Spectra.theater Announces A New Partnership With The Lucille Lortel Theatre

Starting this week, Spectra has added the Lucille Lortel Theatre's Off-Broadway archive to www.spectra.theater. For the last 23 years, the Lortel's database (www.iobdb.com) has been the trusted catalogue for shows produced Off-Broadway, and with this new partnership, the site is officially retired and all users will be automatically redirected to www.spectra.theater.

Audiences and artists can now find Off-Broadway data connected directly to other artists and productions ranging from amateur and pre-professional, all the way to Off-Broadway and Broadway. Spectra's ever updating library includes regional theaters, community theaters, and educational institutions. Spectra's library is a free service that houses play and production information for theatermakers, aspiring artists, and audiences everywhere.

"This is a giant leap forward for Spectra's growth and development," says Trent Saunders, one of Spectra's co-founders (and a company member of the upcoming Broadway show Dead Outlaw). "As theater lovers and professionals ourselves, we know how important IOBDB has been to the New York theater community. This partnership allows Spectra to accelerate our work to help theater compete in the digital economy by becoming the single trusted location for all theater communities online."

Launched in January, and now powered with the help of the Lucille Lortel Theatre, www.spectra.theater is already one of the most comprehensive free resources for data about American Theater, and will now directly connect past, current and upcoming Broadway and Off-Broadway productions to every community who has licensed the same play.

Spectra community members can access detailed information about these productions, including those licensable by MTI, Theatrical Rights Worldwide, Concord Theatricals, and Broadway Licensing. Enriched directly by producing theaters as well as the Open Broadway Database and of course the Internet Off-Broadway Database, this vast, fast-growing archive of U.S. professional, stock, amateur, and school productions is a comprehensive and inclusive free database of titles, venues, performers, writers, directors, designers, Production Team members, administrators, marketing materials, and more.

Spectra is an essential tool for theater-makers conceiving future productions. Theater-making communities are everywhere. If there's an Oklahoma! in Massachusetts, there's no reason Oregon shouldn't learn from it. Spectra wants to connect artists wherever they create. By giving aspiring artists (and not just those on stage) access to other students, and professionals alike, Spectra is helping usher in a new generation of innovative storytelling while opening the door for many more digital natives to find in-person community through theater.

Now, for the first time, audiences won't have to scour the internet to find what else an artist they've seen has done. Users can see a lighting designer's journey from their first onstage performance at their local community theater, to when they were backstage crew in college, to their now diverse portfolio of professional productions regionally and in New York. All in one place. Spectra is a gamechanger for audiences and artists - truly changing the American theater.

Since their founding in 1955, the Lucille Lortel Theatre has been dedicated to increasing awareness and appreciation of Off-Broadway. As part of that mission, the Lortel created the Internet Off-Broadway Database (www.iobdb.com) in 2003 to preserve its quickly vanishing history.

"We're excited and relieved by our partnership with Spectra," says George Forbes, the Executive Director of Lucille Lortel Theatre. "We always felt it was important to ensure the history of Off-Broadway would not disappear. That is why we created the IOBDB. But after more than two decades of building and maintaining this free service, when the Spectra team reached out and shared their mission with us, we knew putting our data in their hands was the right choice. With the increasing demands of the digital world, and the cost and complexities of keeping up the database, [Spectra] is the best way to ensure the history of Off-Broadway continues to be available long into the future. With Spectra being a tech company, this new partnership opens up future possibilities for the entire theater industry, and far beyond preservation. Spectra's unprecedented concept of connecting the different aspects of theater: the play, the characters, the creatives, the production credits, the venues and the artists, gives room for technology to support all theater communities."