Curtain Call

A busy regional theatre runs on volunteers and part-time staff, and front-of-house planning depends on something that changes by the hour: how many seats have sold.

Rotas, show-night checklists, and fire-safety compliance were managed on paper and in WhatsApp groups. The volunteers who needed a system span multiple generations and very different levels of confidence with technology — a tool that only worked for the technically confident half of the team was never going to be a real solution. And the information that should drive staffing — the live box office — sat in a separate ticketing system that the people opening the doors never really saw.

Rather than build a one-off, we took the Muster platform and tailored it to a theatre's front-of-house operation — designed from the outset to be simple and accessible enough for every volunteer, not just the technically confident ones.

An hourly TicketSolve sync pulls live ticket sales and does operational work with them — governing which shows appear on the volunteer job board and auto-detecting when circle seating opens against a configurable threshold. On top sit staffing assignments and availability, pre/post-show checklists, and a kiosk fire register that captures live venue occupancy at check-in and check-out without anyone logging in. Each volunteer gets a personal iCal subscription so their assignments flow into their own calendar, and role-filtered views give volunteers, duty managers, and front-of-house managers exactly the picture they need.

Curtain Call connects live box-office data to the people who run the building.

The same sales figures that measure a show now decide its staffing, its checklists, and its safety record — with each person seeing only what they need to do their part. Data that used to sit locked in the ticketing system becomes the thing that actually runs show night.

The same TicketSolve integration that drives Curtain Call now also feeds the Majestic's public Squarespace website with live event data, via a small Cloudflare Workers layer — one connection to the theatre's ticketing system, doing useful work in two different places.

Data sovereignty was a requirement from the outset, not an afterthought: the Majestic needed to keep control of its own application and its own data, deployable and redeployable on infrastructure it controls, without depending on a proprietary hosting platform. AI-assisted development helped get there faster — not by replacing the work of understanding the theatre's actual workflows and volunteers, but by clearing boilerplate and integration work out of the way so more of the effort went into that understanding.

Curtain Call runs live at Majestic Theatre Retford, already replacing the paper and WhatsApp-group processes it was built to remove.

It is proof that the Muster platform adapts to a specific operation — a theatre, in this case — without rebuilding from scratch, carrying the same operational backbone into a very different setting.