SHOW-SCORE, A “ROTTEN TOMATOES” FOR THEATER, HITS 10,000 MEMBERS AND GROWING

Book of Mormon is the Most Reviewed Show on the Site With Over 1,200 Member Reviews

Theater fans are converging on www.Show-Score.com, a fan-driven review site which today surpassed 10,000 members, a mere six weeks since its launch on Sept. 15. Available for free to theater enthusiasts, companies and producers, artists, and professional critics, Show-Score.com is an audience-focused guide to the 160+ theatrical shows playing on any given night in New York City, from Broadway to far off-off-Broadway. The site helps consumers quickly and easily answer the question “what should I see?” by helping fans search according to themes, location, and dates; by comparing the box office ticket price with major available discounts; and by calculating an overall score based on all critic and member reviews.

Members are rapidly scoring the shows they’ve seen on Show-Score.com, including an astonishing 1,268 member reviews of the Tony Award-winning Broadway show The Book of Mormon. Some of the other most-reviewed shows on the site include The Lion King and Fun Home. The breakaway new hit musical Hamilton already has more member reviews on Show-Score.com than on both Ticketmaster and Facebook. The member reviewing process is quick, fun, and smart phone friendly. Members are invited to score the show they have seen from 1-100, choose buzzwords to describe their experience, and finally add two tweet-length thoughts to describe who would (and would not) enjoy the show.

Show-Score.com was founded by tech entrepreneur and theater enthusiast Tom Melcher. After recently moving to New York and seeing more than 250 shows in his first year in the city, he became convinced that consumers needed an easier way to discover all the shows playing in New York. His research suggested that people would attend theater more if they could easily access the information they needed to discover the right shows for them. Recognizing there was no single outlet that provided this service, Melcher set about building the site along with his co-founder Deeksha Gaur. Show-Score.com is now a fully functional online platform that lists all shows with seven performances or more in NYC, excerpts and scores all professional and blogger reviews for those shows, and compares all major available prices for the shows. The site does not review shows nor sell tickets, and is free to use. It is fully independent, built by theater fans, for theater fans.

“It used to take me hours of surfing the web to find shows that interested me, check their reviews, and get a good price,” said Show-Score founder Tom Melcher, “so we decided to build Show-Score to make it easier. Six weeks ago we started what geeks call ‘public beta’ and what theater people call ‘previews.’ We’ve been astonished by the early response from theater fans, who clearly crave a way to join the conversation about this wonderful art form.”

About Tom Melcher

Tom Melcher (Founder and CEO) is a self-described “theater and software geek,” who grew up doing community theater and programming minicomputers, before switching to a capella and coding at Yale. After stints with IBM and McKinsey, and armed with a Harvard MBA, he plunged into the internet startup scene, and was on the senior management teams of several successful companies, including CNET and MongoDB. Tom created Show-Score because even as a seasoned theater-goer, it was simply too hard to figure out which shows to see.


About Deeksha Gaur

Deeksha Gaur (Co-Founder and Director of Content and Community) comes to the startup world from the not-for-profit theater, where she held senior marketing positions at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Two River Theater Company, and Long Wharf Theatre. She is a recipient of a TCG New Generation Future Leaders grant and The Foundry Theatre’s Producer’s Chair award. Producing highlights include new plays in New York and the Edinburgh Fringe. She has an MA in history from Cambridge University and an MFA in Theater Management from Yale School of Drama.