB.com.au)

Today we are very excited to unveil our latest project: The Australian Music Theatre Database, an ongoing record of the work and people in the professional music theatre industry of Australia.

Our aim is to create a useful resource for the Australian Music Theatre industry with a similar functionality to the well known Internet Movie Data Base (IMdB); creating connections for actors, producers, performers and venues in a format that is quick and easy for the industry and theatre going public to access..

We want to empower the industry to keep their own listings up to date. Actors and creatives can update their page by adding a bio, headshot, education history and contact details. Venues and producers can add contact details and relevant information. Productions can be updated with further info and photos can also be added. You can even submit an entirely new production to be added to the database!

The idea to create the Australian Music Theatre Database grew out of another project with which we are involved – John O’Hara’s #TicketA42 podcast.

John hosts a guest each month to chat about the moment they realised they wanted to be a performer, their career highlights and past productions.

A few episodes into the process of creating the show notes to be published alongside the podcast, I was struck by the realisation that there was no canonical resource to reference historic productions in Australia. If someone talked about the 1998 production of Chicago or the 1959 production of My Fair Lady there was no clear place for more information. So, instead of bemoaning the lack of resource we knuckled down (as we tend to do here) and we built one.

The AMTDB.com.au site we have launched today has been in development for over 12 months and it’s incredibly exciting to finally see the fruits of our labour online. To begin with, we have listed the professional shows currently playing in Australia and will be adding retrospective and future productions as well as new features and functionality over the weeks, months and years to come. It will be a slow process, but we know it will be worth it.

We would like to encourage the community to submit information and updates to us through the forms on the site and we’d love to hear from anyone interested in helping to grow AMTDB to its full potential.