As investigations into political tampering with the 2016 US election on Facebook have made headlines and perhaps spurred corporate introspection, one would hope that the company is in the process of tightening its ad controls. Given the huge importance of social media company in the world’s communications, we can ill afford to have false information circulating that undermines democracy – or that supports racist and hate-filled positions.

But even if Facebook is placing ads under more scrutiny, it’s still pretty difficult to understand what led them to ban ads for a production of Sondheim and Weidman’s musical Assassins, currently underway at NextStop Theatre in Virginia, a professional non-Equity company. In the behemoth of Facebook, a single ad may well just have gotten caught up in the gears, but for NextStop, it denies one of their primary advertising platforms, one of the very few where they can deploy video.

Here’s the spot in question:

Matthew Thompson, managing director of NextStop, said that when they first deployed the ad, it was on their event page for the production, distinct from their company page. They did pay for a sponsored post, and at that time Thompson said that, “There were no issues with it. It was posted and approved almost instantaneously.”

However, when the company posted a slightly revised version, simply to accommodate a different aspect ratio for the video and tighten up the length, they looked carefully at the advisories about ad content. Upon submission, the ad resulted in a response from Facebook that noted “ad sets that use targeting terms related to social, religious or political reviews may require additional review” and also saying that “it looks like your ad may be for housing, employment or credit opportunities.”

None of these factors really came into play with the Assassins ad, so NextStop opted to take Facebook up on their offer of a manual review, since that would show that they hadn’t run afoul of any of these concerns. But instead, that yielded the denial of approval, but on the grounds that, “Your ad can’t include images that depict a person’s body as ideal or undesirable.”

Facebook’s inconsistencies here are considerable. As it happens, the Assassins ad is composed entirely of still images – many of which have been posted to Facebook by the company without complaint. In fact, the video itself hasn’t been removed from Facebook – but the company isn’t permitted to boost it to a broader audience by using it as an ad, meaning it is only going to be seen if someone seeks it out on their page, or turn up in people’s feeds through organic reach, known to be fairly limiting for those with company pages that don’t advertise.

Does the Assassins ad have an attractive woman in it? Yes, Mackenzie Newbury, who plays The Proprietor. Is she idealized? That’s a judgment, but the ad doesn’t present her as a paragon of anything, except perhaps as a representation of America and Americana, with her red, white and blue outfit. There is a quick tight glimpse of her lips, a flash of thigh, but they’re not particularly salacious; some might rightly view this as objectification – and if that is being eradicated from Facebook then it must be applied consistently. But certainly Facebook runs more expensively and slickly produced ads with attractive women in them.

Arts Integrity has reached out to the press office at Facebook for an explanation of what has transpired with the NextStop ad, and received a response saying that the issue was being explored and they would respond as soon as possible. The best possible response would be for them to say that upon further review, the NextStop ad has been cleared.

Over the years, social media platforms have often taken the position that they are merely conduits, and not responsible for what is posted unless something is clearly illegal. But now that it has been shown how the services can be manipulated, it’s important that ad content is vetted and content complaints are investigated. But they also need to take care that in policing their house and addressing violations of their terms of service, they’re not preventing individuals and companies that rely on them for their livelihoods are getting caught up in nets meant to capture bad actors, and not good theatre companies.

Update, October 20, 4 pm: Three hours after Arts Integrity’s initial e-mail to Facebook’s press office, two hours after Arts Integrity was informed that the issue of the NextStop ad for Assassins would be looked into, and one hour after this post went live, NextStop was notified that their ad had been accepted and would begin to run.

There was no further response to Arts Integrity about the issues that led to the ad being blocked.

Update, October 21, 7 am: Last evening, shortly after 7 pm, NextStop was again notified by Facebook that its ad has been disapproved.

This follows a 6:30 pm e-mail from Facebook’s PR department to Arts Integrity noting that the ad had been approved, and that on Monday, the press contact could “explain what has happened here.”

Update, October 22, 2017 11 am: Following yesterday’s disapproval, Matthew Thompson discovered, on Facebook’s desktop interface, a more detailed explanation of why the ad had been denied. It read:

“Your ad wasn’t approved because ads should clearly reflect the product or service being advertised rather than focus on a body part (ex: teeth, abs, acne). Using images of zoomed-in body parts typically evokes a negative reaction from viewers. Learn more about our Advertising Policies.

How to fix: We suggest promoting your product or service without using a zoomed-in body image.

If you think your ad follows our Advertising Policies, you can appeal this disapproval.”

Given the carnival atmosphere of the ad in question, one might wish to simply chalk this up as a comedy of errors. But it is a microcosm of the challenges of having information consolidated within the control of too few hands, especially when the ability to communicate is arbitrarily or erratically denied. While this instance pertains to arts marketing, across the massive universe of Facebook, it’s impossible to know what else might be getting censored, and how such situations are – or are not – being resolved.

This post will be updated the situation warrants.

The final scene of March of the Falsettos & Falsettoland at Hartford Stage, 1991 (Photo by T. Charles Erickson)

When I speak about it with people who saw it, the phrase that comes up most often is, “It was life-changing.”

When I speak about it with people who have read about it, but didn’t see it, the question that inevitably arises is, “What was the ‘coup de theatre’?”

When I speak about it with people who knew nothing of it, they profess surprise that it existed.

I’m speaking of the Hartford Stage production of March of the Falsettos & Falsettoland, the first time the two shows were produced as a single evening. Directed and choreographed by the marvelous Graciela Daniele, the shows were playing exactly 25 years ago as I write this, in a 41 performance run in Hartford Stage’s 489 seat theatre in October and early November of 1991. At most, 20,049 people saw the production; it was at least a few hundred less because, to the best of my recollection, the previews weren’t sold out.

I was the theatre’s public relations director at the time, and it was one of the more ecstatic times in my career. From the moment that artistic director Mark Lamos informed us we would be doing the show, I was thrilled. Though I did not see the original March of the Falsettos in 1981, I played the vinyl cast recording (owned by one of my college roommates, in those pre-digital days) incessantly in my junior year (1982-83), almost as a nightly ritual. When Falsettoland debuted at Playwrights Horizons in 1990, I made sure not to miss it.

I have to credit Bill Finn and James Lapine’s musicals with helping to form my perception of gay life. I was a straight, cisgender kid from a Connecticut suburb in an era and area when one didn’t encounter adults who were out, let alone high school students. I don’t remember any particular fear of or enmity toward gay students on my part, and I hope my memory is correct, but I also don’t ever remember the topic coming up until I got to college.

The humor and sincerity of March, from the opening of “Four Jews in a Room Bitching” to the simple closing of “Father to Son” left me wanting to march along with Marvin and Whizzer and Jason (and Mendel and Trina and Cordelia and Dr. Charlotte) because love, as far as I was concerned, was love. I sang that message over and over in my off-campus room, embedding it in my everyday life as I came to know and love gay men and lesbians as my world expanded through theatre. I should probably give a small shout out as well to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which broke down barriers about sexuality and gender fluidity for straight suburban kids as much as anything we encountered in the late 70s.

It may be difficult to understand today, but producing a musical about a man who leaves his wife for another man, yet attempts to retain family ties, was still an edgy step outside of a major city in 1991. The politics of “outing,” naming someone as gay in the media even when they had not declared themselves to be so, was hotly debated. Gay-Straight Alliances hadn’t really reached northern Connecticut, only 120 miles from New York City, though AIDS certainly had: my first landlord in Hartford died from it in the late 80s.

In marketing the show, the direction I was given was not to confront the subject matter directly, but only to entice people enough to want to see it, and allow the story to reach them once they were in the door. It didn’t hurt that at the time, subscription tickets filled some 75% of the total seating capacity for the run. A lot of people were coming no matter what I did.

Because we had begun using marketing tag lines, aping film advertising, I cobbled together something to the effect of, “It’s about parents, children, love, sex, baseball and bar mitzvahs.” Our graphic imagery in ads was utterly abstract, saying nothing overt at all. Because this was in many ways an experiment, the show’s title remained the unwieldy March of the Falsettos & Falsettoland; the condensing came later.

I knew something special was going on when I would visit the rehearsal hall, whether to track down an actor for a program bio or to accompany a journalist who was doing an interview during a lunch break or at the end of the day. What struck me most was that whoever was in the room during a rehearsal was, as far as Graciela Daniele was concerned, part of the rehearsal. I remember her calling out questions to me as I sat on the sidelines; curious about bar mitzvahs, she became the only person to ever listen to the audio recording of my own bar mitzvah (including me). There were no barriers in Grazie’s space – only inclusion.

Once the show was in the theatre, audiences responded very favorably, with cheering and weeping. If there were letters of complaint over the subject matter, I either never knew of them or have long forgotten them. One staff member, while out to his friends and co-workers, was so moved after seeing a preview that he promptly came out to his family, as he proudly told us all. On matinee days, many of us would slip into the theatre at certain times for particularly memorable moments: we were often there together as Barbara Walsh, as Trina, nailed “I’m Breaking Down” in March; we were there for the final moments of Falsettoland, perpetually moved as Adam Heller, as Mendel, sang, “Lovers come and lovers go/lovers live and die fortissimo/this is where we take a stand.” We endlessly laughed over the anecdote told by Evan Pappas and Roger Bart, as Marvin and Whizzer, of a student matinee when the lights came up on the pair in bed and one student announced rather loudly, “Ooh, they’re gonna get some.”

The whole experience became heightened when Frank Rich, then the chief theatre critic of The New York Times, rendered his verdict.

“It was a secret, until now, that the two ‘Falsetto’ shows, fused together on a single bill, form a whole that is not only larger than the sum of its parts but is also more powerful than any other American musical of its day.

For this discovery, audiences owe a huge thanks to the Hartford Stage. Under the artistic direction of Mark Lamos, it has the guts to produce these thorny musicals together at a time when few nonprofit theaters are willing to risk aggravating dwindling recession audiences by offering works that put homosexual passions (among many other passions in the ‘Falsetto’ musicals’ case) at center stage.”

With unstinting praise, he went on to note:

“She [Daniele] has brought off an inspired, beautifully cast double bill that is true to its gay and Jewish characters — and to the spirit of the original James Lapine productions — even as it presents the evening’s densely interwoven familial and romantic relationships through perspectives that perhaps only a woman and a choreographer could provide.”

Of course, the box office exploded, selling out the remainder of the run within a day. House seats, which I instituted as a practice a Hartford Stage for the first time when I came to the theatre and were only rarely needed, were in high demand. And the talk began of Broadway.

That talk continued for several months, but without going into what were protracted and emotionally trying times, the Hartford production, as we all know, did not go to Broadway. It was Lapine’s original that returned to New York, with the core original cast members – except that Barbara Walsh, our Trina, joined that production. As a result, the Hartford Falsettos became the stuff of legend, and regional theatre legends tend to fade with time. But over lunch with Evan Pappas a few weeks ago, our first in quite some time, he noted that 25 years on, he still meets people who saw the show in Hartford, and tell him stories about how it changed their lives.

I suspect productions of March, of Falsettoland, of Falsettos, have been changing lives for a very long time, whether directed by James Lapine, Graciela Daniele, or any of the many other directors who have brought that story to the stage. I was privileged to have seen Grazie’s production as often as I wished; I’ve seen the previous Lapine productions several times and will see the new one in a couple of weeks.

I couldn’t be happier that it’s back on Broadway, though the show will always echo in my head with Grazie’s vision, with Evan, Barbara, Adam, Roger, Joanne Baum, Andrea Frierson and the twins who shared the role of Jason, Etan and Josh Ofrane. I only wish that Fun Home were still running, because how marvelous would it have been to have two stories on Broadway about family life, love, and pain, set in roughly the same era but written years apart, exploring the thrill of first love and the need for absolute acceptance of gay parents and children.

Oh, the “coup de theatre’? I haven’t forgotten. I saved it for the end, just as Grazie did, though I tipped my hand with the photo at the start of this essay.

The term, as applied to the Hartford production, comes from Frank Rich’s review. He wrote, “For her finale, Ms. Daniele exploits the spatial dimensions at her disposal with an overwhelming coup de theatre (not to be divulged here) that first reduces an audience to sobs and then raises it to its feet.”

After a quarter century, let me divulge.

March of the Falsettos & Falsettoland at Hartford Stage, 1991 (Photo by Jennifer W. Lester)

Grazie and set designer Ed Wittstein chose to completely open up the vast stage at Hartford to its walls, using no set pieces other than interchangeable cubes – and a bed. The lyrics were scrawled randomly on the entire floor (visible due to the theatre’s arena-like seating), and across the Broadway theatre-sized back wall. To be honest, in shades of black, grey and white, they largely disappeared, allowing audience members to concentrate wholly on the handful of people singing intimate stories, with no distraction.

But at the very end of the show, as Mendel intoned the final lines, a small square suddenly appeared through the drop that masked the rear wall. On it was simply the name: “Whizzer.” Then the drop was revealed to be a scrim as the entire back wall dissolved into a ghostly section of the AIDS quilt. A lever was tripped, rather loudly, and the front drop wafted slowly to the floor, fully and clearly revealing the quilt for just a moment before the lights went out, and the show ended.

While the quilt at Hartford Stage was not part of the real quilt, it replicated panels from that extraordinary expression of loss that once covered the National Mall in Washington. Because members of the company had been asked if they had family and friends who they had lost and wished to see included, audience members who worked in theatre quickly discovered they knew people on the Hartford quilt facsimile. While much of the audience was in tears, those who saw the names of those they loved and lost were often overcome.

Beautiful, sad, simple, funny and transcendent. That was the Hartford March of the Falsettos & Falsettoland. I have always understood and accepted that I am spending my life in a world that is forever fading into memory. But if I could ever go back in time to see just one more performance of any show I worked on, it would be March of the Falsettos & Falsettoland. At least it’s still playing in my head 25 years on, and once again, I’m in tears over its beauty as I write, and proud that I had a connection to it. I wish you’d seen it, and if you did, I suspect you know exactly how I feel.

To a particular subset of junior comedy nerds, of which I was an unapologetic member, 1976 was a watershed year, for a reason only tangentially connected to the official Bicentennial celebration that faced Americans down at every turn.

At a time when the vinyl record remained the primary means of owning recorded music (cassettes were coming into vogue, as were, briefly eight-tracks), the comedy sections of record stores were relatively low on product. Without access to a really good used record store, it was particularly hard to find vintage comedy recordings, and by vintage at age 14, that meant anything older than 10 years. Cosby and Carlin filled the racks, but beyond them it was luck of the draw. Believe me, I looked.

So when the essential Barry Hansen, aka Dr. Demento, began “serializing” Stan Freberg’s 1961 album “Stan Freberg Presents The United States of America Volume One: The Early Years,” it was nothing less than a revelation. Conceived as the cast recording of a Broadway musical that never was, with Freberg writing, composing and performing many of the vocal chores, “America” was, to my mind a masterpiece, and I was thrilled when, in the wake of its showcase on Dr. Demento’s show, it was rereleased by Capitol Records, so I could listen to it again and again (which I did, and still do).

As Freberg’s witty, wise-guy approach to everything from the voyage of Christopher Columbus to the Battle of Yorktown proved subtler than Mad Magazine, not as raw as the National Lampoon, and as tuneful any classic cast album, I was hooked. I even went so far as to write down to the lyrics to every song (some in two and three part counterpoint), which involved constantly lifting the needle and dropping it back again, so that I could truly commit the songs to memory, where they remain.

Freberg’s voice, as it happened, was plenty familiar, as he had been a cartoon voice artist for years, but as I grew older, I learned more about his work.

• That he was part one of television’s earliest children’s shows, Time For Beany, whose most popular character, performed by Freberg, was Cecil, seasick sea serpent (initially a live puppet show, it was much later made into an animated cartoon).

• That he had been a charting recording artist, who broke out with a record called “John and Marsha,” which consisted of nothing but some romantic string music and a male and female voices saying “John” and “Marsha” in a way that charted a relationship.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkfwmB8jeSU

• That he obviously found the Jack Webb TV procedural Dragnet an endless source of amusement, as he parodied it often (with Webb’s support).

• That he had one of the last network radio comedy shows, having filled the gap left when Jack Benny shifted to television (a favorite target of Freberg’s). And, most startlingly, that by the time I discovered him, he had largely left the comedy business in order to bring humor into advertising.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY2VAIIQAj4

• That he wrote the longest radio commercial ever, which became so popular that it was recorded and released commercially.

I raise all of this because today would have been Stan Freberg’s 90^th birthday. Unfortunately he passed away at the age of 88 early last year. I regret never having sent him a fan letter, never having made an attempt to meet him on one of my irregular forays to Los Angeles.

Listening to 50+ year old comedy can be a mixed bag, but when I came to Freberg’s work, it was only 15 to 20 years old, so the majority of the comedic references were sufficiently current for me. Today, his parodies of Mitch Miller and Arthur Godfrey don’t resonate as they would have in Freberg’s heyday; his cutting satires of everything from the commercialization of Christmas to the McCarthy hearings can be appreciated for their virtuosity, but they don’t necessarily elicit laughs. That said, Freberg’s riff on censorship and “political correctness” from 1957 holds up very well.

And because his humor was – like that of my other comedic heroes from the same era,  Tom Lehrer, Allan Sherman and Bob and Ray – entirely aural, there aren’t copious videos to show Freberg at work. YouTube reveals page after page of Freberg routines, but the images are often of static record labels, of montages of photos.

Because he was more prolific than Lehrer and, even truncated, his comedy career was longer than Sherman’s, I have more Stan Freberg discs on my shelves than those two artists put together – included the complete boxed set of his radio shows (well, it was canceled after only four months of weekly airings). But just as I play Lehrer’s “Poisoning Pigeons In The Park” every year on the first day of spring, and play Bob and Ray’s “Komodo Dragon Expert” every time I want to demonstrate what truly inept interviewing and moderating skills sound like, Freberg gets a spin at least once a year, on the Fourth of July, when his masterwork “The United States of America” underlines and undermines every patriotic expression of the day.

Happy birthday, Stan Freberg. I knew you, but oh, how I wish I’d known you.

‘You give us $150 dollars and we’ll review your show.’ It sounds like a bizarro-world version of ‘You give us 22 minutes, we’ll give you the world.’

But that is, boiled to its essence, what the Los Angeles theatre website Bitter Lemons has just proposed to the southern California theatre community. Citing the general reduction in theatre reviews both nationally and locally, the site has laid out a plan whereby theatres (or individuals) can pay $150 and be assured of a review of at least 300 words, but one which is wholly independent and will be solely the opinion of the site’s critics, not a pandering paean to whatever show or patron has ponied up the bucks.

While I’m prepared to take Bitter Lemons at their word about protecting the independence of their critics [full disclosure: I know one of their critics, Katie Buenneke, largely from Twitter], the optics of this proposal, as well as many practical elements, seem hugely problematic. The moment money changes hands between a producer (or producing organization) and a media outlet (be it vast or grass-roots), the necessary divide between both parties starts to break down. No matter how strong any “walls” may be, when editorial choices are determined by outside dollars, and when the economic viability of a media outlet may be dependent upon those covered, the opportunities for ethical compromise are rife.

Bitter Lemons became almost compulsory reading for me this year as the site was a central disseminator of information, inquiry and invective during the heated debate over Actors Equity Association’s promulgation of new guidelines for the 99 seat and under plan that had been used in Los Angeles over the past 25 years. In passionate and at times exhaustive detail, Bitter Lemons has been a champion of retaining the 99-seat plan as is, and I fully expect the site to continue to fight for that cause so long as supporters in the Los Angeles AEA community seek to make their case.

That’s why I bring up the optics: here is a theatre site, arguing for the right of union actors to work for notably less than AEA actors elsewhere in the country, that is saying their theatre coverage is dependent on being paid to cover that same community. To be sure, there are some apples to oranges issues in this comparison, but as I say, I’m referring simply to how it looks, not the particulars.

So let’s go to practical issues. “The Bitter Lemons Imperative,” as it’s called, suggests that it’s easy for companies to shoulder the expense. “Most producing companies already have it in their budgets, if they have any budget at all.” While I cannot be definitive, I strongly doubt that’s an accurate statement; I’m unfamiliar with any theatre company that has a budget line for reviews. What they may have, as the policy statement on Bitter Lemons sets out a bit further on, is “thousands of dollars for mailings, postcards, advertising, many companies even pay anywhere from $500 to $2k for a publicist.” But equating marketing with criticism is a comparison with which I suspect few critics would feel comfortable. When a company pays for an ad or a brochure, it explicitly controls the content; when it pays for a publicist, it’s engaging someone to work with the media, but in a manner where there’s no quid pro quo, explicit or implied.

I find myself wondering about where this plan might leave the very newest theatre companies in Los Angeles, which may have budgets so low that the $150 fee to Bitter Lemons is beyond thinly stretched means, and which are already providing (presumably) a pair of complimentary tickets as well, which have their own dollar value. Does this mean that they will go unnoticed by Bitter Lemons? I fear this will only reinforce an economic stratification insofar as the site’s coverage goes, where only companies with sufficient means become worthy of the site’s attention, instead of decisions being made according to editorial choices and interests. If Bitter Lemons learns of an intriguing show that doesn’t write a check, will that show in essence be the proverbial tree falling in an empty lemon grove?

There’s no question that theatre coverage, arts coverage and frankly all manner of paid journalism are under vast pressure right now (take note of an impending newswriters’ strike in Philadelphia or the new round of buyouts at The Denver Post). But those who have set out to offer independent arts coverage have done so by soliciting general support that isn’t tied to an editorial imperative (you pay us, we cover you). Their efforts are more akin to public radio and television campaigns; offhand I think of campaigns by The Arts Fuse in Boston and New York’s The Clyde Fitch Report. Ad sales, already in evidence on Bitter Lemons, are another revenue source; if the site incorporates as a not-for-profit (if it isn’t already), contributions may be further advantaged, particularly with foundations that support new media journalism and the arts, separately or together.

I’ll say again that I’ve found Bitter Lemons invaluable in my education about the 99 seat debate. I am also repeatedly on record as arguing on behalf of paying arts writers and reporters for their work and I applaud new models for sustaining them (and worry about others). But linking coverage to cash on the barrelhead smacks too much of payola, of pay for play, even if it’s out in the open. I think it can only serve to diminish the site’s credibility, and may well, in the long run, result in a diminished Bitter Lemons, which would be a shame. After all, can this model hold up if paying companies start receiving blistering pans, or simply indifference?

As someone who believes deeply in theatre and in theatre journalism, I have to say that if I had to choose where to allocate $150 in the Los Angeles theatre community right now, I’d probably use it to pay an actor before a critic. No bitterness intended or implied.

Update: June 5, 4:45 pm: In writing this post early this morning, I hadn’t yet seen a corollary piece by Colin Mitchell of Bitter Lemons about the early response to the Bitter Lemons Imperative. It reads, in part:

“On the eve of opening night for previews at the 2015 Hollywood Fringe Festival, Bitter Lemons has over 30 exclusive Bitter Lemons Reviews ordered and purchased – that’s right pre-purchased – and those top quality works of theater criticism will be rolling out over the next couple of weeks. . .

We offered a deeply discounted 50% off our regular price of $150 just because we love the Fringe community so much and understand how important it is for them to get quality coverage from a truly experienced, savvy, historian of the ephemeral arts, plus we saw this as the perfect opportunity to introduce the Los Angeles Theater Community to our new business model for theater criticism.”

Is this an arts journalism post or a post about Bitter Lemons’s own business acumen, one that that also essentially functions as a sales tool? The lines seems to be blurring very fast.

Update: June 6, 5:15 pm: In expressing my concerns about the “pay for review” practice at Bitter Lemons, I attempted to address the issue with respect for the site and and shared concern over the dire economic models for arts journalism. Some responded saying it should be given a chance, and time will tell. So now that I’ve seen one of the “paid for” reviews on the site, I want to share with you a bit of what one fringe production has gotten for their $150:

I don’t know about the rest of you people, but if someone pays me to write about them, I suck them off with such vigor that their ejaculate explodes into the back of my skull with such force that I feel like the bells of Notre Dame pounded by Quasimodo on a Keith Moon bender.

So, since I’m only in this for the money, and the bloodthirsty mercenary in me trumps any pretense of integrity and balance, the rest of what follows in this review of Scott Claus’ “Sin: A Pop Opera,” at the iconic Three Clubs bar—a review he or someone else associated with him paid for—will be a bunch of positive, compromised hokum.

Perhaps this is merely showing off in the wake of comments and blog posts about the new policy, or perhaps as Isaac Butler posited in his post “Startling Chutzpah In The 99-Seat Arena,” we’re all just being punked. But regardless of Bitter Lemons’s motivation and intent, I think they’re doing serious damage to their credibility. I would really urge all makers of theatre in Los Angeles to put their money back in their pockets and, if they paid by check, they might want to stop payment now.

Update: June 12, 6:00 pm: The American Theatre Critics Association has issued a statement regarding the Bitter Lemons review policy. It reads:

The American Theatre Critics’ Association, the only national organization of professional theater critics, is concerned with the model started by Bitter Lemons. While it does not guarantee a favorable review or allow theater companies to choose the reviewer, this pay-for-play arrangement creates a clear appearance of a conflict of interest. That appearance, even if spurious, undermines the crucial credibility of not only Bitter Lemons’ critics, but all critics.

Our profession has fought for decades to preserve the image of independence. When our work is put out for sale to those we cover, we are concerned not just for the criticism itself but for the bypassing of editorial judgment in deciding what to cover and what not to cover.

Additionally, Steven Leigh Morris, editor of Stage Raw, another significant Los Angeles theatre site, made the following statement to me regarding his site’s selection of critics in the wake of the Bitter Lemons Imperative:

It is Stage Raw’s policy that any  reviewer who has accepted remuneration from a theater as quid pro quo for a review of that theater is ineligible to write reviews for Stage Raw.

Howard Sherman is the director of the Arts Integrity Initiative at The New School for Drama.

“You know, if we all agreed to stop putting critics’ quotes in our ads, they’d lose their power over us, and we could just sell our shows on what we think is best about them.”

I will confess to having made that statement, or something along those lines, more than once when I was the public relations director at Hartford Stage. Thinking back on it now, I can attribute it to a) youth, b) feistiness and c) naïveté. Remember, of course, that this was the pre-internet era, when reviews didn’t linger forever online, but genuinely became inaccessible 24 hours after they appeared in print. And of course, there was no persuading absolutely every  other theatre in the area that this was viable, and without unanimity, it would fail.

No one took me terribly seriously (though at the time, I certainly did). At the same time that I was attempting to jumpstart my radical approach to arts marketing, I was also guilty of some exceptionally creative “Frankensteining” of words from reviews for the express purpose of trumpeting them in ads. Because that was what was expected, I freely engaged in hypocritical acts because, well…paycheck.

More than two decades later, it seems that Broadway marketers may be moving towards my way of thinking after all. As evidence, I give you three screen captures from video advertising for three current Broadway shows:

Finding Neverland ad on Times Square video screen

Screen grab of Curious Incident tv ad

Screen grab of Something Rotten! tv ad

Look, ma, no quotes! Apparently it’s now enough simply to plaster the logos of media outlets on an ad to suggest that their critics have been positively disposed towards the show being sold. I’d say the truth is more variable.

Without going back and rereading the coverage in every outlet represented in these images, I’m willing to give The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time the benefit of the doubt, because the reviews were, as I recall, pretty terrific, and because the show has given equal weight to each outlet it represents. There’s a certain understatement at work.

I give the Something Rotten! ad credit for some subtle humor, because while it offers up The New York Times logo, a bit of animation that lobs a tomato at it, and obscures it, because the Times wasn’t actually all that keen on the show.

The Finding Neverland logo parade seems fairly disingenuous, because its New York Times review wasn’t positive, yet it dominates to screen. Did the Times write about the show? It certainly did. Does the screen say that they liked the show? In point of fact no. But I suspect that they’re trading on the fact that the presence of the Times logo might fool some people into thinking the show was endorsed by the paper, which may not be an absolute ethical lapse, but it’s certainly willfully misleading.

This isn’t to say that quotes have disappeared from ads, and even the examples above pull out some specific quotes on their own, separate from these logo parades. In the case of Fun Home, their ad is almost entirely glowing and attributed review quotes, with some award nominations thrown in as well. What they’re avoiding is any mention of what the show is actually about, which is a shame, but a sign of our still unenlightened times, in which the content of the show may be perceived as possibly limiting its commercial appeal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlpNv60eGyU

I know of critics who will on occasion, when they think their writing has been inaccurately represented in ads, reach out to productions and make their feelings known. In such cases, especially with major critics, I would imagine those concerns receive due attention, since no one wants to be party to a souring relationship with a critic. But in these cases, the question is whether the folks who police trademark usage for each outlet have noticed these examples, and whether they are concerned enough to suggest – or enforce – that, in some cases, their logos may be getting used to imply an endorsement which doesn’t necessarily exist.

For those who decry the shrinking space for arts reviews, or who find star rating systems too reductive, it seems we’re in the process of moving on to the next iteration – exploring how to dispense with opinion entirely, in favor of implied endorsement, warranted or not. My youthful activism has come around to a more mature realism: we need as much writing as possible about the theatre, and that doesn’t mean just feature coverage, but criticism as well. If we work to marginalize critics through marketing, we may boost a show here or there, but at the end of the day we’ll be worse off for having done so.

It is the policy of London’s Underground, commonly known as “the tube,” to not accept advertising which, in the words of it supervisory authority, Transport for London, “may cause widespread or serious offence’.” By judging posters for the West End transfer of Joshua Harmon’s Bad Jews as potentially doing so, and therefore banning them, TfL may well be giving greater widespread offense for its oversensitivity, even if it comes from a place of genuine concern, which now rises to the level of censorship.

I don’t want to discount disturbing reports of rising anti-Semitism in Europe, but this poster won’t feed that trend. A Jewish playwright and a Jewish producer shouldn’t be prevented from their promoting their work because of fears of how some might misinterpret its name.

True, there is no governing body preventing the production of the play itself, and numerous other outlets – all presumably with a set of advertising standards – haven’t apparently taken issue with the ads. But in cutting off the miles of pedestrian tunnels used by countless shows to reach both natives and tourists alike, TfL has put a dent in what, by my own observations when visiting London, is a foundational part of a great deal of theatre marketing.

Had the poster been a stark white sheet with nothing but the words “Bad Jews” in big block letters and a tiny print phone number and web address, one might possibly mistake it as a political statement. If the play title were “Jews Are Bad,” you might at least be able the comprehend the protective concern. But the Bad Jews poster, with its rash of review quotes, billing of actors and creative team and clear identification as a theatrical production, can hardly be mistaken for anti-Semitic propaganda. It is, unquestionably, a show poster.

Presumably, this has not occurred because representatives of TfL have seen the play and decided that it’s ‘not good for the Jews.’ If that were their criteria, then presumably they have also banned posters for the current London run of The Ruling Class, a pitch dark satire whose targets include the Church of England and whose central character is a nobleman who believes he’s Jesus.

Let’s remember that the authority which has banished Bad Jews from The Tube is the same one that saw no problem with (strikingly clever, IMHO) ads for the English National Opera’s Don Giovanni in 2012, the ones which showed an open condom wrapper and offered the slogan (in big block capital red letters) “Don Giovanni. Coming Soon.” Surely the parents of some small children, asked to explain this image, may have felt offense. (I saw a modified version of the poster that read “Opening Soon.”) Perhaps, like so many censorious authorities before them, TfL misses innuendo until it’s pointed out to them, but sees offense in the straightforward. And, like so many censors, it makes arbitrary decisions that it can’t justify.

Of course, this is also the same authority that blurred out the face of Prince Charles on posters for the play King Charles III, again to avoid causing offense. I have little doubt that the Don Giovanni campaign was designed to be provocative, and generate buzz around the production, but it was consistent with the efforts of so many opera companies to attract younger audiences by marketing their work in a manner that blows the dust off of perceptions of the art form. In the case of King Charles III, the image was arresting, but probably tamer than many an editorial cartoon about the monarchy. I know many British people have great affection for the Royal Family, but was the original poster really offensive to anyone beyond the family, who as public figures have been subjected to worse (such as the puppets of Spitting Image) and who I imagine don’t spend any time in the tube? The British government may have abolished the censorship authority of their Lord Chamberlain in 1968, but perhaps former staffers or acolytes of that role have holed up in the Underground.

Like so much public censorship, the decision on Bad Jews has produced a round of ridicule in the British press, which also brings with it untold free marketing for the show. Transit for London may have kept the words “Bad Jews” off of its walls, but it has placed the show on the lips of people everywhere, and if that prompts even more people to see that very provocative, probing play about Jewish identity among millennials in America, one is almost tempted to thank them. Save for the genuine worry about what TfL, in their seemingly absolute authority, might seek to censor next.

 Howard Sherman is Director of the Arts Integrity Initiative at the New School for Drama.

I anticipate that this October will be the month of “freak,” and not because of Halloween. Though that won’t help.

Because the media can’t resist trend stories, and any three or more items with a common link can constitute a trend, the confluence of the AMC series Freakshow; the new season of American Horror Story, entitled “Freak Show”; and the Broadway musical Side Show, with its opening number inviting audiences to “Come Look at the Freaks,” will prove irresistible. However, they may also engender more frequent use of the word “freak” to apply to people with disabilities, bringing into vogue a term used far too often to marginalize those who don’t match up with what is far too often termed as “normal.” What, after all, is normal anyway?

“Freak” is a particularly ugly word when applied to a person with a disability, since it is not only designed to clearly label them as being something other than the prevailing “standard,” but it has been layered over centuries with implications of fear and horror and objectification. Many people went to see side shows in order to gaze with at best fascination, but often with superiority or revulsion at people who, in some cases, could find no other employment (and developed extraordinary skills to combat that) and for whom medical treatments and assistive tools were unavailable. That connotation lingers.

Part of the challenge that’s barreling towards us in the next month comes from how these works are advertised. The deeply unsettling ads for American Horror Story, whether in TV or on subway signage, are determined to link “freak” with “scary” and “strange.” In an effort to recall the very side shows in which John Merrick was displayed, the pending Broadway revival of The Elephant Man already has theatre signage imploring passers-by to “Behold an extraordinary freak of nature.” And how many people may come out of Side Show humming the often-sung and whispered, “Come look at the freaks/Come gape at the geeks/Come examine these aberrations/Their malformations/Grotesque physiques/Only pennies for peeks”? It’s quite possible that more people will see or hear the word “freak” than will actually see the shows that contain or employ them, reinsinuating the term back into common parlance, devoid of context or understanding.

Each of these examples may be very different works – one a reality TV show, one a fictional horror fantasy, one a Broadway musical – but they’re all rooted in the setting of a circus or carnival sideshow or, as they were often known, freak show. The side show has proven a rich location for tales of fiction and fact for many years, from William Lindsay Gresham’s noir Nightmare Alley to an early and rare Spalding Gray monologue In Search of The Monkey Girl to Katherine Dunn’s family saga Geek Love. The legacy of Tod Browning’s film Freaks lingers after 80 years, along with the debate over whether it was utter exploitation, or something more.

This is not to suggest that we can entirely eradicate “freak,” but that as these depictions proliferate, we should be thinking about the context in which they’re used. In the various accounts being told, it would be dishonest to pretend that “freak” was not a common term for people with disabilities. Within each work, it’s an accurate term (although in its out of town run at The Kennedy Center, I noticed Side Show’s careful use of “disabled” at one point, anachronistically but diplomatically), no different than the term “crippled” in Martin McDonough’s The Cripple of Inishmaan, which played on Broadway in the spring.

Daniel Radcliffe and Sarah Greene in The Cripple of Inishmaan

But Inishmaan is also the example that provokes my concern about “the fr-word” this fall. While in Ireland in the 1930s, no one was stopping to find a more proper term for the boy they all called, to his own frustration, “Cripple Billy.” But when the show was discussed or written about, the term was used over and over again, with some critics seemingly of the opinion that since it was spoken so often in the play, they could use it in their own writing. But those critics were writing in 2014, not 1934, and their language should not have been the language of the play except when making direct quotes.

Just like the language regarding race, the best term for discussing those who have disabilities has been evolving. Terms like “handicapped” and “differently abled,” which were seen as proper not so long ago, are now problematic; for comparison’s sake, think about how terms like “Oriental” or “Negro” seem today. Worth remembering is that the long-prevailing language was imposed upon minority groups without consultation or consent; now it’s incumbent upon us to employ the preferred terms that groups choose for their own self-definition.

That’s not to say the word is never to be uttered. Beginning in the 1960s, the counterculture embraced “freak” specifically to define themselves as outside of conventional society, but the term was usually dissociated from physical attributes and was more of a state of mind; we began to hear about “freak flags flying” from groups that assiduously wanted to be perceived as outside the mainstream. There are nouveau side shows in a number of places, including Coney Island and Venice Beach, but on recent looks, their bills of fare were just as apt to favor people who displayed outré body art or performed stunts than those with disabilities, and in every case the performers are there under their own agency.

Indeed, just as LGBTQ activists embraced the derogatory “queer” as an emblem of their own efforts at acceptance, and to confront those who sought to suppress them, there are those in the disability community who proudly call themselves “freaks” or “crips,” and those names are often claimed by performers with disabilities as well. But no differently than someone straight should call a member of the LGBTQ community “a queer,” no one should think that they have the right to label someone with a disability “a freak.” Those individuals can self-identify as such, but it doesn’t cut both ways.

As Christopher Shinn wrote so eloquently for The Atlantic, disability is not a metaphor. I would add to that sentiment that “freak,” when applied to a person, is not a title of mystery and wonder. It’s a slur. So see these shows according to your own taste. But think carefully about how you’re going to talk about them afterwards.

This essay appeared in a somewhat different form as part of The Guardian’s op-ed section, “Comment is Free.” Click here for that edited and condensed version.

The arrival of a new movie trailer online is received with a level of excitement and scrutiny that once waited for the film itself; even photos get analyzed in depth, as the recent hubbub over the first image of Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman has proved. So it’s no surprise that the theatre fan community went into a frenzy over the first full trailer for Disney’s film of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Into The Woods; after all, superhero movies now arrive like clockwork, while movie musicals, though more common than in the 70s and 80s, are still infrequent events. That dearth caused a previous bit of alarm and umbrage over Into The Woods, when Mr. Sondheim suggested there might be some plot changes.

Almost as quickly as the Into The Woods trailer appeared, my social media feeds were filled with an anguished refrain: where are the songs? Yes, the core audience felt betrayed, even though I suspect every person who was moved to write already knows the score by heart.

What those of us who love theatre in general, musicals in particular, and Sondheim most of all have to remember is that, sadly, we are not representative of the majority of moviegoers, and movie marketers have to throw a wide net. Those of us who flock to watch the trailer of Into The Woods are already committed to seeing it, no matter how much we may want to grouse about it. The film studios are trying to reach a much wider crowd, for whom the sight of stars singing may be off-putting, strange as such a thought may be to those of us who are ready to belt out a show tune at the slighted prompting. It’s also possible that we’ll get a more representative trailer as the film draws closer.

Minimizing the musical theatre connection has certainly been true for movie musicals for some time. It’s almost as though marketers are trying to slip the fact that people sing past potential audiences. Unlike Into The Woods, which does seem more like a moody tour of the film’s production design than anything, music is prominently featured in countless trailers, even for non-musical films, and sometimes with music that isn’t ever heard in the film. But when it comes to seeing people sing, let’s keep that quiet, shall we? We can hear singing in trailers, and see people moving their lips, but not in sync. Take a look at the trailer for Hairspray as an example.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJ53mRO80c0

Dancing, apparently, isn’t so problematic. The Dancing with the Stars effect has probably only increased its appeal. Another example is Mamma Mia! which looked as if it was a romantic comedy with a bunch of Abba songs on the soundtrack, rather than a story told using Abba songs. One can understand why they wouldn’t have wanted anyone to see and hear Pierce Brosnan warbling, but the sight of master thespian Meryl Streep going to town on some Swedish pop might have added some appeal in its very incongruity.

Maybe Paramount knew the theatre purists were already on edge when they cut the trailer for Sweeney Todd, given the relative musical inexperience of the main cast (which many feel lived down to their expectations), which keeps vocals to a minimum. Despite that, more than most musical trailers, Sweeney actually gave us a real look at a bit of a song, “Epiphany,” spoke-sung by Johnny Depp (although we were halfway through the trailer before it was deployed). However that could easily be recognized as a fantasy sequence and seemingly not the style of the whole film. Overall the trailer hewed closer to the Hammer Films homage that director Tim Burton had appropriated for the Grand Guignol tale, and maybe a few Fangoria devotees were lured into a musical they’d have avoided otherwise.

It’s not that we don’t get a few glimpses of people singing in some trailers, but in the quick-cut style that brings them flash and energy, there is a certain “blink or you’ll miss it” quality, even when the making of music is central to the plot, as in the Dreamgirls trailer, where one would think performance footage of a superstar like Beyoncé would actually be a plus.

The incongruity of Eddie Murphy singing may be why we saw a bit of exactly that in Dreamgirls, and the same rationale may have applied to Depp in Sweeney, as well as Catherine Zeta-Jones and Renee Zellwger as the merry murderesses in the trailer of Chicago. For Zellweger, the singing was new; for Zeta-Jones it was part of her professional background, but before she became a star. Perhaps singing from people we least expect to sing has marketing value.

Mind you, this fear extends to movies that aren’t musicals but tell musical stories and in which the main characters are known to us precisely because they’re singers. The flash of the trailer for the just-released Get On Up, about James Brown, gives us glimpses of his energetic performances and we hear his music along with narration and dialogue, but lips actually moving along with the songs go largely unseen. Of course, given the subterfuge with which actual musicals are being marketed, I can’t help but wonder whether some audiences see this and think, “Uh, I dunno. I think they’re trying to slip one of those durned musicals by us.”

As much as we purists might be desperate to see musical scenes as quickly as possible, we can be fairly sure that the film itself will be a musical, even if it has been adapted and altered from its stage version. The example of Irma la Douce, one of the very few musicals to be adapted for the screen without the songs, is unlikely to recur.

So what about original musicals for the screen? To be fair, original live action film tuners are scarce, except for animation, where, since Disney’s The Little Mermaid, a mini-song score seems de rigeur. But is that a selling point? On the basis of the trailer for Frozen, which ultimately drilled Idinia Menzel’s “Let It Go” into the brains of millions of kids and their parents worldwide, even Disney wasn’t sure that the massively successful score was going to bring in the crowd. The film seemed to be the story of one girl, one boy and one talking snowman. However, to be fair, even though they hid it, the word got out about the exceptional songs.

The trailer for Les Miserables did show us Anne Hathaway as the doomed Fantine singing “I Dreamed A Dream,” in fact it’s all we hear as we watch that trailer – all of the other visuals that are laid over it could easily come from a non-musical. No warbling Wolverine here. Perhaps, to the handful of people in the world who have managed to escape any knowledge of the stage musical, this one song could be an isolated case. But this trailer more than any demonstrates the marketing tactic that prevails: don’t make it look too much like a musical in the hope of capturing some people who may not like musicals, and as for the core audience, we’ll throw ‘em a bone.

I wish I could recall which Twitter wit I read who compared movie trailers without songs to foreign film trailers without dialogue, since I would like to credit them for that very astute observation. But it’s worth noting that foreign films are financed and produced abroad, then picked up for distribution over here; the Hollywood studios shoulder vastly greater risk when they release musicals. While I’m fairly grouchy about the studios these days, with the endless remakes, sequels and films from dystopian young adult novels (thanks Mark Harris for that), I really am willing to give them a lot of leeway on musicals, to a degree on how they adapt them, but certainly on how they sell them. For perspective: if a musical sells 600,000 tickets in a year, it’s a smash; if a movie musical sells 600,000 tickets in its first week, it’s a disappointment. And after all, if a trailer whets our appetite for a movie musical, we can always fire up the iPod, or our Sondheim channel, and listen and sing along to our heart’s content until the movie comes out. After all, haven’t we been doing that already?

Incidentally, we’re getting two musicals this Christmas. In addition to Into The Woods, everybody’s favorite orphan is back, and on the basis of the trailer, while it’s hard to know what’s been done with the story and most of the score, at least we know it will still be a hard knock life tomorrow, though we may not be entirely sure of who’s singing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrxc8rS2W2E

When I saw it for the first time last week, I was really struck by the poster for the West End debut of the musical Urinetown. Why? Because it didn’t look like a theatre poster. It looked like a movie poster.

In point of fact, it looked to a certain degree like the poster for Star Trek: Into Darkness, which owed a debt to the poster for The Dark Knight Rises. Many movie posters are endlessly iterative and imitative, as they want to subtly remind you of other successful films in the same genre. I give points to Urinetown UK for evoking dark futures with humanity under threat – completely consistent with the world conjured in the show. Equally apt, it counters the darkness by placing a young attractive couple, reaching for a drop of water, at the center of a spaghetti-tangle of (empty) pipes, and they added a tagline: “A drop of hope can change the world.”

It has taken almost a decade since Urinetown’s Broadway closing for it to reach England, so the opportunity to capitalize on Broadway buzz has long since faded, That certainly suggests one reason why the graphic bears no relationship to the Broadway marketing material, unlike The Producers, The Book of Mormon, Jersey Boys and so many other US to UK transfers. That works in two directions as well, since Mamma Mia! and Matilda ads look the same in both countries, having started in London.

As I pondered the Urinetown UK art, it struck me that one reason the vast majority of theatre ad design looks so different from movie ad design is that while a movie is trying to simply drive sales and pique interest, theatre designs, more often than not, are trying to build a brand. If theatre images emphasize a star, they could be undermining a long run, since eventually stars leave; movies have no such problem. Think of the image of Les Mis’ Cosette: as the show ran and ran, the image became so ubiquitous that they could run ads without the show’s title and you would know what the ad was for. Producer Cameron Mackintosh’s team even could play with the image, running variations on Cosette that honored holidays or welcomed other shows to Broadway. And it was hardly the only show to do that: think of the Phantom’s mask, the eyes of Cats, the Chagall-esque Fiddler on the Roof, Larry Kert running after Carol Lawrence for West Side Story (though that would eventually be supplanted by Saul Bass’ fire escape logo for the film). Colleges, high schools and community theatres use knock-offs of these designs for years and years.

As I’ve said, it’s the lapse in time that has afforded Urinetown UK the chance to go in another direction, since given the relative age of the show, it doesn’t undermine a worldwide branding effort.  The other reason they have that opportunity: in my opinion, the original Urinetown graphic never became iconic. Do you remember it? Perhaps only vaguely, and I suggest that’s because it was only a type treatment, as opposed to an image, a true logo, a brand.

To digress for a moment: when I worked at Hartford Stage, one of my responsibilities was to work with a range of local designers to secure pro bono graphic designs for each of our shows. In addition to keeping expenses down, it insured that each show would have its own feel and look, with the ads held together by a very solid, strong and consistently utilized company logo. In this process, the artistic director had only one edict – there must be some representation of the human in every graphic. He believed that people are at the center of theatre, that audiences come to watch people on stage, and so the human element – sometimes nothing more than an eye or a hand – was a reminder of the unique nature of live theatre. In hindsight, thinking back over 50 shows, I believe he was right and I’ve advocated for this approach ever since. To be fair, not every design was perfect, and some worked better as art than as marketing, but the best remain those that followed the artistic director’s dictum. If you think of great theatre graphics, I’d be willing to bet that you’ll find the majority do so as well. That’s why, at least in my estimation, there’s not a graphic image from the Broadway Urinetown that lingers in memory.

But turning back to Urinetown UK, as I have often this week, I continue to applaud the complexity and sophistication of its imagery, which come to think of it also recalls that used for Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil.  I was so intrigued, that I took the time to watch a three-minute promo video for the show and, to be honest, it ended up showing me what I think is missing from the Urinetown campaign. A barrage of words flew at me from a variety of speakers, all describing the experience of the show: epic, wackadoo, eco-friendly, apocalyptic, daring, exciting, entertainment, political, adventurous and satirical wit. Director Jamie Lloyd said he hoped it would advance “conversations about climate change, environmental disaster, the moral responsibility of big business.”

But looking at the poster and watching this video, I realized that something has been, if not forgotten, downplayed for this Urinetown, at least as I know the show.

It’s very, very funny. I laughed a lot.

Not only that, it is especially funny to those who know and love musicals, since it’s “satirical wit” is focused, in part, on previous, iconic musicals.

Now if it is Lloyd’s intention to lean heavily on the show’s Brechtian overtones and downplay the humor, then you can probably ignore everything from here on in.  But if Urinetown UK– with all of its topical, political and social overtones – is to retain its irreverent take on both a world without water and its stance as a love letter to musical comedy, then I’d urge the powers that be to tweak the tone of their rhetoric and their imagery, lest they mislead their potential audience – and those who buy. Remember, you’re fighting a title that, for some, carries a whiff of something distasteful, even while it becomes a memorable point of distinction from most other musical theatre.

I’ve heard it said many times that if a show is a hit, its logo – whatever it is – looks brilliant. And perhaps in the long run, if there is in the long run, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But when you’re trying to set expectations and lure audiences, every communication is freighted with meaning (it can even effect the advance perception of critics who were previously unfamiliar with the material), and what I remember most of Urinetown was having a darned good time.

This afternoon on Twitter, journalists were decrying the proliferation of the word “premiere” in theatres’ marketing and press materials, especially in cases where the usage is parsing a point rather finely or declaring an outright untruth. I feel for Jason Zinoman, Johnny Oleksinski, Charles McNulty, Diep Tran, Kelly Nestruck and their peers, because at times they may have editors wanting them to take note of important distinctions, but don’t necessarily have a complete production history in order to insure accuracy. Having previously explored the obfuscations of arts communication in Decoder and Decoder II (which remain inordinately popular), it falls to me to dissect this phenomenon.

How has “premiere” metastasized? World premiere. U.S. premiere. East coast premiere. West Coast premiere. Professional premiere. New York premiere. Broadway premiere. Regional premiere. Area premiere. Local premiere. World premiere production. Shared premiere. Simultaneous premiere. Rolling premiere. I’m sure I’ve missed some (feel free to add them in the comments section).

So what is this all about?

It’s a sign of prestige for a theatre to debut new work, so “world” and “U.S.” premieres have the most currency. This is the sort of thing that gets major donors and philanthropic organizations interested, the sort of thing that can distinguish a company on grant applications and on brochures. You would think it’s clear cut, but you’d be wrong.

If several theatres decide to do a brand new play all in the same season, whether separately or in concert with one another, they all want to grab the “premiere” banner. After all, it hadn’t been produced when they decided to do it, they can only fit it into a certain spot, and they can’t get it exclusively, but why shouldn’t they be able to claim glory (they think). Certainly they’re to be applauded for championing the play, and reciprocal acknowledgment is worthy of note.

But still I imagine: ‘Oh, there was a festival production, or one produced under the AEA showcase code? Well surely that shouldn’t count,’ I can hear some rationalizing. ‘We’re giving it more resources and a longer run. Besides, the authors have done a lot of work on it. Let’s just ignore that production with three weeks of paid audiences and reviews. We’re doing the premiere.’

Frankly, sophisticated funders and professional journalists aren’t fooled. But there are enough press release mills masquerading as arts news websites to insure that the phrase will get out to the public. If anyone asks, torturous explanations aimed at legitimizing the claims are offered.  When we get down to “coastal,” “area,” “local” and the like, it’s pretty transparent that the phrase is being shoehorned in to tag onto frayed coattails, but at least those typically have the benefit of being honest in their microcosmic specificity. That said, if multiple theatres, separately or together, champion a new play, they’re to be applauded, and reciprocal acknowledgment is worthy of note.

In the 1980s, regional theatres were being accused of “premiere-itis,” namely that every company wanted to produce a genuine world premiere so that it might share in the author’s royalties on future productions, especially if it traveled on to commercial success. Also, there was funding specifically for brand new plays that was out of reach if you did the second or third production, fueling this dynamic. Many plays were done once and never seen again because of the single-minded pursuit of the virgin work. To give credit where it’s due, that seems less prevalent, even if it has done a great deal to make the word “premiere” immediately suspect. But funders and companies have realized the futility of taking a sink or swim attitude towards new work.

To give one example about how pernicious this was, I was working at a theatre which had legitimately produced the world premiere of a new musical, and the company had been duly credited as such on a handful of subsequent productions. But when the show was selected by a New York not-for-profit company, I was solicited to permit the credit to be changed to something less definitive – and moved away from the title page as is contractually common – lest people think this was the same production and grow ‘confused’. I didn’t relent, but it’s evidence of how theatres want to create the aura of origination.

I completely understand why journalists would be frustrated by this semantic gamesmanship, because they shouldn’t have to fact check press releases, but are being forced to do so. That creates a stressful relationship with press offices, and poor perception of marketing departments, when in some cases the language has been worked out in offices wholly separate from them. Have a little sympathy, folks.

Production history of Will Power’s
Fetch Clay, Make Man

That said, at every level of an organization, truth and accuracy should be prized, not subverted. What’s happening at the contractual level insofar as sharing in revenues is concerned is completely separate than painting an accurate picture of a play’s life (the current New York Theater Workshop Playbill for Fetch Clay, Make Man provides a remarkably detailed and honest delineation of the play’s development and history, by way of example). Taking an Off-Broadway hit from 30 years ago may in fact be its “Broadway debut,” but “premiere” really doesn’t figure any longer, since there’s little that’s primal or primary about it. If you’re based in a small town with no other theatre around for miles, I suppose it’s not wrong to claim that your production of Venus In Fur is the “East Jibroo premiere,” but does anyone really care? It’s likely self-evident.

Let’s face it, any catchphrase that gets overused loses all meaning and even grows tiresome. If fetishizing “premiere” hasn’t yet jumped the shark quite yet, everyone ought to realize that there’s blood in the water.

P.S. Thank you for reading the world premiere of this post.

Thanks to Nella Vera and David Loehr for also participating in the Twitter conversation that prompted this post, which has been recapped via Storify by Jonathan Mandell, including some comments I’d not previously seen.