The business side of the live business.
Philip Henslowe ran the business of the Elizabethan stage. He financed the companies, owned the playhouses, banked the receipts, and — crucially — kept the books. Henslowe's Diary, his surviving account book, is the closest thing we have to a financial record of the theatre that produced Shakespeare and Marlowe: loans, costumes, box-office takings, who got paid what and when.
Four centuries later, the curtain still doesn't go up until someone has kept that ledger. We took his name because the business side of the live business has never had a name of its own.
Henslowe is the intelligence, the tools, and the reporting for the people who actually finance, produce, and manage commercial theatre and live entertainment. Where the trades cover openings and weekly grosses, Henslowe covers the economics underneath: how shows get capitalized, what they cost to run, when they recoup, and what the numbers really say.
It's built for producers, general managers, investors, and the service providers and vendors in their orbit — the people who carry the financial risk of putting work on a stage, and who have never had this in one place.
Henslowe is a joint venture between Container, Golden Brands, and Carlson Keany.
We're opening the doors a crack. If you work on the business side of live entertainment, enter a company email on the home page to take a look around — and tell us what you'd want from a tool like this.